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Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the station of all great art.
Armstrong traveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealed itself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced a number by saying, "This one's for you, Rex: I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You." He had a great love for children, was always willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royalty and heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large public celebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late '50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.
He usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn't accept everything. By the middle '50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that kind.
Essayist Stanley Crouch's latest book is Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives