Chapter 6: The Birth of Jazz
Table of Contents
“West End Blues” by Louie Armstrong and his Hot Five
“West End Blues”
Album/Year Released
Recorded 1928; released 1928
Artist/Composer
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five
Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), trumpet and vocals
Composed by King Oliver (1885–1938) and Clarence Williams (1893–1965)
Genre/Style
New Orleans jazz
Song Form
12-bar blues with extended introduction
“West End Blues” was recorded in 1928 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. The performance exemplifies Armstrong’s virtuosity, expressive phrasing, and central role in transforming jazz from a primarily ensemble-based New Orleans style into a soloist-centered art form. “West End Blues” shifted how jazz was culturally understood, signaling its potential as a serious and innovative musical language.
The recording opens with Armstrong’s now-infamous unaccompanied trumpet cadenza, lasting about fifteen seconds. The cadenza features long, lyrical lines and wide interval leaps. Jazz historian Gunther Schuller famously described this moment as a “clarion call,” arguing that “West End Blues” made it clear that jazz could no longer be dismissed as mere entertainment or folk music, but could “compete with the highest order of musical expression.”
After the opening, the piece unfolds as a multi-strain twelve-bar blues composition by Joe “King” Oliver. While “West End Blues” is most often performed as an instrumental, lyrics were later added by Clarence Williams. The title refers to the West End of Lake Pontchartrain in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, a popular resort area with live music, dance pavilions, and leisure activities in the early twentieth century. Writers such as Schuller and Gary Giddins have emphasized the recording’s symbolic importance, with Giddins noting that the tune came to represent the rise of jazz as a classic American music.
A key moment in the recording is Armstrong’s vocal chorus, which features early examples of scat singing. In scat singing, nonsensical syllables replace lyrics, allowing the voice to function as a melodic and rhythmic instrument rather than just carrying text. Armstrong’s scat is highly rhythmic and closely mirrors his trumpet phrasing. This vocal passage engages in a call-and-response interaction with the clarinet, played in its low register by Jimmy Strong. Armstrong’s scat phrases serve as musical “calls,” answered by the clarinet with fluid, reedy responses that contrast in timbre but align in contour and rhythm.
The contrast in timbre between Armstrong’s voice and the clarinet sharpens the call-and-response effect. Armstrong’s vocal sound is rounded and flexible, while the clarinet projects a more nasal, woody tone, giving each response a distinct color even when the melodic material overlaps. Through this interplay, “West End Blues” shows how call-and-response works within sections of a band and across different instrumental and vocal timbres, linking the blues tradition to emerging jazz improvisational practices.