Louis Armstrong quotes:

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Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day. -- Al Stewart
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong. -- Philip Levine
I didn't even respect singers until I heard Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong. -- J. D. Souther
Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can. -- Stanley Crouch
My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden. -- Mose Allison
The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try. -- Sarah Vowell
If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that. -- Steve Lacy
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. -- Ken Burns
English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records. -- Pete Townshend
Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music! -- Dave Brubeck
The New York that Frank Sinatra sang about, people will never know that place. The New Orleans that Louis Armstrong sang about is the New Orleans that's still there - it's preserved. -- Blake Lively
I saw Louis Armstrong perform at Albany State College on Radio Springs Road. He was probably the first famous individual I saw in concert. Unfortunately, I never did get to meet him. -- Ray Stevens
I didn't grow up during the time that Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis and all those people were playing. So it's not really my responsibility to keep it up, what they were doing. -- Trombone Shorty
My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut. -- Dick Dale
It's a spirit that was given me and the relationships and meeting all these great people, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; through Max I met a lot of people too. My first album was with Benny Carter. -- Abbey Lincoln
And my dad wanted me to play the trumpet because that's what he liked. His idol was Louis Armstrong. My dad thought my teeth came together in a way that was perfect for playing the trumpet. -- Jackson Browne
Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists. -- Terry Teachout
When I was a young man, I shined the shoes of Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan! Music was just everywhere like that. And in my family, everyone could play something, and if they couldn't play, they could sing. -- Chuck Brown
It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.' -- Joe Haldeman
I can play the trumpet. Before I became an actor, I wanted to be the next Louis Armstrong. I started young and got to grade seven. When I turned 13, everyone started whipping out guitars, looking cool and joining rock bands, so I stopped playing. -- Douglas Booth
I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues. -- Eric Clapton
I love Ray Charles. He can still teach everybody a lot about how to make great music. Not necessarily how to make hits, but how to make great music. Of course, part of it is his incredible talent. Who are the greatest jazz singers in the world? Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ray Charles. -- Ahmet Ertegun
When my sister and I were kids, swimming down in Charleston, there was this pizza parlor that had this old Dixieland band play, and I just loved Louis Armstrong and the sound of his voice, and I got up there with the band and started singing Louis Armstrong songs when I was a kid. I have no idea why, but I did it and I loved it. -- Thomas Gibson
If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love. -- Mahalia Jackson
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about. -- Wynton Marsalis
You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played -- Miles Davis
[Louis Armstrong] was the only musician who ever lived, who can't be replaced by someone. -- Bing Crosby
Louis Armstrong could only happen once - for ever and ever. I, for one, appreciate the ride. -- Bobby Hackett
The bottom line of any country is: what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong. -- Tony Bennett
I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel. -- Billie Holiday
[Louis Armstrong] could play a trumpet like nobody else, then put it down and sing a song like no one else could. -- Eddie Condon
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 -- Al Hirt
Louis Armstrong changed all the brass players around, but after Bird, all of the instruments had to change - drums, piano, bass, trombones, trumpets, saxophones, everything. -- Cootie Williams
Louis Armstrong said you have to live a life. And that's right. If you don't live a life, you don't got nothin' to come out your horn. -- Sally Field
Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays, Glenn Miller on Fridays, and Mozart on Sundays. Unless it was raining. If it's raining, it's always Billie Holiday." -- Clare Vanderpool
If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original. -- 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. -- Ellis Marsalis, Jr.
Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument. -- Ellis Marsalis, Jr.
If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong." -- Jasper Fforde
If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong. -- Jasper Fforde
I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that. -- Douglas Booth
A very few musicians passed across all decades. In terms of trumpet playing, Louis Armstrong does it of course but Sweets [Edison] is right up there too. He is unique, in every sense of the term. -- Freddie Hubbard
[Louis Armstrong is] the father of us all, regardless of style or how modern we get. His influence is inescapable. Some of the things he was doing in the 20's and 30's, people still haven't dealt with. -- Nicholas Payton
A good crowd had formed along the sidewalk and the concrete ledge that bordered Louis Armstrong Park. The anticipation was dizzying...New Orleans had the big-boy parades and [Jackson & Billy] couldn't wait to attend a second line... -- Hunter Murphy
Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had. -- Tony Bennett
When I was a young man, I shined the shoes of Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan! Music was just everywhere like that. And in my family, everyone could play something, and if they couldnt play, they could sing. -- Chuck Brown
You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.' -- Ned Block
What [Louis Armstrong] 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. -- Leonard Bernstein
Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World' is my ultimate karaoke song. It is a wonderful world. People forget we only have a certain amount of time, and it can all end at any moment. Armstrong and Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' are the ultimate one-two punch. -- Dhani Jones
The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me." -- Wynton Marsalis
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. -- Frantz Fanon
And if Mozart is for Sundays, who do you listen to the rest of the week?""Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays. And Glenn Miller on Fridays, unless it's raining. If it's raining, it's always Billie Holiday.""What about Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday?" I asked."Those days are quiet. Unless it's raining." -- Clare Vanderpool
Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong. -- Dan Morgenstern
I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. -- Cornel West
If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know." Louis Armstrong -- Louis Armstrong
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 -- Louis Armstrong
I think we've all had enough of Coltrane saxophonists. There's a case of someone ruining a generation of saxophonists, as Louis Armstrong may have ruined a generation of trumpeters. -- Paul Bley

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