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Satchmo!

It was on this date in 1928 that Louis Armstrong and his band, the Hot Five, recorded "West End Blues." The "West End" of the title refers to the westernmost point of Lake Pontchartrain within Orleans Parish, Louisiana. In its heyday, it was a thriving summer resort with live music, dance pavilions, seafood restaurants, and lake bathing. Armstrong was 26 years old at the time, and living in Chicago, where he'd been for six years. He'd moved there from New Orleans as part of Joe "King" Oliver's band; Oliver had been a friend and mentor to the young singer and trumpeter since Armstrong was a teenager. They parted ways in 1925. Oliver composed "West End Blues" and had just recorded his own version a few weeks earlier, but Armstrong's cover, recorded in Chicago's OKeh studio, is legendary. It features Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano, and it's one of the first recorded examples of Armstrong's trademark "scat" singing. His unaccompanied opening cadenza is considered to be one of the defining moments of early jazz, incorporating a rhythmic freedom that anticipated many later musical developments.
The recording took the jazz world by storm. An ecstatic audience carried Armstrong off the stage when he performed the song live one night. Jazz composer Gunther Schuller wrote that the record "made it clear jazz could never again revert to being entertainment or folk music. The clarion call of 'West End Blues' served notice that jazz could compete with the highest order of musical expression. Like any profoundly creative innovation, [it] summarized the past and predicted the future."
This recording was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1979.
If all you know about Louis Armstrong is his later work, after he blew his lips out, where he just holds a trumpet and sings, then you don't know how significant he is to jazz history. You owe it to yourself to listen to some of the Hot Five recordings and hear his blazing, innovative trumpet work.
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Louis Armstrong - West End Blues

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