Perhaps we will someday have a jazz hall of fame—less pretentious of course than the pantheon for baseball players, but still a place in which the men who created America’s greatest music will be honored. We each will have a list of those whose busts should encircle the hall, but there will be no arguments as to Louis Armstrong. For Louis was not only one of the greatest jazzmen in the music’s history. He was an American institution, a jazz ambassador to the world. His rich personality, his love of the music he played and the people with whom he played it, his joy of life, were engulfing. He was a Rabelaisian, in the full sense of the word, and he put more into jazz than he got out of it.
Listen to Louis on “Chimes Blues,” his cornet sounding out clean and precise against the old King Oliver band, leading the way that all jazz musicians were to follow, his tone and intonation clean and firm, his mastery of the instrument already fully established. When he made his last real appearance at the National Press Club, a few months before his death, Louis was a sick man, but he still had it. He had been told by his doctor to sing a song or play a chorus, but no more. Instead, he was “on” all evening giving us the music that had made him great and flooding the ballroom with his personality. He knew we loved him, and he loved us right back. After he died, we had his legacy—not only the hundreds of records he had cut in the studio or “live,” but in the enduring mark he had made on all jazz.
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