great artists, and then there are artists of such titanic power that they literally change

of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Dostoevsky, Picasso

the rare example of an artist whose very fame, image, and media mythology can

first came to prominence, in the ’20s and early ’30s, you heard the Armstrong revolution

the trumpet into an incandescent upper register, hitting high Cs audiences would talk about for

had sounded like that; no one had commanded like that

a clip of the late sax legend Artie Shaw stating, “I would say jazz almost

but even if you credit Armstrong as the prime innovator of jazz, what he invented

was more than a musical invention — it was a personal/existential one, an analog for

the system of musical imagination by which a musician would now pour out what was