Houstonian brings musician Louis Armstrong’s legacy to life
Gone nearly 50 years, Louis Armstrong nevertheless still speaks to the American experience more than any single musician. His life and career worked the seams between struggle and success, comedy and drama, artistry and entertainment, harmony and rebellion.
His was a story about upward mobility: A kid who grew up poor and became an internationally renowned entertainer. His story had a classic migratory path, as he absorbed the culture of his youth in New Orleans, sharpened his trade in Chicago and settled in New York.
That story will be told in “Here to Stay,” a new permanent exhibition built from the Armstrong archives in the new Armstrong Center in the Corona neighborhood of Queens in New York. This new museum will be placed across the street from the Louis Armstrong House Museum, among New York City’s great historic destinations. To curate the permanent exhibit at the Louis Armstrong House Museum board tapped Jason Moran, a Houston native whose career over 25 years sprung from jazz into garden projects and pursuits that reflect various disciplines and media.
Calling from New York, Moran suggests the work has been a relief during a period of quarantine where his work as a performer, recording artist and curator for the Kennedy Center has been put on hold.
“It came right on time,” he says, “to be able to focus on an artist who tried to exude that much positivity all the time, despite whatever else was going on in America and the world. To focus on him, to listen to that music, think about his life, it’s been a lifesaver.”
Moran has much with which to work. And also a formidable challenge ahead. Armstrong became such an iconic figure during his career that a shorthand emerged of him as a jovial jazz ambassador.
“You lose something when a life is constantly framed, you know?” Moran asks. “But there’s so much more to his story. In his writings he talked about what framed him as a young kid. There was this internal search for a father who’d always been missing in his life.
“These things keep showing up in his life and work. He watched musicians leave New Orleans for the north and return in bad shape. So he left with this ambition really looking for something. And he took the time to write it down, to save it. That wasn’t a common trait for an artist in those days.”
The intersection of music and place
Armstrong artifacts are scattered around the country. Baton Rouge’s Capitol Park Museum has several in its wonderful collection. But the Louis Armstrong House Museum operates an incredible archive in addition to the musician’s incredible midcentury home. Armstrong didn’t wait for others to document his life. He was inclined to type or write about thoughts, feelings and experiences almost every day of his life, creating a vast paper trail that offered more perspective on his life than could be gleaned solely from a recording.
Moran is trying to figure out how to best tell a story that starts in 1901 in New Orleans and ended in New York in 1971. Though the story truly begins before and ends after Armstrong’s life. His mother presented a history of slavery and a history of the culture in New Orleans that predated his birth. The influence of his work on American music — not just jazz, but all popular forms — is inestimable. He was also engaged in civil rights: A global ambassador for a type of music unafraid to speak out against injustice.
So Moran is sifting through trumpets and mouthpieces, handkerchiefs, typewriters and pens, correspondence and musical notes. Armstrong would also create visual art to accompany homemade recordings he made in his home. He’d smatter collages over all his house.
“I want to find a way to showcase that part of him,” Moran says. “This artist unbound. He found a freedom most of us aspire to.”
For Moran, 45, the project has deeper personal resonance than simply grasping a great opportunity to tell a story about an iconic person.
He’s long been interested in the interactivity between music and place, having conducted performance projects that make use of evocative or historic settings. He also has a deep interest in pulling to the surface history that has been obscured over time. He grew up in Third Ward at a time when the neighborhood’s and city’s musical history were largely bulldozed to make way for something new.
Moran — a graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts — is particularly interested in “how jazz leaves a trace of itself behind beside the actual sound.
“So for me, place is extremely important. Houston still has the Eldorado Ballroom, the structure is still there, even if there aren’t many performances there. For me, that’s major, even if you don’t have somebody standing on Emancipation giving a 10-minute meditation on Duke Ellington visiting.”
‘The Giza pyramids of jazz’
Between 2015 and 2017, Moran worked with the local arts organization Da Camera on a “homecoming residency.” It featured regular performances and collaborations with artists around the city, in addition to research into the musical history of Houston, with an emphasis on Third Ward and Fourth Ward.
“Houston needs something,” he says. “Something needs to happen to preserve the history of jazz in the city. I don’t know yet what to do, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
When Harlem’s storied Lenox Lounge was demolished
three years ago, Moran went to the construction site and asked for a couple of bricks. Just last year, he presented a performance in New York that found his group, the Bandwagon, performing inside replicas of old, departed clubs like Slugs Saloon and Three Deuces that were epicenters for jumping nightlife decades earlier.
He commends Armstrong’s wife, Lucille, for preserving her husband’s legacy. She pushed for their home to be granted landmark status, and she left it to the city in her will, which also left the entirety of their belongings to the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.
Moran refers to the house as “really the Giza pyramids of jazz.”
His task will be to find the right pieces from that archive to further expand the frame around Armstrong’s narrative.
Literary critic Harold Bloom once suggested Armstrong and poet Walt Whitman were the two people who exhibited “the genius of this nation at its best.”
That’s the sort of presentation Moran will seek to assemble with “Here to Stay,” which will open in 2021. He seeks to create a broader frame for Armstrong or to dispense with the frame altogether. In doing so, a story again emerges about a remarkable life that spanned much of the 20th century; that moved from New Orleans to New York; that circled the world and entertained and informed.
“To let people know,” Moran says, “that wherever he’d go, something special was made there.”