© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“The First Great Soloist”
“When on June
28, 1928 , Louis
Armstrong unleashed the spectacular cascading phrases of the introduction to West End Blues, he established the
general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come. Beyond that,
this performance also made quite clear that jazz could never again revert to
being solely an entertainment or folk music.
The clarion call
of West End Blues served notice that
jazz had the potential capacity to compete with the highest order of
previously known musical expression. Though nurtured by the crass entertainment
and night-club world of the Prohibition era, Armstrong's music transcended
this context and its implications.
This was music for
music's sake, not for the first time in jazz, to be sure, but never before in
such a brilliant and unequivocal form. The beauties of this music were those of
any great, compelling musical experience: expressive fervor, intense artistic
commitment, and an intuitive sense for structural logic, combined with superior
instrumental skill. By whatever definition of art -be it abstract,
sophisticated, virtuosic, emotionally expressive, structurally perfect — Armstrong's
music qualified.
Like any
profoundly creative innovation, West End
Blues summarized the past and predicted the future. But such moments in
the history of music by their very brilliance also tend to push into the
background the many preparatory steps that lead up to the masterpiece.
Certainly, West
End Blues was not without its antecedents. It did not suddenly spring
full-blown from Armstrong's head. Its conception was assembled, bit by bit,
over a period of four or five years, and it is extremely instructive to study
the process by which Armstrong accumulated his personal style, his
"bag" as the jazz musician would put it.
Armstrong’s
recording activity in the years 1926-29 was so prolific that the jazz analyst's
task is both easy and difficult. On the one hand, the recordings give an
exhaustive, almost day-by-day documentation of Louis's progress. On the other
hand, he recorded so much, under so many varying circumstances and pressures,
recorded such a variety of material with the indiscriminate abandon in which
only a genius can afford to indulge, that the task of gaining a comprehensive
view, in purely statistical terms, is formidable. The wonder of it all is that
Armstrong, irrespective of what or with whom he recorded, maintained an
astonishingly high degree of inventiveness and musical integrity, at least
until the early 19305, when he did succumb to the sheer weight of his success
and its attendant commercial pressures.”
[Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development,New York
[Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development,
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