Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein

Two iconic geniuses had a surprising amount in common

Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye originally did their unique take on When the Saints Come Marching In (below) in the movie The Five Pennies.

It’s a great clip and led me to think a lot about Armstrong, who is my favorite musical personality. The bottom line is that genius isn’t necessarily inventing or developing something out of thin air. Rather, it’s taking elements that already exist and putting them together in a monumentally new way.

The jump to Albert Einstein is natural as strange as it seems. Einstein is the prototypical genius. His most important breakthrough was taking work by Max Planck and others and transforming it into a theory that illuminated the relationship between energy and matter. He took the hints that the earlier scientists used for mathematical constructs necessary to make equations work — but which they didn’t think actually exist in nature — and showed that they were real and defined the behavior of light and all other forms of matter. (That, in any case, is my limited understanding.)

Miles Davis, who reportedly didn’t like the way Armstrong presented himself to white audiences, acknowledged his stature directly and in no uncertain terms. When Armstrong died, this is what he said:

“You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played.”

It isn’t that he necessarily was a greater talent than other jazz greats. It was the talent plus the luck of being there at the right moment. The world was ready for Einstein to discover the…

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