What did Miles Davis think of Louis Armstrong?
Given that they were often hailed as the two main leaders at the forefront of jazz, you could imagine that Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong might have been truly bitter rivals. So what was actually the truth?
To all intents and purposes, Armstrong was the old school king of the genre. Being attributed as one of the largest spearheads of the jazz movement of the 1920s, he was the one that every other wannabe looked up to and adored; the one they learned from, the one they wanted to grow up to be like.
With a career that spanned the vast majority of his lifetime, owed to not only his musical talent but his happy-go-lucky persona, this was a man who had finessed the fine art of capturing an audience to a tee, while also showing his peers exactly how it was done.
Coming into the fray some 20 years later, it’s fair to say that Davis quite fancied himself as the cool new kid on the block – with the former being the operative word. As a pioneer of the ‘cool jazz’ movement, he embodied something far more energetic and experimental than many of his contemporaries. Rather than just staying in one lane, he preferred to use jazz as a springboard into all sorts of new territories, from classical to electric.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that although Davis and Armstrong were two trumpet players occupying much of the same scene, they had very different dispositions and outlooks on life. The trouble was, by the time Davis was rising the ranks as the genre’s latest star, Armstrong’s impact, as part of the supposedly elder generation, was beginning to fade, so it was easier for the former, in all his sense of youth and naivety, to somewhat shoot off at the mouth.
In this regard, Davis was expertly coy at hiding his grievances with the master in a blanket of supposed compliments, once espousing: “I love Pops, I love the way he sings, the way he plays – everything he does, except when he says something against modern jazz music. He ought to realise that he was a pioneer, too. No, he wasn’t an influence of mine, and I’ve had very little direct contact with Pops.”
They most definitely hailed from different worlds, reflected in the way Armstrong stuck steadfastly to his classic vision of jazz, while Davis was hopeful of moving it into new frontiers all those years later. But even with time and space and eras seemingly separating them apart, the younger blazing couldn’t fully deny the presence of the true king, even when sometimes he liked to pretend to the contrary.
“You know you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played – I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat – with feeling. That’s another phrase for swing. I also love the way he sings,” Davis ultimately enthused, displaying that although he could offer up his own visions and imaginings just as much as the next man, deep down he knew Armstrong was the one who could blow all of them out the water.
This was the pillarstone which defined what relationship there was between Davis and Armstrong – they may not have been firm friends or always seen eye to eye in the world of jazz, but the hierarchy of the scene always remained in place. As much as Davis and his contemporaries became hailed as the new-fangled next generation, they all had to concede defeat when it came to placing respect on the name of the real maestro.
