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July 2024
1min read

Pops: It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the impact upon younger musicians of hearing Louis Armstrong (bottom center) for the first time. “I never heard a man blow like that in my life!” trumpeter Sweets Edison remembered. “He hit two hundred high Cs, and they counted them as he went around the stage, and he ended on a high F!” Here, eight other trumpet players, each an important musician in his own right, absorb lessons from the source: clockwise from top left, Muggsy Spanier and one-handed Wingy Manone; Duke Ellington stars Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart; Hot Lips Page; Wild Bill Davison and Bobby Hackett; and the fiercely competitive Roy Eldridge, who admitted that after hearing Armstrong for the first time in 1930 he became “so indoctrinated with Louis that for a while I was going around trying to talk like him.”

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