Satchmo, les carnets de collages de Louis Armstrong

We knew him to be an orchestra director, a trumpet player, a singer, actor, a writer of memoires. We are now going to have to add, posthumously, another feather to his cap: Louis Armstrong was also a «collage» artist. For someone who was precocious – newspaper boy at the age of 7, arrested at 12 for shooting a gun in Perdido Street, married at 16– he picked up this artistic hobby rather late in life. The book presents all the compositions done from 1953 up to his death, in 1971, combining article clippings, record covers, photos, birthday and Christmas cards, telegrams from the Western Union and pieces of Band-Aids, all glued on cardboard or recording boxes. «Satchmo» places himself with his friends and contemporaries – King Oliver, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, including the Pope and Leslie Caron. Now and then there are a few women in the strictest attire or a lovely behind but legend has it –not without humor- that he used to get rid of this sort of creation very quickly: Lucille Wilson, his fourth and last wife, made sure everything was kept respectable …

• Satchmo, les carnets de collages de Louis Armstrong (Satchmo, the wonderful world and art of Louis Armstrong), by Steven Brower, La Martinière, 2009, 258 p., 32 €, ISBN : 978-2-732-439198