Rather than driving a Lincoln Continental into a swimming pool, or chucking a television set through his hotel room window, jazzman Louis Armstrong coped with the boredom of touring by making mix tapes and covering their 7in-square box covers with collages. Kept under wraps in an archive in Flushing, New York until now, they have been brought to life in a new book in all their Scotch-taped splendour.
Armstrong spent all but a few days of the year hawking his gravelly tenor voice to live audiences the world over. In the dressing room after each show, he would use the same voice to comment and reminisce onto the reel-to-reel tape machine he carried in a special trunk, mixing in musical clips or snatches of banter with his wife Lucille and fellow band members.
Of the 650 reels he recorded, 500 are decorated with his collages. "Louis always carried a pair of scissors," remembered fellow band member Marty Napoleon. He cut from photographs, wrapping paper, greeting cards, newspapers, congratulatory telegrams. There are clippings from advertisements for inflatable lingerie and Swiss Kriss herbal laxatives.
Exuberantly, often rhythmically composed, the collages often feature Armstrong, alongside friends and collaborators – Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Stéphane Grappelli, Nat King Cole. Some are annotated in Biro in his jazzman's scrawl.
None carries a date, but in a letter of 1953 he wrote "You know, my hobbie [sic] is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own. Of course it's not an awful lot to send a person… but sometimes the spirit of the thing can mean so much."
The final collage, made after his return from hospital after a heart attack in June 1971 is made from newspaper headlines about his recovery. "Tell all the cats," it reads, "the choirmaster up there in Heaven will have to wait for old Louis." He died just a few days later.
'Satchmo, the Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong' by Steven Brower (Abrams £19.99) is out now
