How Did Louis Armstrong Impact Society

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The jazz community and the music we know today would not be the same without the contributions of Louis Armstrong, who is widely considered to be a founding father of Jazz. The works of Louis Armstrong who was a trumpet and cornet player, composer, actor, and singer have profoundly shaped and impacted all American music. His ingenuity and his musically inventive mind have given us a style that dominates the Jazz community. Armstrong’s innovations and progressions single handedly changed the face of Jazz, his innovations are still effecting music today. Many musicians today work in the shadow of Louis towering figure and bask in his legacy he left behind. His style of trumpet playing revolutionized the world of Jazz, and he became one of …show more content…

Leaving Oliver’s Creole band gave Armstrong the opportunity to express and experiment with his own style of playing. In 1920 Armstrong encountered Earl Hines, Hines like Armstrong was a soloist who was interested in reshaping the way traditional Jazz was played, their duet on Weatherbird is a perfect example of the type of Jazz he was trying to create and was a milestone recording from the 1920s. On November 12th, 1925 Louis Armstrong and his band The Hot Five, made their first recording that bore Armstrong’s name as the band leader. The Hot Five band members originally consisted of Louis Armstrong’s wife, Lil Harding-Armstrong on the piano, Kid Ory on the trombone, Johnny Dodds on the clarinet, and Johnny St. Cry on the Banjo. Most of Armstrong’s band members came from King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, in the late 1920’s Armstrong would change the band’s name from The Hot Five to the Hot Seven, with the addition of a tuba player and drums. Armstrong would later disband the Hot Seven and start working with the bigger bands of the Swing Era. This was artistically a low point in Armstrong’s career as he focused more on the big band sound and movie sets, there was also a lot of personal turmoil going on in his life at that time, but he would later go back to his small band roots in the late …show more content…

The collective improvisation was a style typically used by older styles of Jazz, such as Dixieland Jazz, Free Jazz, and New Orleans Jazz where every band member would improvise a “solos” collectively. Except for the bass and drums, they were expected to keep playing a beet or a certain cord sequins in the background. As a result Dixieland and New Orleans Jazz can sound a little predictable. Armstrong had a style of only having the individual instruments play their solo separately with no other instruments playing or only with nonintrusive instruments playing in the background. This style highlighted the individual talent of each musician by giving the musician a chance to show off his or her talent separately from everyone else, this also gave the audience the chance to truly appreciate the individual components of the band and the individual talent of each musicians. After each musician had performed a solo the band would return to the original melody and finish the song, sometimes only a select few members of the band would perform a solo while the others nonintrusive played in the background, it was common for the bass and drums to stay in the background. Armstrong pioneered the style of primary solos and brought it to the public’s

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