Skip to content

Louis Armstrong

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

YEAR

1990

INDUCTED BY

Rickie Lee Jones

CATEGORY

Early Influences

Rich in talent, skill and personality.

It is rare that you find technical excellence, superb artistry and irresistible charisma in one performer. Louis Armstrong had all those qualities. As an architect of jazz and a vocal trendsetter, Louis Armstrong left an indelible mark on music as an art form.

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

HALL OF FAME
ESSAY

By Chris Albertson

He was known as America’s Jazz Ambassador, but Louis Armstrong’s scope reached far beyond the music he so epitomized. No other jazz artist has towered so high above all others in his musical field, not even Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis or Charlie Parker.

In terms of influence, Armstrongs importance to jazz exceeds Beethoven’s to European music, Shakespeare’s to English literature and Chuck Berry’s to rock & roll. “You know you can’t play anything on the horn that Louis hasn’t played,” Miles Davis once remarked. “I mean even modern.”

Read More
Class of 1990
More from the class of 1990
%post_title%

The Who