Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was born August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Louis Armstrong appeared in over two dozen films but is most recognized for his music. He’s was of the most influential faces of the Harlem Renaissance. He changed Jazz music forever. As a child Louis was part of a quartet making petty cash on the streets. He learned how to play the cornet while in a juvenile home for firing a gun on New Year’s Eve. Jazz was new and exciting around the time Armstrong was growing up. He played in different bands and gained much experience as an adolescent in the music business. As a teenager he couldn’t afford an instrument but he still went to clubs to hear people play. Louis wasn’t well known until he joined The Oliver Creole Jazz Band at the age of twenty-one as a cornet player. In 1922 he got an opportunity to join a band in Chicago. The New Orleans style music intrigued the people of Chicago and took the town by storm. He later quit and joined other bands and further on an orchestra. While in the orchestra he got many solo opportunities and started playing the trumpet. He played for a Broadway show in the early 1930s, he had his own band and was very well-known across the country at this point. After creating his own band he returned to New Orleans to reunite with Oliver’s band. In the 1940s audiences were starting to criticize Louis and his band. Towards the end of the decade, Louis’s manager hired a new band to play with Armstrong that became very successful. He had more skill and edge than most other Jazz musicians of his time which made him stand out from the others. He became known as “The Great Satchmo of Jazz”. Louis went on to tour America and Europe during the great depression. He was most known for his swing-style music that other musicians attempted to imitate. He became increasingly popular in the film industry later on in his life. He had to stop playing the trumpet due to health problems, he had a heart attack in 1959, but Louis continued singing...