One of the most famous sons of New Orleans is the world-renowned Louis Armstrong. During his 70-year life, Armstrong did as much or more to transform and popularise jazz music as anybody else could claim to have done.

His youth was spent in material poverty.  He never knew his father and his mother brought money into the home by offering her services as a prostitute.  All the while, the young Armstrong was hanging-out around the dance halls and brothels in the red-light district of New Orleans, soaking-up the sounds of the jazz players laying down their grooves.  As one source notes, 'Armstrong grew up at the bottom of the social ladder, in a highly segregated city, but one which lived in a constant fervour of music, which was generally called “ragtime”, and not yet “jazz”. Despite the hard early days, Armstrong seldom looked back at his youth as the worst of times but instead drew inspiration from it, “Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine—I look right in the heart of good old New Orleans...It has given me something to live for.”'  This quote serves to illuminate the nature of jazz as a storytelling form where the instruments serve as the vehicle by which thoughts, feelings, images and emotions are conveyed.

It is widely recognised that Armstrong's most fundamental contribution to jazz music was to effect a change in emphasis in the way it was played.  Traditionally, musicians took turns to go on an improvisational trip with their instruments.  Louis Armstrong was one of the first players to emerge as the soloist in the group, featuring as the main attraction and the primary musician in the group.