Accidentally Brilliant?

 

I’ve spent the last week with Steven Brower’s book Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong. The title hints at the book’s issue, as it looks like someone hedged his/her bets by stuffing a lot of matter into the title and the book. As such, it’s another Armstrong bio, and there are better. The book’s reason to exist is its extensive, handsome presentation of Armstrong’s collaged scrapbooks and reel-to-reel tape boxes, many of which have remarkable energy, whimsy and density. Handwriting, clipped headlines, photos and other bits of ephemera were taped down to personalize the boxes or create a form of narrative in the scrapbooks.

Unfortunately, after a few paragraphs in the introduction, Brower only nods at Armstrong the visual artist after that, which is a shame because the visual art is so interesting. From a contemporary perspective, though, one of the questions the art raises is how good these pieces were when first made. We see them today after time has yellowed the tape and newsprint that were key components of his collaging. Now, there are colors that weren’t there when Armstrong made them, and there are textures that accompany the decaying tape that further enliven the compositions. The schmutz of history is all over these pieces, and it makes interesting, intuitively energetic compositions into something remarkable.