Hi Arthur, I  like your post on Armstrong. He is one of these artists that you can recognize in a second, whether he’s singing or playing the trumpet. I tried to think on your question of what are the particular characteristics of his music making. I find there is a very close connection between his singing and his trumpet playing. The way he plays trumpet is very similar to his singing, it comes through in the way he is vibrating or marking the expressive moments in the music. Also the timing and the way he is building his phrases are both done in the same declamatory way as his singing. When he is singing, his vibrato’s are very similar to the trumpet vibratos and I think that there is a clarity in the way he punctuates his syllables, using the exploding ones in a sort of trumpet way. I love also his duo with Ella! They complete each other beautifully, him with his rough voice and her very cultivated and feminine singing (that's real chambers music!)

Hi again, would just like to add that was thinking more about it and was wondering how he would play another instrument... it seems to me that his musical expression goes far beyond any given instrument. They will probably all sound like Armstrong’s voice! It’s a combination of a very clear imagination of what he wants to do together with a great instrumental control.  Speaking about using syllables in an explosive way reminds me of the time I was working on some Bach choral piano transcriptions and didn’t decide yet how to structure my phrases. I went to my teacher who gave me this excellent advice, which was to use the words of the choral to guide me and this way I will be making the right musical decisions. Every word has its way of sounding phonetically, which is also connected to its meaning (and so the meaning and the strength of the syllable decides its importance in the phrase). So the interpretative decisions should be inspired by the punctuation of the syllables and the meaning of the words,  some being stronger than others.  For example, a syllable closing on a word is often less strong than the one opening it. This is also very clear in the way Armstrong often softens the end of the words with his vibrato.

Hi,
I was looking at some videos of his today and found the following to be a nice example to what I was saying: