As much as I admire Wynton Marsalis, he says stuff that is sheer nonsense sometimes. He said that Louis Armstrong was the musical equal of Bach. Louis was certainly very talented, influential and a great sight-reader but he could not possibly have been a musical equal to Bach.

Bach had a tremendous musical education in the tradition of the finest Europe had to offer at that time. Louis was a black kid growing up in a segregated Southern city that disdained its own jazz culture at that time (remember the city officials allowed the Navy roughnecks to shut down Storyville in 1917 no differently than the brownshirts shut down the jazz clubs in Berlin a couple of decades later).

I'm not knocking Louis. If he had been given Bach's schooling, he might have been greater than Bach--I don't know. But Louis was known as a great musician not as a composer. Even "Struttin' With Some Barbeque" was really written by Lil Hardin and not Louis. Bach wrote some of the most enduring music the world has ever known.

Louis may have equalled Mozart as a musician--I can't say for certain, of course. But certainly Mozart was far superior at composing. The man could write entire operas in his head before he even set them down on paper. What opera did Louis write?

Louis should be given his due because without him there might not be any jazz today. But he was not the musical equal of Bach. Scott Joplin or James Scott were closer to matching Bach than Louis. Hell, for that matter, so was Jimi Hendrix or Willie Dixon.

The truth seems to me to be that black American musicians have rarely concentrated their talents in the area of classical composition because it hasn't been a relevant music in their lives with rare exceptions as Paul Chambers. To compare a Louis with a Bach is largely useless. I don't think it is necessary to demonstrate Louis's greatness by comparing him to Bach and I think it does a disservice to black American music by implying that somehow it isn't on par with white European music.

As the so-called "Ambassador of Jazz," Wynton would do well to avoid that kind of thing.