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From Louis Armstrong's steamer trunk
“Reel To Reel.” The Paris Review, Issue 184, Spring 2008—
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 five hundred decorated reel-to-reel boxes, one thousand 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”) …
These are exquisite. In these examples they demonstrate effortless variation, expert control of proportion and color, and apparently very little respect for the niceties of production, focusing on the interrelations of the matter itself. It anticipates many of the music-centric ‘zines that would appear decades later, both in its freedom of reference and stylistic position as an emblem of a kind of personal music curation. I will be interested to see if anything like this level of consistency is maintained through the rest of the collection, which will be published next spring in Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, by Steven Brower (which is apparently given entirely to Armstrong’s visual art).
Remarks: 2 of 2
Remark · Zach · 12 June 2008
But must this facile “improvisation” comparison come up with every reference to jazz and another art form?
Remark · Chris · 13 June 2008
Jazz scholars are a knotted-up little bunch.