Another Pops Article in NYT

[Dan Gould]

The ribbon-cutting is this week, here's an article about the guy who had the job of archiving Armstrong's stuff:

Trumpets, Diaries and Cocktail Jiggers

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: October 15, 2003

ouis Armstrong did not catalog his possessions according to the rules of library science. For example, though he kept song indexes for his collection of 650 reel-to-reel tapes in neat three-ring binders, he curiously alphabetized titles by their last word. So "The Girl That I Married," on side one of reel No. 44, is cataloged on the line above "In the Mood."

But over all his archives demonstrate an enormous sense of purpose in leaving a documentable footprint on the world, even beyond his performances and recordings. Part of his archives is displayed at the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, which has been renovated and is having a ribbon-cutting ceremony today before opening to the public for tours starting tomorrow.

Since 1991 it has been Michael Cogswell's job to organize all of Armstrong's personal effects. Comfortable in the home that his wife Lucille busily managed, Armstrong was perhaps relieved by the sense of security he felt after being sent to a home for wayward boys, spending 20 protean years on the road and being married three previous times. He left much evidence of his nesting habits. Mr. Cogswell, as director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, based at Queens College's Flushing campus, has sorted and stored every tape, record, photograph, trumpet, cocktail jigger, ashtray, book, unsent letter, diary entry, trumpet and laxative packet in the house, where Armstrong lived with Lucille from 1943 to his death in 1971. (Lucille lived there until she died in 1983.)

"We have to ask ourselves why Louis was, for example, making all these tapes and cataloging their content," Mr. Cogswell said the other day, standing in Armstrong's small study before a portrait of Armstrong painted by Tony Bennett. "Part of it is him being the great communicator — he'd knock off a seven-page letter to a fan, thinking nothing of it. But on another level Louis had a sense of his place in history. I think he sensed that these tapes would survive him."

Much of the drive to ready the three-story brick house as a public historic site came from Mr. Cogswell, 50, an affable Virginian with a zigzag background. He has raised most of the money for the $1.6 million renovation of the house on 107th Street in what is now primarily a Dominican, Ecuadorean and Colombian neighborhood.

After spending a few years at the University of Virginia, he dropped out in 1973 to make a living as a saxophonist, moving to Boston and working in R&B and jazz bands. In 1981 he returned to the University of Virginia to study musicology.

"My mentor there was a Harvard-trained musicologist named Ernest Campbell Mead, who wore a bow tie and a seersucker suit," he said. "I couldn't believe how great it was that this guy's job was to stand up in front of a class, play records and talk about them. I wondered, why isn't somebody doing this for jazz? He's talking about Josquin" — the Renaissance composer — "he's talking about Beethoven; how come somebody isn't doing the same thing for Ellington or Charlie Parker?"

In 1983 Mr. Cogswell earned his bachelor's degree in music, and then the university offered him a job in charge of the sound-recordings collection in its music library. Three years later he started a master's degree program in musicology at the University of North Texas, and found work at that school's music library, which brought him closer to jazz archivism. That school is renowned for its jazz big-band instruction, and keeps Stan Kenton's entire archives, as well as a collection of rare Duke Ellington recordings. That is where he was when a listing for the job of arranging, preserving and cataloging the Armstrong Collection, owned (as it is still) by Queens College, crossed his desk in the Music Library Association's job newsletter. "I took a look at it and said, That's my dream job," he said.

Two weeks later he had the job. He and his wife, Dale Van Dyke, moved to New York. On his first day he was faced with the reality of the situation.

"There were 72 cartons of Armstrong's stuff, a desk, a chair, a sofa and not much else," he remembered. Besides creating proper storage systems for everything there, he began collecting other items related to Armstrong from around the world. Much of this collection is featured in his book, "Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo," published this month by Collectors Press.

Mr. Cogswell said Armstrong would be happy with how things have turned out. "He'd be delighted that people are enjoying his house," he said. "One of the things we have on exhibit is his F.B.I. file, and I always chuckle to think of the F.B.I. maintaining a file on Armstrong. He was the most open guy you'd ever want to meet."