Satchmo's Archive

Perhaps you already know about this but I found some interesting stuff about Louis Armstrong's self-archiving on WFMU's 'Beware of the Blog':

[A] lesser-known fact about Armstrong is that, along with the medicinal supplements stowed in his carry-on, he toted reel-to-reel recording decks with him everywhere. With them he committed to tape concerts, conversations, his own playing and talking, audio flotsam from the Satchmo Universe. Even more impressive, Armstrong adorned the audio tape boxes with alluring and vivid Romare Bearden–esque collages layering photos, news clippings, concert programs, handwritten captions and other graphic elements. Armed with scotch tape and scissors, Armstrong spent countless hours entertaining himself, squirreled away in the den of his home in Corona, Queens, making visual music.

The collages are great - do click on the link and take a look :o)

tapes and time

Sorry - I'm in posting overdrive this morning but, the more I feel my way through it, the more the sense of past, present, and future seems important to me, so just a quick comment about the medium of the audio recording: I *think* that there is something very particular about the way audio material plays with our sense of time.

If you read a letter written by someone in the past, no doubt you do experience a particular kind of connection based on the fact that that person's hands touched this paper, formed these letters, etc. But there is something much more immediate about hearing a voice - if the quality of the recording is good enough, the person could actually be in the room with you, whereas the letter is a relic, something left behind rather than an index of the person's presence. (In fact, we normally write letters because we are *not* physically present in the same space at the same time.) So an audio recording seems to make the past available to us in a very direct way, as if we were allowed to be present in the past for a moment, and it is the fact that it only *seems* to do this that makes the experience of listening to tapes potentially so upsetting.

Actually, as I write this, I'm becoming less and less convinced by what I'm writing. I often keep cards that people have sent me - I had a clear-out a while ago but, even so, they still go back a few years - and going through them can be quite a fraught experience because, in each case, I imagine the sender choosing that particular card for me, looking at the others in the rack, and picking out this one and not any of the others. So maybe the cards give me the sense of being present in the past for a moment too.

In short, I'm trying to work out whether there is something distinctive about the recorded voice in terms of the way it conjures up the past, but it's eluding me for the moment...

shop talk

I have a recording my father made of a visit I made on 14 Sept 1996 to my parent's house in Westchester, about an hour north of NYC. My guess is that this visit would have been the first time I had seen them in several months, because I had been traveling all that summer. The full recording is about 90 minutes long: I tell many stories about my travels; he talks extensively about Mozart at one point; but in a way this one bit is perhaps the most interesting exchange: we are talking about HIS composition teacher...

I don't think there's anything on this tape I'm inspired to turn into music. on the other hand, it's psychologically quite amazing to me: the layers to everything are sort of scary. is that totally blatantly obvious, I wonder? I feel as if I can hear all the complexity of the three relationships embedded in the sound of our voices...

anyway, I'm hoping I can find the 60's dinner table tape before too long. god knows what THAT's going to feel like to listen to!!!

family voices

written on 11 march 09:

I've started transferring the cassettes I have of my family. it's not the easiest thing: hearing the voices of dead loved ones is strange and oddly discomfiting. instead of feeling closer to them by hearing their voices, I feel forced to face how far away they really are. so I've started with the tapes I know to be less interesting and therefore less fraught: my mother practicing recitation of various monologues. I'll keep you posted on how this goes...

More on the great-grandparents

Just a fragment from 16 March, 2009:

I've been thinking of you listening to all those tapes again and I can imagine how difficult it must be. I hope that you're finding it bearable. I spoke to Gareth and Traci again about their tape of Traci's great-grandparents and I think listening to it affected them more than they'd thought it might. It's not really that Traci had much recollection of her great-grandparents. It's more that she thought she knew their story and then, when she listened to the tape, realised that there were all sorts of details that she hadn't remembered, or perhaps hadn't taken much notice of when she was younger. I guess it can almost be a kind of reproach to realise that the story was there all the time but that one never really listened to it.

Traci's great-grandparents

This is what I wrote on 4 March about Traci's Great-Grandparents and about my parents' recording of me as a child:

Just a quick line to tell you about an exile tape that I've located. I was talking about the project with one of the people I work with - his name is Gareth Walker - and he said that his wife, Traci, has a tape of her great-grandfather talking about his own journey from Eastern Europe to the US, I think in the early years of the 20th century. Traci's mother made the tape some years ago precisely so that the story wouldn't be lost. The evening after we talked, Gareth asked Traci if she'd be willing for us to listen to the material and perhaps use it, and she said yes, completely happy.

Gareth and Traci both work on phonetics, so they're very used to audio technology and will digitise the tape themselves and let us have a CD. (They're perfectly happy for us to use the actual tape later on, if you decided you liked it and wanted to clean up the sound quality or anything like that.)

I've also been listening to the stuff that my Mum and Dad dug up last time I went over. I have to say that I haven't really hit anything very promising yet. There's a tape of me as a child - it's a sort of monologue with real words in it but it doesn't make much sense. Actually, I think the idea was that I was pretending to 'speak French' but, of course, it's nonsense with a few English words thrown in. Maybe that *is* a kind of exile tape? There's really very little with my parents' voices. I think they utter some words of encouragement on the 'French' tape but it's difficult to hear. (Actually, as I write about that recording, it begins to sound more interesting than I thought it was when I first listened to it...)

Lost tapes!

And this is what I wrote on 9 February, 2009, about the loss of Steve's tapes:

Steve has now spoken to his mother about the cassettes and I'm afraid it's not good news. She had them all until her own mother became ill a couple of years ago and went into residential care, at which point they had to clear a lot of stuff out and the tapes were thrown away. It's strange - I keep fretting about it as if it was something of mine that had gone into the trash!

I'm not sure what I think about it really. I'm quite intrigued by the idea of a lost archive. I mean, the truth of it is that people often do look for reminders of the past only to find that they were thrown away at a time when no one thought they could possibly be of any interest. (I've thrown away letters that I now wish I'd kept!) And I've been wondering if it might be possible to involve some of the family in reflecting on the messages they sent each other and, especially on the way the tapes became the focus of family meetings - sort of create a new text by asking them to talk about old ones.

I don't know what you think about this? As I say, the *truth* of it appeals to me - moving out from ourselves and accepting what there actually is (or isn't). On the other hand, it could result in quite heterogeneous material.

I've also asked my own parents whether they have recordings of themselves and my dad has promised to have a look. I'm optimistic that there will be something, although I'm not sure what they will be like. I'm going to see them, not this weekend but the one after, so it might be possible to listen to some of it then.

Steve's tapes

In the interests of grouping our records together, this is what I wrote on 7 February, 2009, about Steve's relatives in Canada and the tapes that they used to send to one another:

I'll be in touch again very soon but, in the meantime, I just wanted to tell youwhat happened when i asked Steve the 'do you have a relative who grew up in another country' question. After a bit of thought, he said that, yes, he has relatives who emigrated to Canada in (I think) the late 60s or early 70s and their children (now in their early 40s) are quite clearly Canadian rather than English. What is a bit spooky is what he said when i asked about audiorecordings. I'd thought that might be quite a long shot but, on the contrary,he said that, when he was a child, the Canadian relatives used to record messages on audio cassettes and send them to the family in England instead of letters. The English relatives would all get together to listen to the cassettes - that struck me as very typical of Steve's family! - and make a similar recording to send back. Apparently the replies sometimes featured Steve and his cousin, Sally, playing duets on the recorder :o) Steve doesn't know if any of the cassettes survive now but he reckons that, if anyone has hung onto them, it will be his mother and he's going to ask her about it when he sees her this evening. I thought that was amazing - not only did they make recordings but it sounds as if they were the main way that the two parts of the family sent news to each other.