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Louis Armstrong
Trumpeter and singer; founding father of jazz
The smile that gave jazz its face — and the trumpet that gave it wings.
The rise
Born on 4 August 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, he learned cornet in the Colored Waif's Home. By the 1920s his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in Chicago invented jazz improvisation as a solo art and made the soloist, not the ensemble, the centre of the music.