Louis Armstrong on CDAll Time Greatest Hits
When Louis Armstrong died two days after his seventy-first birthday, on July 6, 1971, Duke Ellington said: "If anyone was Mr. Jazz, it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. Every trumpet player who decided he wanted to lean towards the American idiom was influenced by him ... He is what I call an American standard, an American original ... I love him. God bless him."
Louis Armstrong spent his youth in the turmoil of the great port on the Mississippi - in the old Creole quarter of New Orleans. The symolic borders of this quarter were a jail, a church, a school for the poor, and a ballroom. His parents - his father was a factory worker, his mother a domestic - were separated when Louis barely had been born. Nobody paid much attention to him. Once or twice the authorities considered putting him in a reformatory, but nothing was done until, one New Year's Eve, Louis fired a pistol loaded with blanks in the streets. Then they put him in the reformatory. He bacame a member of the school choir which performed at funerals and at festivities. Louis received his first musical instruction on a battered old cornet from the leader of the reform school band.
