This article appears in the November 13/20, 2023 issue, with the headline “Louis Armstrong’s Last Word.”
“Iget this question all the time,” Ricky Riccardi admitted. The director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong Center looked at me carefully. “Just last week, when I tried to sum up Louis’s life and contribution in an interview, I went on for 28 minutes.”
“Can you give me the five-minute version?” I asked.
Riccardi took a breath. “OK. You can name a thousand great instrumentalists or you can name a thousand great vocalists, but he’s the only person you could find who changed the way people played their instruments and the way people sang. Louis does that in a four-year period in the 1920s; by 1930, if you aren’t playing or singing like him, you’re out of work.
“He was also born at the right time to be a multimedia superstar. Louis was there for acoustic recordings in 1923. After accompanying silent movies, he then made pioneering appearances in film, radio, and television. In many cases, he was the first African American to have featured billing in these new industries.
“He had a rags-to-riches story intimately tied with race. He was born in New Orleans one generation removed from slavery, saw lynchings as a child, then was part of the Great Migration. Eventually, he was in a position to call out a sitting US president, Dwight Eisenhower, over integration.
“He was the soundtrack to the Jazz Age, the Depression, and World War II. In the ’60s, his ‘Hello, Dolly’ took over from the Beatles as the No. 1 hit.
“If you had to pick one person to write the history of 20th-century American culture, it would have to be Louis Armstrong.”
Ever since his seminal first recordings as a leader with his Hot Five and Seven ensembles in the 1920s, jazz musicians have called Louis Armstrong “Pops,” a literal invocation of his role as an ancestor. One of the greatest living practitioners of jazz, the trumpeter Tom Harrell, told me he’d heard a memorable pronouncement of Armstrong’s technical contribution from the saxophonist Phil Woods. Woods—a fluid master of the alto saxophone who is best known to the general public for his solo on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are”—told Harrell, “Louis Armstrong was the first person to play behind the beat on record.”
It’s a strong statement, but one that is borne out by a casual survey of the music recorded by others in the 1920s. Armstrong’s multimedia superstardom was the vessel for this subtle yet epochal reframing of the beat. Indeed, Armstrong’s rhythmic control could be his greatest legacy.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t Got That Swing),” as the Duke Ellington song puts it. There is no easy or agreed-upon definition of “swing,” but part of it seems to be how the musicians in an ensemble don’t play on quite the same rhythmic track. In the simplest terms, “behind the beat” means that the melody is a shade slower than the accompaniment. This effect gives another kind of ecstasy to the overall rhythmic feel. Armstrong was surely not truly the first to use behind-the-beat phrasing; the practice runs back through the Afro-Latin diaspora. But the anointed ambassador of the American mix was Armstrong. As his fame grew, as he became the symbol of American music to the whole world, Armstrong’s beat only got lazier and more confident. He could swing a whole band of the squarest cats all by himself.