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Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong's recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles in the late 1920s are widely credited with establishing the improvised solo as the central creative element of jazz, shifting the genre's focus away from collective group playing toward the kind of individual virtuoso improvisation that's remained central to jazz ever since. His innovative "scat singing" — improvising wordless vocal melodies using nonsense syllables in place of lyrics — became one of jazz vocal performance's defining techniques, and Armstrong's own gravelly, instantly recognizable voice made him as significant a vocalist as he was a trumpet player. Armstrong's 1964 single "Hello, Dolly!" knocked the Beatles off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 during the peak of Beatlemania, making the 62-year-old Armstrong the oldest artist ever to have a number-one single at the time, a late-career commercial triumph decades after his most influential recordings. His warm, crowd-pleasing stage persona and willingness to cross over into mainstream popular entertainment drew some criticism from later jazz purists who felt he'd become too commercially accommodating, but Armstrong's technical innovations on trumpet and his foundational role in establishing improvisation as jazz's defining feature remain undisputed among jazz historians.
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Miles Davis
Miles Davis's career moved through more distinct stylistic eras than perhaps any other major jazz musician — bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion — and his 1959 album Kind of Blue, built around modal rather than traditional chord-based improvisation, remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. Davis assembled a series of legendary small ensembles throughout his career, each featuring musicians who themselves went on to become major jazz innovators — John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter all passed through Davis's bands before establishing significant careers of their own. His 1970 album Bitches Brew, which incorporated electric instruments and rock-influenced rhythms into a jazz framework, helped launch the jazz fusion movement and drew significant criticism from jazz traditionalists at the time, even as it opened the genre to a younger audience more accustomed to rock and funk. Davis's willingness to repeatedly abandon commercially successful styles in favor of new creative directions, often alienating existing fans in the process, made him one of the most restlessly innovative figures in jazz history, and his catalog spans a broader range of jazz's stylistic evolution than any other single musician's body of work.
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