Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong
The wonderful, if typo-strewn, “official book” of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives (Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo, 2003) afforded glimpses of the collages of photos, clippings, and adhesive tape that the great jazzman composed on hundreds of boxes of reel-to-reel recording tape. Now Brower exposes this homemade artwork much more generously, mounting at 7-by-7-inch full scale well more than 100 collages as well as other photos and pages of Armstrong’s typed and handwritten personal recollections. Designer as well as author, Brower presents the pictorial material immaculately. As writer and documentalist, though, he is less able. His traversal of Armstrong’s life is sound but marred by much poor wording. Though nearly blooper free—alas, Paul VI is called Pius XII both times a pope appears—picture captions are often too meager or absent. The mercifully few descriptions of Armstrong’s music are nonsensical gush, and the reference notes are, to put it kindly, unorthodox. Louis lovers will forgive all this, however, and hail the book’s revelation of another attractive facet of one of America’s most prodigious talents. --Ray Olson