Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) was the New Orleans-born trumpeter, vocalist, and bandleader whose Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (1925–1928) made jazz a soloist's art. From there the trail runs through Ella and Louis to What a Wonderful World — pick any era and it delivers. Find Louis Armstrong vinyl, CDs, and reissues at Wax Trax Records.
Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 4, 1901. He grew up in extreme poverty in the Storyville district and learned cornet at the Colored Waif's Home (where he had been sent at age 11). He worked his way up through New Orleans bands, riverboat performances, and Chicago jazz scenes, before joining Joe King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1922. His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings for Okeh Records (1925-1928) are widely cited as the foundational documents establishing jazz as a soloist's art form rather than a primarily ensemble form. He became a international cultural ambassador for jazz across multiple decades. His vocal recordings - particularly Hello, Dolly! (1964, displacing the Beatles from #1) and What a Wonderful World (1967) - brought him massive late-career commercial audiences. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1971 at age 69, two days after his 70th birthday performance at the Waldorf Astoria. His foundational influence on jazz, popular music, and broader American music history is widely cited as one of the most important contributions to the form.
Louis Armstrong's sound is foundational to jazz as a recognized genre - combining jazz, traditional jazz, swing, Dixieland jazz, vocal jazz, and popular music with his distinctive virtuosic trumpet technique (expanding the trumpet's expressive range), his distinctive gravelly vocal delivery (with scat singing innovation), and his foundational influence on subsequent generations of jazz musicians.
Original Okeh, Columbia, Verve, and Kapp pressings of the Louis Armstrong catalog are foundational items in jazz and broader popular music collecting. Multiple anniversary editions, audiophile reissues (Mosaic, Verve, Acoustic Sounds), and the comprehensive Mosaic Records box sets have been released.
Listeners new to Louis Armstrong typically start with the Hot Five & Hot Seven sessions (1925-1928) or Ella and Louis (1956).
