"It's been called "the most important 15 seconds in all of American music." Larry Tye makes this point in his new book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong Transformed America. He's not alone. Many people make this claim, and they are arguably correct.
Tye says of the then-unprecedented opening cadenza of Armstrong's 1928 version of King Oliver's "West End Blues" that, "the three-plus-minute, 78 rpm rendition" has phrasing that "suggests opera, some is melancholic, twelve-bar blues. Offbeat notes linger. Phrases droop." It marked Armstrong's passage from campy entertainer in 1925 to a serious, genre-defining maestro by 1928. The song also marked the first time jazz soloists were thought of as great artists. Pianist Earl Hines' solo in "West End Blues" further underscored the new recognition of solo virtuosity.
And speaking of firsts. In referring to the scat portions of the tune, Billie Holiday said "it was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words." This paved the way for the scatting to come from Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and Bing Crosby and right on through to hip hop today.
The song and its opening by an unaccompanied Armstrong remain thrilling today, nearly 100 years later in the evolution of jazz and blues. One can only imagine how people reacted to the tune back then when Armstrong & His Hot Five debuted it. "West End Blues" has informed and inspired no shortage of great music since its inception in the earliest days of radio. No wonder udiscovermusic.com wrote earlier this year that recording the song at Okeh's Studio in Chicago on June 28, 1928 was "the day jazz changed forever."
