by Steve Newman

Created on: September 22, 2009

If Jelly Roll Morton invented jazz the music, then Louis Armstrong created jazz the art-form, jazz as a means of expression, in the same way a poet or novelist will use words as a means of expression, or an artist paint. And I don't use this analogy with the written word and art glibly. When Armstrong was at his most creative in the 1920s, American literature was also being re-invented by Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, as was art by Picasso. It was an almost unconscious post First World War outpouring of pent-up anger and aggression, of the need of a new beauty, and at times a huge resentment against the strictures of the 19th century, strictures that had come apart at the seams with the bloodbath of 1914 - 18.

These young men were just as much revolutionaries as were the slightly older men then sitting in the Kremlin. They wanted change and would create change. They cut to the quick in an abolition of the old fashioned. These were new times, and new times needed new words, new art, and new music. Taking the literary analogy further. When we listen to a Louis Armstrong solo, most notably from the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, we are listening to an equivalent of Hemingway's, 'in our time', where there is a sudden, beautifully crafted, and very quick outpouring, or re-capitulation, of a set of new ideals - "are you listening out there, it's saying, because I've something to tell you, something that might just change your lives!"

The only difference is that Armstrong's work, which is just as stylish as Hemingway's, is of the moment, of that moment captured on record. Think of Hemingway sitting in a bar in Paris thinking about a story and then sweating over it for a couple of hours before putting his journalist experience into the mix and writing the finished story. Then think of Armstrong learning to play his horn and then trying stuff out on those river boat bands, stuff that would eventually become a thirty second solo on a three minute recording. There is a huge difference in approach and execution, but a huge similarity in preparation: it's sweat and genius.

Louis Armstrong was an all American jazz baby, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the Fourth of July 1900. And this date was something Armstrong believed in to the end of his days, and so did everyone else, until a baptismal certificate confirming his actual birth date as August 4, 1901, surfaced, and in the name of scholarship silenced one of the happiest legends in American popular music.

The

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