YouTube user bobcatransom was on vacation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, when they came across a three-piece band playing in a bar and were blown away by the singer’s ability to sing like jazz legend Louis Armstrong.
“About an hour after we arrived in town we heard these guys just absolutely slaying it for a small handful of people and having the time of their lives doing it,” they captioned the video. The band performed a note-perfect version of “What a Wonderful World,” and the singer even added some improvisational scat singing just like Uncle Satchmo would have done.
“What a Wonderful World” may be Armstrong’s most famous song, but it is an anomaly in his legendary career. Armstrong is known by many as the first great jazz soloist and the most important musical figure of the 20th century, so the heartfelt ballad wasn’t adored by his hardcore fans when it was first released.
“This is so heart warming,” Youtuber Scott Mitchell commented on the video.
Armstrong recorded “What a Wonderful World” four years before his death, and it feels like a person coming to grips with their own mortality and appreciating the things that really matter in life. Armstrong sang the tune while thinking of the children in his Queens neighborhood in New York City.
“I saw three generations come up on that block,” he said, according to the Louis Armstrong House museum. “They’re all with their children, grandchildren, they come back to see Uncle Satchmo and Aunt Lucille. That’s why I can say, ‘I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, they’ll learn much more then I’ll never know.’ And I can look at all them kids’s faces. And I got pictures of them when they was five, six and seven years old. So when they hand me this ‘Wonderful World,’ I didn’t look no further, that was it.”