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Louis Armstrong- An Extravagant Life. Louis Armstrong- An Extravagant Life
What is jazz? According to Merriam Webster?s Dictionary ...
... Bibliography Works Cited Bergreen, Lawrence. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.
New York: Broadway, 1997. Boujut, Michel. Louis Armstrong. ...
... Bibliography Works Cited Bergreen, Lawrence. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.
New York: Broadway, 1997. Boujut, Michel. Louis Armstrong. ...
Submitted by emily712 on November 28, 2005
Category: Music and Movies
Words: 1483 | Pages: 6
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Louis Armstrong- An Extravagant Life
What is jazz? According to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, jazz is American music developed especially from ragtime and blues and characterized by propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre. Most people of course will not give you this exact definition when asked to define jazz, and you will get numerous responses. Some people may not even quite really know what jazz is besides a type of music. Whatever the case, jazz has different meanings for everyone, but for Louis Armstrong, jazz was not only a way of life, but it was his life.
Louis Armstrong. Many know the name, and may recall a hit song or two of his. But then others, me included, do not know much else of the man behind the music. Unfortunately, without taking a class like this or another music class, most of them probably never will either. People knew him by various names, the father of jazz, satchmo, pops, but without a doubt he was the first most important soloist to emerge in jazz. To this day he is probably the most influential musician in the music’s history.
Louis grew up in New Orleans in the early 1900’s, and began his love affair with music at an early age. Like most black musicians of this time, Armstrong included, reading from music was not the way you made music. Most just played by ear, and taught themselves how to play an instrument, never learning how to read a sheet of music. To them it was almost a bad thing if you did know how to read, and the ones who did, would pretend they could not. Music was to come from the soul, and be improvised. Reading a sheet of music while playing would only take away from that and you could not perform as well. Eventually though, even Armstrong himself would have to learn if he wanted to earn a decent living, and make something of himself.
In 1919, Louis was able to...
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