[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Coming up on tomorrow's show, at this time tomorrow, we'll be discussing our first summer school read, James Baldwin's novel, Another Country. We'll be joined by NYU professor and Baldwin scholar, Rich Blint, and of course, you. You can get the conversation started now. If you have any thoughts about Another Country, reach out to us on social media @allofitwnyc. We have a couple of stories up there you can respond to. Tune in tomorrow at 1:00 PM to listen and participate. Now, let's get this hour started with Louis Armstrong.

[music - Louis Armstrong - A lot of lovin' to do]

Alison Stewart: Turn the corner on 107th Street and 37th Avenue in Corona, Queens, and you'll find the home of jazz legend, Louis Armstrong. Since 2003, it's been a museum where you can see where Mr. Armstrong spent the last three decades of his life. 20 years later, there has been an expansion, and last week, a new edition opened its doors across the street. It's called The Louis Armstrong Center. The new facility honors the legacy of the jazz artist with a permanent exhibition featuring personal items from his life, like Armstrong's voice recordings reflecting on his time on the road, excerpts from his journal entries, and even two passports Armstrong took with him as he toured the world and much more.

The items highlighted in this exhibit are part of the rich tapestry that make up Louis Armstrong's life. Sure, he was a prolific jazz musician, but also the exhibit tells the story of Louis, the husband, the visual artist, and beloved member of his community in Corona, Queens. Louis' love of his neighborhood is one of the guiding principles of the new center. It plans to grow community outreach and education programs. With me now to talk about the center and its legacy is the center's executive director, Regina Bain. Regina, welcome to the studio.

Regina Bain: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Welcome back to the studio, Jason Moran, jazz pianist and curator of the permanent exhibit, Here to Stay. Welcome back.

Jason Moran: Good to be here.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the nexus of the center. It's built right across the street from his home, and the archive, this archive has been housed at Queens College, originally.

Regina Bain: Yes. In the '90s the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation donated the archive and Queens College has been shepherding it, but now it's across the street from the historic home on 107th Street in Queens.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you've been to Louis Armstrong's house or if you've been to the new center, maybe you're one of the people who wanted to get out there and see it right away. Give us a call, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or maybe you lived in Corona, Queens, around the same neighborhood where he spent the latter parts of his life. Tell us what Louis Armstrong means to you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

That's also a phone number where you can get on the air and talk to us, or you can text to us, if that is easier for you. Jason, you're a man of many talents. November, you had a residency at Village Vanguard. That's the last time you were here. December, you had an art exhibition at MASS MoCA. January, there was an album release. That's just an example of what your life is like. When you get a call like this to come and curate something, why did you decide to make space for it?

Jason Moran: Well, I'm invested heavily in how Black culture, and especially Black music culture, resonates after the music stops. Where is the place making for it and where's the safe space for it? Where is the space for us to investigate? What do the sounds mean? It's actually dream material when three years ago, right before the pandemic, I received a call from Julia del Palacio and Jeffrey Rosenstock to come join and think about curating this exhibition for this upcoming museum. Then I had all of the pandemic to really dive into the archives. This is a dream to touch and to think about these materials in ways that maybe Louis didn't think about them.

Alison Stewart: When you say dive into the archives, will you explain, Regina, how large the archives are?

Regina Bain: 60,000 pieces. The largest archive of any single jazz musician. It's huge. It's an incredibly important piece of American history, of Black American history. It's all completely digitized as well so people can go online and search it, but we want to make sure to steward, to protect, but to share this amazing repository.

Alison Stewart: As you started thinking about this, Jason, ruminating on it and knowing how enormous this archive was, where did you start?

Jason Moran: Well, it's interesting. Louis is a person of many talents. We know his beautiful voice, we know his innovative trumpet skills, but also, let's look at how he writes about himself. That was the first place I started. Investigating how does he gather the language to tell his own story, not the story someone else told about him, not a press review, but how does he say it in his own terms?

He practices writing about himself. He does it a few times in his life. I think it's in that practice that we start to understand the kind of artist he is. He's not necessarily taking it for face value. He wants to have another go on it again, just as he does a musician who's improvising on a song. I need another chorus. He's adding choruses to his life.

Alison Stewart: He's described, Regina, as a rigorous archivist.

Regina Bain: Oh, most definitely. He made hundreds of hours of recordings of himself on reel-to-reel tapes, he made recordings of himself rehearsing, of he and Lucille discussing and sometimes fighting, of parties in his house. He recorded, and then he wrote down the things that were on his recordings. He put them into a notebook and cataloged them. He was the first archivist for our museum.

Alison Stewart: Did he ever explain why? Do you get a sense of why he did this?

Regina Bain: There is a recording where he says, "Here I am in this certain place, and I'm here talking with you." Then you hear music swell up. The you is us. There's literally no one else in the room with him when he's saying this. He knows that his legacy is important and that it should be kept and that we will want to listen to it. I think that he did this because he had a sense of the importance of his life and respect for it, and then he put that to work in the recordings in the archive.

Alison Stewart: Jason, I'm asking you this as Jason the artist, not the curator, what can you see as the benefit of this self-documentation?

Jason Moran: Well, you get to reorganize the facets of your own library, but you only get to do that if you save it. We're in very much a disposable time right now. We're also trying to figure out how do we dispose of plastic, how do we dispose of TikTok, how do we dispose of these things, but he thinks of his ideas as very central and to take them seriously, even the random conversations he might have with his friends in his dressing room after a show, he keeps that as a document.

It's above and beyond what an artist should do, because actually, the artist probably rarely goes back to listen to all these tapes that they've made of themselves, but he does know that there is an afterlife and that that afterlife is worth and maybe as important as the time he spent here on the Earth playing the music. He thinks about where [unintelligible 00:07:35] his legacy and where's the resonant quality of it. If you keep it, it can have another life afterwards.

Alison Stewart: Regina, what was something you heard that's maybe surprised you or you thought, "Oh, I'm going to take that nugget with me"?

Regina Bain: From Louis?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Regina Bain: I love the image of him studiously poring over his writing and over his collage art. Not many people know that he was a prolific collage artist. He would take his scissors, he would take the paper, he would take the pictures, and he would bend over the desk and create something. He was a prolific artist, not just a musician. I love the images of him smiling. He was an effervescent, joyous person, but the images of him studiously bending over his work speak to his ethics.

Alison Stewart: What about for you, Jason? What is something you heard or saw that [unintelligible 00:08:28] thought, "This is a nugget," even just take for yourself?

Jason Moran: I also think about who he was to others. Who is he to Lucille? I'm in the pandemic learning and diving into Armstrong, but I'm also diving into the love relationship between Lucille and Louis. It's Lucille who buys that home in Queens. It's Lucille who says, "We're going to save this archive." It's Lucille who says "We're going to save this house and make it a museum." She's an incredible dancer, an incredible partner, and she is with him in this journey. Just looking at their love relationship, I fell in love in the way that they loved one another. It's not necessarily something that I thought about when I started on the project.

Alison Stewart: Reminds me of somebody else I know, maybe, working relationship. Alicia Hall Moran, shout out to you. My guests are Jason Moran and Regina Bain. We are talking about The Louis Armstrong Center in Corona, Queens. Listeners, if you want to get in on this conversation, if you got fond memory of jazz legend Louis Armstrong, or maybe you live in Corona, Queens, in the same neighborhood where he spent the latter parts of his life, we'd love to hear from you, or maybe you already been out and seen the new center, we'd like to hear your experience, or maybe you've been to the house, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

I see some texts coming in because you can text that number or you can call up and join us on air. I want to play something from the exhibition. There's a section that features his instruments and his various tools. Let's listen to this clip about Louis Armstrong and his tools. This one is his instrument, and this is just one of those interesting little textual details, his lip balm. Let's take--

[music]

Regina Bain: Every artist needs a fine set of tools to create with. Let's look at some of Armstrong's. This gold-plated Selmer trumpet was given to Louis by King George V of England in 1934. Armstrong follows King Oliver on cornet, a smaller horn with a darker sound, but moves to the trumpet for a new sound and tone, brighter, brassier, more in your face. Armstrong made the trumpet into a solo instrument, bending notes with impeccable precision, and then soaring into higher notes that would make the audience roar. To pull off this incredible feat night after night would fatigue his lips, AKA chops. Here is his favorite lip salve, made by Franz Schuritz in Mannheim, Germany. Armstrong focuses all of the air pressure into the mouthpiece.

Louis Armstrong: You can't blow a horn nohow without having the soreness at your lips. See, well, all that goes in the plain trumpet.

Alison Stewart: I love that clip. That's your voice, by the way, Regina. [laughs]

Regina Bain: It is. It is, but then when Louis's voice came in, I was like, "Ooh, yes, that sounds good."

Jason Moran: Ooh, right. Louis. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: There's just something about that because it's the everydayness of it. This was a working musician. He's a legend to us now, but he needed to take care of both his instrument and his physical instrument. Just that little detail, I just found such a lovely piece of texture.

Regina Bain: Most definitely. The trumpet is hard on the body. He had many heart attacks because he put his whole body, his soul, his heart, his lips, into the sounds and he was dedicated about it. Even he was on his deathbed, literally in the house. He died in the home, but the night before, he was telling his manager, "I want to go back on the road because I want to play." He put his whole heart, his body, his lips, into the sound.

Alison Stewart: Someone has texted, "As an immigrant, I grew up in Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and went to Corona often for Italian ice. It wasn't until I was older and grew to love jazz that I learned he lived there!! His love for the hood and kids is legend. What a wonderful world sings to me and many other Queens kids." What was his relationship to the neighborhood like?

Regina Bain: It was intense. He was on the road for many days of the year, but when he came home, when that tour bus pulled up on 107th Street, the kids came out, because they knew they were welcome. They knew that he and Lucille would have them inside, they could have ice cream, they could watch the television, they would learn trumpet. We try and be in that legacy by teaching trumpet to students now, by being a part of our neighborhood. There was someone who was an intern with us, Patrick, recently came back and said, "I needed to come back for Selma's birthday." Selma Heraldo was the next door neighbor to Louis and Lucille. She dedicated her life and her home to the museum. She willed it to us.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Regina Bain: It was her 100th birthday, and this young person who lived on the block came back to celebrate it. That's the kind of relationship that he inspired.

Alison Stewart: The exhibit gets into Armstrong, and by extension, Jazz's influence on global politics and various issues that were important to him. His record label released an album of live performances from abroad called Ambassador Satch in 1956, right? Am I getting this right?

Jason Moran: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Okay. What was it about his appeal that he could be a global ambassador?

Jason Moran: I think the essence of what people have called jazz is that it's freedom making possibility and sound, and it relies on the interaction with the musicians who are on the stage, and each one is treated equally, but you all have to be in dialogue with one another. There's not really someone in the front. Louis learns how to play in the front because he has played second to King Oliver, his great mentor. When Louis then charts his own territory and makes his new constellation about what the music can be, people hear that possibility.

Whether they understand it as, "Okay, this is something that can be the Declaration of Independence." "No, maybe not," but what it unlocks in people is a sense of, "Oh, maybe there's something further than what I credit freedom for having, and I hear it in this music." He shows up with Kwame Nkrumah on the cusp of Ghana's independence. He shows up in the Congo for Patrice Lumumba. He shows up for people. The music shows up. They know that even at his time of his life when he is doing this in his 50s and 60s, there's still something vital to the struggle, and that music is embedded in that struggle.

Alison Stewart: Regina, what issues were important to Louis Armstrong?

Regina Bain: The music, most definitively, how the music connected to people, to people's hearts. It wasn't separate. He wanted to be with people with his music. The issues of civil rights and Black people in America. He spoke out about the Little Rock Nine, about the students who were trying to go to high school in Arizona, and who were met with an angry mob. When he spoke out, people tried to blackball him for it, and it was because Bing Crosby spoke up and said, "If you don't have Louis Armstrong, you don't have me," that we got to have What a wonderful world that came after that. He was interested in the music. He was interested in Black people's lives. He was interested in joy.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Lyron from Long Island City is calling in. Hi, Lyron. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Lyron: Hi there. Forgive me for walking and talking. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: It's okay.

Lyron: Noisy.

Alison Stewart: Getting your steps in, I get it. Go for it.

Lyron: Awesome. I just wanted to share, nothing spectacular, but my daughter was born and raised in New York. I'm a California import. I've been here about 35 years. I've always just enjoyed having her immersed in such wonderful people and events and history from the past, especially she's of dual identity, African American from me and Colombian from her mom. When we went to that house, I took her when she was in her 20s, it was just so fascinating to me to be in this face of greatness. The home reminded me a lot of my own home. It wasn't extravagant and large and big, everything was homey, and just to think of such greatness being in that space was just fascinating.

Alison Stewart: Lyron, thank you for calling. That's an interesting point, that it is a home.

Regina Bain: It's a home.

Alison Stewart: It's not a palace. It's not Graceland. Graceland, it's fun and everything, but you know what I mean? You could see someone having a life there.

Regina Bain: There's a feeling that people get when they enter that home. The new center is new. It has the multimedia exhibit, it's gorgeous, but then it puts a context into what it means to ring the doorbell, to walk into a home where no one has lived since the Armstrongs, the furnishings, the wallpaper, it's all theirs. People used to say they could smell the smoke that was coming out of the wallpaper. That they could feel his presence, and that matters.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting you should bring up the home of the new exhibit. It is beautiful. It is gorgeous. It's modern though. It is modern. It's got beautiful curves and sort of undulates. What do you make of the juxtaposition between the home, very much the homey home, and then this gorgeous, gleaming, new space?

Jason Moran: That's a good question, but I think what it offers is, there has to be some place of transition. The new space offers-- I'd say this, we're having the first stamp of the new passport. [laughs] We're going to watch where the museum takes us, because it is a living space too. Not only is the exhibition in it, the archive is in it, but also there's a performance space which is also, I think it's about futurity. It's about what's going to happen next, and that we allow space for all that to exist within one building is extremely rare, and to have its relationship just across the street from the home, it makes a kind of synergy that I enjoy watching even in its young stage right now.

Alison Stewart: It's cool. It's kind of past, present, and a future.

Regina Bain: Most definitely. Caples Jefferson architects wanted to design a building that felt musical. When we opened it, we had 12 trumpet players, some who were on the terrace of the historic home and some who were on the terrace of the new center. We wanted to sonically connect these two buildings because they are in service of one another. I'm so excited for Armstrong now and the contemporary artists who will do research in the archives and create and perform new works in the new building.

Alison Stewart: Let's take Benny calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Benny. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Benny: Hey, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Benny: I just wanted to say that in the neighborhood there, there is a junior high school that's dedicated to him. It's called Louis Armstrong Junior High. My son had the pleasure of going there and every morning they played It's a Wonderful World, and his trumpet is enshrined in the office there.

Alison Stewart: Love that story.

Regina Bain: I love it. We work with that high school and other high schools in the area.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Regina Bain, executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and Jason Moran, jazz pianist and curator of Here to stay at the exhibition. We'll take more of your calls and your texts and we'll hear more about the new edition after a quick break. This is All Of It. [music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour are Regina Bain, executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and jazz pianist, Jason Moran, who also is a curator of Here to Stay, part of the new edition. He curated the exhibit. This is a great text. Louis Armstrong visited my arts high school in downtown Houston, Texas, the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. That was a great day. All of us were so excited, and he was so kind. I look back and only realize how very special that was, late '80s.

Someone else has texted, "My dad, who turned 87 a few weeks ago, has always been a massive, massive Louis Armstrong fan, and raised me to be one as well. He heard him live several times and I can't wait to bring him to see the museum. Dad calls him America's Mozart." Would you agree?

Jason Moran: He's beyond Mozart. Hold on now.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Settle in.

Jason Moran: Armstrong is on his own terms. One thing I think is really important to state about Black music is that after emancipation proclamation, something happened where the miracle of recorded technology actually got to document how we sounded all the way. We have no recording of Mozart, but I know how Louis Armstrong sounds. I know what he looks like. I've seen his handwriting. He makes himself so real for us that it's a treasure to have him. He's beyond Mozart to me. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Here to Stay is the name of the exhibit you curated. Let's hear a little of the song, and we can talk about it on the other side.

[music - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - Love is Here to Stay]

Alison Stewart: Of course, that's Ms. Ella Fitzgerald on vocals. Why was this the song that inspired--

Jason Moran: Did you just hear that?

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] Moving on to the next question.

Jason Moran: Also, in that thing about Louis playing second. He played second to Bessie Smith. He played second to King Oliver. He played second to Billie Holiday, and here he is playing second to Ella Fitzgerald. It's how he accompanies her in those final moments where they're singing that duet. He's playing just the most incredible harmony lines behind her incredible phrasing. One of the things that they break us free of and they show us is the possibility of rephrasing the idea. You change the entire melody by rephrasing it. They should be owed so much publishing because they really did make a new song. Anyway, here to stay, it's just they kept saying it and it just kept resonating more that the archive was coming home. The home is still there. That he is an emblem of the city, and so he's here to stay.

Alison Stewart: When you were in conversations about what the new center should look like, what were some of the must-haves?

Regina Bain: The must-have is that the community should be a part of it. That it should be a musical building as the architects designed. We wanted to have a space to make new music and to be able to share that with the world. We wanted to make sure that we could share that archives in a way that felt like people could be close to it. I love that King George's trumpet is there, that the Grammy is there, and that people can engage with that now.

Alison Stewart: Someone has texted, "My name is Christian. I live two blocks away from his house. I've lived here for over 12 years, and I love the neighborhood. I didn't realize the importance of Louis Armstrong and what he did in his life, but as I got older, I started to listen to jazz, and his music is among my favorite. I look forward to checking out the new exhibit." Important point. You can't just show up.

Regina Bain: Please, go to louisarmstronghouse.org and get a ticket because it's still in an intimate space, and we want to make sure that the people who come really have the space. If you're two blocks away, if you're in the neighborhood, come on over. We'll take care of you.

Alison Stewart: There's an Artist-in-Residence Program. What's this about?

Regina Bain: Yes, this is Armstrong Now. That's where we work with Black diaspora contemporary artists to do research in the house and in the archives and create new works. During the pandemic, it was those performances and the research actually happened in the home. We are a museum, and museums, you usually preserve, protect, don't touch, but we are a museum in dedication to a musician. We need to touch a little bit, at least with sounds. We want dancers, multidisciplinary artists, musicians, to make music in the home, but also in the gorgeous new center, in the state-of-the-art building where we can stream around the world.

Alison Stewart: Jason, what was hard about being the curator on this? What was a tough decision you had to make?

Jason Moran: Armstrong has so many assets, and he has so many points of view because he lives quite a powerful life from 1900 to the '70s. We really see a lot change in America, and he's a witness to that. His music also becomes the witness that we also need to research. The hard part is you won't be able to get everything in it. It's also a small space. It's not massive. How do you start to tell just enough of the story, his origin story? Who are his parents? Who is his sister? Who are his grandparents?

How does Armstrong deal with the camera that's focused on him all the time and asking him to smile, or focused on him in a way where Black performers have to really be sometimes hesitant about stepping in front of the camera for fear of being misused? How does Armstrong deal with it? How does that age over time too? We try to put enough into the conversation that the audience gets a sense of it. Then we have a digital table in the center of the room where there are other chapters that an audience can choose what they want to learn about. Over time, that will grow as well. It's an exhibition that continues to grow.

Alison Stewart: How did you arrive on the color palette for the new center?

Regina Bain: The new center and the new performance space has a red vibe to it. There's something that's strong, that is powerful about that color that I love. Then there's also blue, and blue is one of Lucille's favorite colors. I love that that's a part of it. Color, generally, needs to be there to represent what this legacy is.

Alison Stewart: It's a vibe.

Regina Bain: It's a vibe that is vibrant. I also love that Jason opted to put a book in many of the spaces where the exhibits are, and so there's a studious vibe as well. It's both the energy of, "Let's put the music out there," and, "Let's study and think about the music too."

Alison Stewart: Ricky McMahon has texted, "Our family plot in Flushing Cemetery is right next to Louis Armstrong's grave. Everyone should go see the graves and see the beautiful trumpets sitting atop the headstone. Before my parents passed away, that was a twice a year ritual for my family. I've been to the museum and the house, and I have to say, it's one of the finest tributes to an American legend I've ever seen."

Regina Bain: Thank you so much, Ricky. We really appreciate that. There were some international visitors. They were coming every year before the pandemic, and I think they're coming back this year. They made a pilgrimage. They would come to the home, but they would also go to that burial plot.

Alison Stewart: Jason, what are some questions you hope people ask themselves? If they go to the new center and they go out for coffee or for a cocktail after, and they're having a conversation about what they saw, what do you hope comes up?

Jason Moran: I'd hope they take their phone out and record their conversation. You know what I mean? I think he didn't find a barrier of where the recording studio was, so he took his typewriter to type letters to people. He took his reel-to-reel to make recordings backstage with friends in the hotel room. He took his scissors, so he would cut up his press and make a new collage out of it. I think that documenting part, we have these phones now that are beautiful microphones.

I know a lot of musicians, we use it to make our voice memos or practice sessions, but also, what is the conversations that we're having? How do we take care of each other through the documents we make of one another in our community? There's something to just cherish in that. I think we shouldn't be so flippant about how important or unimportant something is. Armstrong, I think, took everything really seriously. He's a hilarious guy. I won't tell any of his jokes, but also, he is a comedian too. I think he understood the verve of life.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of truth in comedy. Does he drop truth bombs occasionally? [laughter]

Regina Bain: He has a lot to say about life. He has lived a life and every aspect of it is a part of his comedy.

Alison Stewart: The answer was yes.

Jason Moran: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right. The Louis Armstrong Center. The opening, by the way, I saw some of the video of the opening. It looked like it was a blast.

Regina Bain: Oh, it was a blast. There were parts of it that were challenging. We had an incident happen in the community. What happened that rose around it, where different members of our community said that's what this is about, that we have to serve every aspect of our community. Louis Armstrong was incarcerated when he was a young person, he shot a gun in New Orleans. It was in that juvenile detention center that he learned and got formal lessons in the cornet, the trumpet, that led to his amazing career.

We had an incident with someone who might be in relationship to the juvenile justice system. What we want to do as a museum is tell the story and live those values, and be of service to every member of our community, and we did. It was a great time. There were two young students who spoke on the stage, and they brought some warmth to everyone's hearts. If you're listening, young people, we appreciate you.

Alison Stewart: Can you give folks the details, time, hours, how to get more information?

Regina Bain: Yes. Go to louisarmstronghouse.org, and you'll find tickets there. Thursday through Saturday, we're open for the public to come. Ahead of time, get a ticket to come, but we also do group tours on other days. If you want to find out about that and bring your students, bring your group, please do, and then we have other times where we work with artists who are in residence throughout the week. If you're interested in applying for Armstrong Now, sign up for our newsletter, and submit an application.

Alison Stewart: I have to ask, Jason, what are you doing next? I get that long list of things you were doing last time you were here.

Jason Moran: Actually, yesterday, I solidified a performance date at the Louis Armstrong Center. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Breaking news.

Jason Moran: On September 23, I'll be playing at Louis Armstrong Center, and I'm so thrilled that the bandwagon will come and touch the soil and make some sound in the space. I'm really excited about that.

Alison Stewart: We are too. My guests have been Jason Moran and Regina Bain. We've been talking about the opening of the Louis Armstrong Center in Corona, Queens. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Jason Moran: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on a little bit of Louis Armstrong.

[music - Louis Armstrong - Home]

 

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