Ahead of Steven Brower’s Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, due 2009, the Paris Review editors share some of Satchmo’s collages:
When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius. The story goes that he did a series of collages on paper and tacked them up on the wall of his den, but Lucille, who had supervised the purchase and interior decoration of their house in Corona, Queens, objected. Armstrong decided to use his extensive library of tapes as a canvas instead, and the result is a collection of some 500 decorated reel-to-reel boxes - 1,000 collages counting front and back.
The collages feature photographs of Armstrong with friends (like the snapshot captioned “Taken at Catherine and Count Basie’s swimming pool, at his birthday party, August 1969″) and with fans (Armstrong seems never to have refused a photo op or an autograph); congratulatory telegrams and clippings from reviews of his performances; a blessing from the Vatican (as reassembled by Louis, the first lines read: “Mr and Mrs Most Holy Father Louis Armstrong”); and cutouts from packages of Swiss Kriss herbal laxatives, which, judging from the label’s ubiquity in these pieces, were as much a staple of Armstrong’s daily life as playing the horn. Only occasionally do the collages indicate the musical content within; usually there is no correlation.
Armstrong made generous use of various kinds of adhesive tape not only to attach images to each box but also to laminate, frame, or highlight them. The works are untitled and undated, but he was making them as early as the 1950s; in a letter from 1953 he wrote, “Well, you know, my hobbie [sic] (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape … My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own.”
These little stories, illuminating and entertaining syntheses of Armstrong’s passions, now reside in the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College in Flushing, New York. They show how this very public man could turn his irrepressible creativity to the service of private amusement; the collages, one senses, were chiefly for Armstrong’s own enjoyment, like the tapes they housed. It seems equally clear that they took on a documentary significance for him - no more poignantly than in the final collage, made after his return from hospital following a serious illness in June, 1971. Armstrong died on July 6 of that year, at the age of 69. But one of the headlines he clipped, from the June 24 edition of the Orange County Register, quotes him as saying: “Tell all the cats the Choirmaster up there in Heaven will have to wait for old Louis.”
Related: Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar
First posted: Friday, September 5th, 2008.
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