To celebrate Seven Days of Satch, a week-long virtual festival produced by French Quarter Festivals Inc., OffBeat is republishing decades worth of Louis Armstrong content! For Day Two of our retrospective, we bring you an article by John Swenson first published in 2017 in which he explores the inimitable legacy of the jazz and cultural icon.
The Armstrong Legacy
Jazz traveled the technological and aesthetic passageways of the 20th Century to a point where it now has millions of faces around the world. In New Orleans, Louis Armstrong stands out as the face of jazz. His music defines the contours of traditional and swing era New Orleans jazz, and it continues to be a direct influence on the city’s young musicians today. In the starkly recontextualized post-Katrina New Orleans, Armstrong’s influence is one of the cultural realities that was not washed away and doesn’t need public money, charitable institutions or political rhetoric to sustain itself. It lives in the musicians themselves, in Leroy Jones, in Kermit Ruffins, in Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, in Maurice Brown and all the other trumpeters who’ll summon Armstrong’s spirit in the annual birthday celebration for “Pops,” the Satchmo Summer Fest.
