On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, John Halle wrote:
> In a promo for the series Burns refers to Louis Armstrong as
> "unquestionably the greatest musician of the 20th century." (I think I got
> the quote right.)
>
> I'm curious as to whether this position has become conventional wisdom
> among the cross section of the intelligentia represented here.
The "greatest musician" is as unfillable a category as the greatest athlete -- past a certain point, one compares apples and oranges. And in the case of musicians, the taste there's no accounting for counts for an awful lot. But Armstrong was undoubtedly one of the greatest: he was the inventor of something really new, and had a passle of great subsidiary skills on top of it. If you can read music and understand harmony on an elementary level (enough to follow what someone else is pointing out), I can recommend a very short, very clear and very no-bullshit explanation of why, musically, Armstrong was a genius that changed the shape of jazz: pp. 72-84 of Scott Deveaux's _The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History_. Deveaux is the only guy I've run into that can explicate jazz scores the way Charles Rosen explicates classical ones. As you can tell from the title, Armstrong is not the book's focus. But in treating him just insofar as he contributed to "the birth of bebop," I think DeVeaux manages to highlight in a very short space just what it was in Armstrong's musical accomplishment that was stunning to his professional contemporaries and indispensable for what followed.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com