"I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."
Louis Armstrong
"If it hadn't been for Jazz, there wouldn't be no rock and roll."
Louis Armstrong
"What we play is life, my whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn," he told a doctor a few months before he died in 1971. No, he wouldn't cancel an upcoming date at the Waldorf-Astoria. "The people are waiting for me, I got to do it, Doc, I got to do it."
Louis Armstrong
"Be good if I get to the Pearly Gates .... I'll play with Gabriel."
Louis Armstrong
"Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast!"
Louis Armstrong
"In my opinion, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet stylist of all time and has influenced every trumpet player of his time and long after"
Jazz trumpeter Al Hirt
"All we can do is be glad we live in the same century as Louis Armstrong"
Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis
"If it weren't for him, there wouldn't be any of us."
Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played."
Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis
"He left an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time"
Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis
"There never was any hidden side to him. He came `as is' "
All Stars clarinetist Barney Bigard
"In the small hours, a friend and I were wandering around the French quarter, when suddenly I heard a
trumpet in the distance. I couldn't see anything but an excursion boat gliding through the mist back to port.
Then the tune became more distinct. The boat was still far off. But in the bow I could see a Negro standing
in the wind, holding a trumpet high and sending out the most brilliant notes I had ever heard. It was jazz.
It was what I had been hoping to hear all through the night. I don't even know whether it was 'Tiger Rag' or
'Panama'. But it was Louis Armstrong descending from the sky like a god. the ship hugged the bank as if it
were driven there by the powerful trumpet beats. I stayed absolutely still, just listening, until the boat dropped anchor.
All Stars trombone man Jack Teagarden
remembering his 1921 New Orleans visit.
"Louis Armstrong was the epitome of jazz and always will be"
Jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Duke Ellington
"Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation."
New Orleans Jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis
"I think Louis is the greatest jazz musician that's ever been. He had a combination of all the factors that makes a good musician. He had balance... this most of all. Tone. Harmonic sense. Excitement. Technical skill. Originality. Every musician, no matter how good usually has something out of balance, be it tone, too much imitativeness, or whatever. But in Armstrong everything was in
balance. He had no weak point. I don't think there has been a musician since Armstrong who has had all the factors in balance, all the factors equally developed... Lyricism. Delicacy. Emotional outburst. Rhythm. Complete mastery of his horn."
Pianist Teddy Wilson
"Louis played the Regal Theater in Chicago,and they had this fantastic trumpeter Reuben Reeves in the pit. So in the overture they put Reuben Reeves on stage doing some of Louis's tunes. Louis listened - then when he came on he said, "Tiger Rag". Played about thirty choruses! The next show? No overture!"
Danny Barker
"What he does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul."
orchestra conductor Leonard Bernstein
"It's America's classical music ... this becomes our tradition ... the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? ... we contributed Louis Armstrong"
singer and recording artist Tony Bennett
"I'm proud to acknowledge my debt to the 'Reverend Satchelmouth'. He is the beginning and the end of music in America".
singer and recording artist Bing Crosby
"If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love"
singer and recording artist Mahalia Jackson
".. Armstrong's improvisational verve and technical virtuosity defined jazz ... and his engaging personality and ever-present grin made him a natural as the international ambassador of jazz, America's greatest gift to the world"
Life Magazine ~ The 100 People Who Made The Millenium
"Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be as lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug dying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a small man. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.
Stanley Crouch; Time Magazine; June 8, 1998
