Two Satchmo Articles From New York Times

[Dan Gould]

I haven't even read these yet, first is an article about Louis' habit of taping people without telling them:

Live From Satchmo's Den

By JOHN LELAND

Published: October 9, 2003

LUCILLE ARMSTRONG lived in the brick house in Queens for 12 years after her husband's death, and when she died, during a trip to Boston in October 1983, the first person into the house was Phoebe Jacobs. Mrs. Jacobs, 85 and a woman of some dash, had worked with Louis Armstrong since 1956, and is now the executive vice president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.

Much had changed in the house since Armstrong's death in 1971, Mrs. Jacobs said last week. Among other things, she lamented, Lucille had thrown out his stash of marijuana from the basement. "He always had the good stuff," Mrs. Jacobs said.

But a treasure of the house was intact: 650 reels of audiotape, each in a box decorated with an exuberant collage by Armstrong himself. The tapes date back to at least 1950, and perhaps to 1948. Mrs. Jacobs arranged for them to be boxed up and eventually taken to the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College. And there, for the most part, they have sat. "He was like a mischievous kid with that tape recorder," she recalled. "He'd put it on and you wouldn't know. Then months later he'd play your voice back."

Last April, under a grant from Save America's Treasures, a man named Matt Sohn began copying the tapes onto compact discs for preservation and for use by scholars and fans. He has completed about 450 so far. Most have never been heard by the public.

Last week, Mrs. Jacobs visited the archives with a documentary filmmaker, Mark Hoover, who is culling clips from the tapes. She said that Armstrong had intended the tapes for the public. "I think Louis had a feeling about legacy," she said. "He'd ask me to save papers. He bought his own tombstone."

To enter Mr. Sohn's windowless realm is to visit with Armstrong in a way that has not been possible before. More than half the recorded material is music, mostly dubbed from albums. There are also recordings from radio and television, including news bulletins announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The rest is talk — remarkable, boring, quotidian, profane, unguarded, naked talk.

Mr. Sohn cued up a recording identified as tape No. 5, made in 1961, after the funeral of Velma Middleton, a singer in one of Armstrong's bands. It is 5 in the morning, and the voices on the tape are tired, drunk and testy. The voices belong to Louis and Lucille. They are in his study, discussing what will happen when they repair to the bedroom. They are of different minds on the matter.

After an intimate (and robustly unprintable) back and forth, Louis plays his trump card. "It's up to you to keep the horn percolating," he tells her. "That's your happiness and mine."

At this point, readers who have been involved in such 5 a.m. negotiations, with or without trumpets, can guess how this turns out. As Lucille storms off, the tape captures the sound of ice cubes falling into a glass, liquid splashing over the cubes and the long quietude of a man stewing alone in his study.

"You feel like you shouldn't be listening to this, and then you realize that he made it for us," Mr. Hoover said. "All his life his friends were trying to edit him for his own good." With the tapes, he said, "we finally get to hear him tell it all."

Armstrong, who grew up in poverty in New Orleans, early on set out to create a public document of his adventures, supplementing it until his last days. Though he never finished the fifth grade, he wrote more about his life and his country — about drugs, barbers, music, laxatives, race and love — than any figure in jazz history.

He began traveling with a typewriter in 1922, when he was 21, engaging in idiosyncratic work that he called "gapping." Jack Bradley, a longtime friend and photographer, said he used to watch Armstrong reel off a six- or eight-page letter, only to learn that it was to a complete stranger.

Armstrong produced two autobiographies, numerous essays and magazine articles, and 12 linear shelf feet of papers, which are now in the archives. Many of the writings have never been published.

Armstrong kept two state-of-the-art tape recorders in his den and had his valet, Doc Pugh, carry one on the road. When the archivists started working through the tapes, they found a rich trail of conversations, birthday greetings, dirty jokes and testimonies to his debt to King Oliver and other musicians from his early career. Many of the tapes are conversations with hotel maids or bellmen.

The tape cases demonstrate Armstrong's unsung zeal for collage. Mrs. Jacobs said that he began making collages in the 1930's, working first with lingerie ads and risqué photographs, later switching to news clippings about himself or other items of interest.

He saw the tapes as a way to share his experiences with others, she said. He liked to indulge in everything — food, women, marijuana , music, bawdy humor, company — and the tapes, delightfully uncensored, were the closest he could come to letting fans in on the action.

"He was so grateful for everything he got," Mrs. Jacobs said. "This was his way of giving back."

Mr. Sohn said he had developed a warm relationship with Armstrong through the tapes. What struck him, he said, was that Armstrong never complained, and that apart from the marital disagreement described above, he never seemed upset.

"I understand my dad a lot better through this," said Mr. Sohn, whose father had also pursued a jazz career but put down his horn after having children.

When the Armstrong house opens next week, a hidden audio system will play short clips from the tapes. But the real goods remain tucked into the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library at Queens College. The archives are open to the public weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the recordings are accessible by appointment. (For information, www.satchmo.net or 718-997-3670.)

On most days, though, Mr. Sohn said he has been left alone with the tapes. He cued up two segments in which Armstrong associates recite the African-American trickster story about the Signifying Monkey. Neither man is sober enough to finish the tale. Mr. Sohn said that he has found almost no instances of Armstrong erasing or re-recording on a tape. Once he taped it, it was in the records for good.

Even so, the house still doesn't give you the full Louie. When Mrs. Jacobs went there after Lucille's death, she came across a scarf and sake set depicting men and women in an encyclopedic variety of conjugal positions. Mrs. Jacobs spirited these away. "I'll burn it before I die," she said of the scarf.

"Louis felt you should enjoy all of life, and none of it was bad," she said. "He didn't believe in holding anything back."

Until she changes her mind about the sake cups, the recordings give the fullest opportunity to enter his extraordinary, ordinary life and, as Armstrong says on one tape, to "dig how this was Satchuated."

*********************************

And here's the second article, mostly about the decor of his home in Queens, New York, which is opening as a museum next week.

For a King of Jazz, a Castle in Queens

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: October 9, 2003

TWENTY THOUSAND visitors would probably not travel every year to Corona, Queens, to see the Lucille Armstrong House.

But that's what it was: her house. She found it. She decorated it. (Oh, man, did she decorate it.) She presented it to her husband, Louis, in 1943 on his return to New York from an out-of-town gig. And she lived in it more than a decade after he died.

With her death in 1983, at the age of 69, the red-brick house at 34-56 107th Street froze in time. The Armstrongs had no children. No one has lived there since. So it never occurred to anyone that an all-turquoise kitchen might need freshening up, that an all-mirrored bathroom might need toning down, that vine-patterned silver-foil horizontal window blinds to match the vine-patterned silver-foil bedroom wallpaper might be a touch too much.

As a result, the Louis Armstrong House, which opens as a museum next week, is more than a shrine to Satchmo, the most influential figure in jazz history, from "Cornet Chop Suey" to "Hello, Dolly!" It is a record of a well-to-do 20th-century Queens household — exuberant, yes, but not pretentious — and is a worthy companion to other domestic landmarks like the 17th-century Wyckoff House in Brooklyn and the 18th-century Dyckman House in Manhattan.

"You don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your horn for you," Armstrong was quoted as saying in "Louis," by Max Jones and John Chilton (Little, Brown, 1971). "When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate, they ain't got no breath to blow that horn." Now, it's true that the Armstrongs had an unusually large side yard, with a goldfish-stocked pond. But they added that in later years. The house itself was a vision of modesty. At least from the outside. Inside, Mrs. Armstrong and her longtime decorator, Morris Grossberg of Manhattan, made their own kind of music.

"I don't think there's a square inch of paint in the house," said Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives at Queens College. "Even the ceilings of the closets have wallpaper." In this setting, gold-plated Selmer trumpets compete with golden swan-head bathroom fixtures by Sherle Wagner International and an almost pristine 1960's kitchen. The Sub-Zero refrigerator is paneled in turquoise to match the floor-to-ceiling cabinetwork. There are also a built-in countertop NuTone blender, a KitchenAid dishwasher with a "party" setting and a six-range, double-oven Crown stove, which was custom made for the Armstrongs.

"Most of our visitors will come because this was the home of Louis Armstrong," Mr. Cogswell said. "But other visitors will come purely for this historic house." Tours begin next Thursday, a day after the ribbon-cutting. Mr. Cogswell expects 15,000 to 20,000 visitors a year at the house, in a neighborhood where the most imposing structure is the steeple of Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church.

"The house may not be the nicest looking front," Armstrong wrote in his own idiosyncratic style around 1970. "But when one visit the Interior of the Armstrong's home they see a whole lot of comfort, happiness & the nicest things. Such as that Wall to Wall Bed."

Mrs. Armstrong bequeathed the house to New York City, "in respectful memory of my deceased husband," Mr. Cogswell wrote in the newly published "Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo" (Collectors Press). Title was transferred in 1986. Two years later, the house was designated a city landmark.

Queens College operates the house under license from the city and was given Armstrong's personal archives by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. The collection is at the college's Flushing campus.

Converting the house into a museum cost $1.6 million. Mr. Cogswell said that every step has been challenging and time-consuming: raising money, assessing the building's condition, bringing it into compliance with city codes (among other things, an illegal third-story addition had to be removed) and planning the program and the design.

Platt Byard Dovell White, known for restoring landmark buildings, were the architects, succeeding Buttrick White & Burtis. The master planning was by Rogers Marvel Architects.

A great deal of effort has gone into preserving the appearance of the house as it was 20 years ago. For instance, new air-conditioning units have been installed behind the old plastic Carrier faceplates.

An even more startling illusion is the garage door, which looks like a roll-down but is in fact made of vertically hinged panels that can be folded open during business hours to reveal the visitors' center and entrance.

The yellow-and-silver diamond-patterned wallpaper in the rec room, echoing the sea-grass wallpaper in the living room, was recreated by Chambord Inc., of Hoboken, N.J., since it is no longer made.

"I was interested in the application of high-level preservation techniques to a condition that was so vernacular," said Samuel G. White of Platt Byard Dovell White. "You knew, if you looked long enough, you'd find that foil wallpaper rolled up for $2.99 a yard in a hardware store within 10 blocks."

Easily the most poignant issue was posed by a Wecolator chair lift on the stairway. In the eyes of the Buildings Department, the device somewhat limits necessary egress in a place of public assembly. But the architects argued that it was essential to keep the lift, in which Mr. Armstrong was once photographed.

"This vivid evocation of the last weeks of Louis's life is one of the most moving parts of the museum," Josh Brandfonbrener of Buttrick White & Burtis wrote in 2000. He said it would also buttress the role of the building as "one of the first `modern' house museums, recording how people lived at a specific time and place in history." The borough commissioner for the buildings agency agreed.

The lift is by no means the only sign of Louis Armstrong in the Louis Armstrong House. That beaming countenance radiates from portraits on the walls, including one by the singer Tony Bennett, and that gravelly voice can be heard in homemade recordings played over a new speaker system. Armstrong comments in one that his cluttered den "look like a whorehouse on Christmas morning."

Armstrong made some 650 reels of tape recordings: precious LP's and 78's, radio programs, conversations around the house and on the road with friends and fellow musicians. Then he decorated the tape boxes with his own collages.

Two reel-to-reel Tandberg tape decks still sit in a stained-pine cabinet in his den, along with a Dual turntable and a Marantz stereo console and FM tuner. "When at home he has several radios going all the time," the music critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times Magazine for Jan. 29, 1950. " `Might pick up an idea or hear something,' he says."

But until the last years of his life, he was far more likely to be on the road than at home. That makes the house even more compelling. For a husband who wandered — in more than one direction — Mrs. Armstrong created a sanctuary.

She was his fourth wife. They met in 1938 at the Cotton Club, which was then on West 48th Street. He later wrote in Ebony magazine that Lucille Wilson was a "distinguished pioneer," the first to break the color line against dark-skinned dancers at the club. They married in 1942.

At the time, she lived in Harlem, and he lived out of hotel rooms. In Queens, the Brennan family was living in a frame house on 107th Street that dated from 1910. They had known Lucille since her school days in Corona. "These White people were moving out — going to Another Neighborhood," Armstrong wrote a quarter-century later in a reminiscence contained in the archives and reprinted in "Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words," edited by Thomas Brothers (Oxford University Press, 1999).

"And when they found out that Lucille come All the way from Harlem out in Corona looking to buy a house," he added, "why they were so glad to know that she liked their house and she told them that she would buy it — hmmm. They almost gave her the house for nothing."

Armstrong did not lay eyes on the house until his wife had bought and decorated it. He arrived by cab early one morning after returning from the road.

"One look at that big fine house, and right away I said to the driver `Aw man quit Kidding,' " Armstrong wrote. "I get up enough courage to get out of the Cab, and Ring the Bell. And sure enough the door opened and who stood in the doorway with a real thin silk Night Gown — hair in Curlers. To me she looked just like my favorite flower a Red Rose.

"The more Lucille showed me around the house the more thrilled I got," he wrote. "Right then and I felt very grand over it all. A little higher on the horse (as we expresses it)."

Not so high as to dwell in the cocoon of celebrity, however. "The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out," Armstrong wrote. "They just rejoice and say, `Hi — Louis & Lucille — your car is so beautiful coming out of that raise up gate,' which knocks me out." (The "magic up and down Gate" will be reinstalled after a free-standing visitors' center is built across 107th Street.)

"All of the kids in Corona where I live came in front of my home and wished me a Happy Birthday, which thrilled old Satch," he wrote about his 69th birthday in 1969. "Saying carry on until you're a hundred years old."

After a series of hospitalizations for heart, kidney and liver disorders, he told a Times interviewer (July 4, 1970): "Now I have time to be at home, which I never did have — traveling all day long, buses, and going to airports, waiting all day for a plane, gets you there just in time to do the concert, no supper, no anything."

He added: "Well, I ain't going to do that no more. I needs the rest anyway. What's a better vacation than this?"

It lasted only a year. Armstrong died of a heart attack two days after celebrating his 71st birthday, on July 6, 1971, in his beloved Wall to Wall bed.

Mrs. Armstrong lived in the house 12 more years, and watched as neighborhood institutions like the Singer Bowl at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and an elementary school on 113th Street were renamed in her husband's honor. On Sept. 20, 1983, in Boston to attend a Louis Armstrong Music Fund concert, she suffered a heart attack. She died there 13 days later.

After she had created the first real home for that legendary itinerant, it was Lucille Armstrong who never came back from the road.

[Rooster_Ties]

"Satchmo"???

Oh, you must be talkin' 'bout Pops!!!

[BruceH]

Thanks for the articles, Dan. Great stuff.

[a.j. zeitlin]

I caught this in the Times and was excited to read it. Great news.

[jazzbo]

The only reason I want to go to NYC again someday (lived there when I was two months to two years old while my dad was at Union Seminary!) is to see Satch's house. A friend and I have a desire to go together like a pilgrimage. . . but we have to find a way to afford it and to afford the trip with womenfolk who won't want to spend more than ten minutes there, and we'll want to spend a few whole days. . . .

No easy answer!

[Christiern]

Lonson, I just hope the Fab Five don't get to Corona before you do!

[jazzbo]

Amen to that!

[skeith]

Jeez Lon,

The only reason to come to NYC is to visit the Armstrong house?

You are making us New Yorkers feel bad about our hometown.

what about a visit to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx where you could drop a flower on the graves of Duke, Miles, Hawk, Bags and others? You could visit Bird's apartment.

And yes, there are even some living, breathing musicians in NYC that are worth seeing!!!!!!!!!!

And you can always check out your organissimo buddies.

[jazzbo]

Well said, well pointed out. . . but the truth of the matter is that the Armstrong house would be the motivating factor that would make me go to NYC. I've very little traveling money, and I've a limited amount of places I can "choose to go" to with my limited amount of traveling time and money, and NYC is not high on my list. Going to New Orleans, going back to Swaziland, and several other places are above NYC. . . .I can see a trip with my wife to NYC draining my entire bank account!

And another reason: I hate metropolises!

Edited October 16, 2003 by jazzbo