October 31st, 2010: Day Three in the City

Sunday was a lazy day. By my standards, that meant getting up at 8 am instead of 6 am. The air was cold, crisp, and comfortable. At around noon I headed to Queens to the Louis Armstrong house museum, hoping to catch the one o’clock tour.

I got there past 1pm but luckily I was herded into the house before the official start time of the next tour. The Armstrong house is small and modest and there isn’t that much to see. The marble bathtubs and the gold plated fixtures give the house a touch of old, musty decadence. The kitchen, with its wall-to-ceiling blue formica cabinets and its high-tech (for their time) appliances has a Retro/Jetson quality; back to the future, I guess. As I went from room to room, I could not help but think of the Armstrongs as precursors of The Jeffersons, that caricature of the black, nouveau middle-class of the 1980s, that was supposed to represent the ironic side of black upward mobility.

Alan, the tour guide, was quite animated and passionate about Armstrong. There was not a hint of irony to anything he said, only unabashed admiration. Every word he uttered was complimentary and enthusiastic. He looked silly is his Halloween costume—he was dressed in black, head to toe, wearing dark glasses in the shape of quarter notes, and had a box over his head with holes on the sides for his arms with the introductory bars to West End Blues pasted to the box, front and back. He was very well-informed about Armstrong’s life and career, and had an interesting point of view about Satchmo’s significance, not just to jazz, but to American culture in general.

Armstrong grew up dirt poor in New Orleans but was never spoiled by fame and wealth. He remained consistently humble and unassuming. He overcame poverty but some of the marks of poverty and deprivation could be detected at the house: in his writing (chock full of misspellings and grammatical errors), in the gaudiness of the house décor (silver wall paper that made one room look like it was wrapped in tin foil), and in his vulgarity (a glass in his den was illustrated in Kama Sutra fashion; the copulating figures reminded me of the silver silhouettes of naked women truckers put in the mud flaps of their vehicles).

Alan found it charming that at dinner with the Queen of England Armstrong passed laxatives around the table. I think he assumed that this behavior was motivated by a democratic, irreverent impulse. My sense is that this was simply uncouth behavior. I don’t think that Armstrong was engaging in anti-monarchic disrespect given his firm conviction that laxatives were a therapeutic necessity. With exuberant glee, the tour guide also mentioned a postcard that featured Armstrong sitting on a toilet recommending laxatives as the best way to “leave your troubles behind.” I thought, “Oh dear, where’s the pride in displaying yourself to the world sitting on the toilet?” Bathroom humor is a sign of crudeness and Armstrong was not above it. I did enjoy and appreciate the story about his audience with the Pope. When his Divine Highness asked Armstrong whether he and Lucille had any children, Satchmo replied: “No, but we are working on it.” I’m not sure whether Armstrong intended to be irreverent or not. Probably he did not. The remark may have been completely innocent. I can only imagine what the Pope must have thought about Armstrong’s veiled sexual joke.

Some considered Armstrong an Uncle Tom. But he was a strong advocate and supporter of civil rights. He was also a considerate and generous neighbor. In one of the many letters he wrote during his residence in Queens, he expresses his great appreciation for his fellow residents and is grateful for their concern about his health. He notes how some would call the house to inquire about his well-being if they didn’t hear him practicing his trumpet. He was crazy about kids and the most touching memento in the house is the photo of Armstrong sitting on his stoop, trumpet to his lips, blowing wide-eyed, a small kid on his lap, another sitting on the step right above his, and a third blowing on a toy cornet looking at him. It is as if Satchmo was looking in a mirror at his own image as a little boy in New Orleans. I asked our guide if the trumpet boy had become a musician and he said no. He did return to the house as an adult and was very moved when he saw the photograph.

When Armstrong moved to Corona, there were a handful of blacks in his neighborhood. Now it is a Latino enclave. As I walked towards the house on 103rd street, the first establishment I noticed was the Cibao Express-Cibao Travel, a travel agency. I went by a Colombian bakery next to a Mexican café, by the Rancho Latino, which offered “Dominican and international food;” I walked in front of the Amazonas Café and a few doors down I noticed Maxim Restaurant, which offered Chinese and Mexican food; further along was the “99 Cents Latino Store” located next to the Great China restaurant where customers could enjoy “Chinese and American food.” The throng coming out of the church on 37th Avenue, was 100% Latino. And just before hitting 107th Street, on 37th Avenue, I saw the driver of Mudanzas Papi trying to park his moving van. Queens is only 25% Latino but Armstrong’s neighborhood felt 90%.

Alan mentioned that the news of Hello Dolly topping the charts in 1964, displacing Can’t Buy me Love by the Beatles, caught Armstrong in Puerto Rico. This was my cue to identify myself as Boricua. After the tour, as I scanned the gift shop, Alan said that there was another Puerto Rican in the house and introduced me to Jendar Morales, a museum staff who happened to be the daughter of Dario Morales, a trumpet player with Roberto Roena. I bought the complete Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings CD, and after checking with Jendar about the quality of the food at the Dominican restaurant across the street from the museum, I visited Angelita’s, where I swallowed a plate of rice and beans with a mix of cod fish and scrambled eggs. I was in a hurry. Why is it that the signature salad in Latino restaurants is iceberg lettuce and tomatoes?

From Queens I raced to El Museo del Barrio to catch Bongo Passion, a performance of contemporary Puerto Rican classical music by musicians from the Puerto Rico Conservatory, sponsored by La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña and the Spanish Consulate in New York. The program began with a really lame composition for bongó and concluded with a piece for clarinet and piano; this piece was bracketed by a boogie-woogie ostinato on the piano. A series of very abstract pieces were played, which prompted the lead musician to explain, rather defensively, that Puerto Rican music was not just Salsa, not just Bomba y Plena, and that if the audience thought that what they had heard was “shocking,” there was no need to worry, there was at least one piece in the program that had a melody. Then the ensemble proceeded to play what sounded like Muzak to me.

Bongo Passion was weird and I did not appreciate or enjoy it. I think nobody did. At one point I caught the executive director of the sponsoring organization yawning quite vigorously. In the end, everybody was polite to the musicians. The audience made an effort to keep the clapping going while all the performers and sponsors lined up on stage for a bow, but the latter were all still up there way after the clapping died out. That was embarrassing. You always want to be able to exit the stage before the ovation is over. During the performance an older woman that was sitting behind me, who did not seem to have any filters, kept muttering to her son: “I thought this was going to be a play” and “this is boring, I could swear you said it was going to be a play.” The son shushed her and, in a tone that suggested embarrassment, told her several times, “No Mami, it’s a concert not a play.” He probably said to her that some musicians were going to play at El Museo and that’s probably the only word she heard. I wondered if she was demented.

The concert at El Museo ended at 6pm. This gave me only a two-hour window to get back downtown, rest for a bit, and then head out to the 8pm show at the Nuyorican Poets Café by Bobby Sanabria and his student big band. I walked the stretch from the hotel to the Café, from 15th and Irving Place down to 3rd street between Avenue B and C. As I hit 3rd St. and Avenue B, I saw a two-legged rabbit carrying a trumpet case and thought, “That must be one of Bobby’s students.” At the Café I had the fortune of bumping into my colleague and fellow Salsaphile, Xavier Totti, his wife Teresa, and Bobby’s wife, Elena Martínez. Just as I was about to take my seat, who walks in but Candido Camero, assisted by his wife; they sat next to me.

The band was clad in Halloween costumes: the rabbit was supposed to be Donnie Darko; the piano player was, according to Sanabria, a “Jewban,” that is, a Cuban Jew; the bass player was a Skipper; another trumpet player simply had a head band that said “bad hair day;” one trombone player was a buff Spiderman and the lead tenor sax was a Franciscan Monk. The conga player had no costume and the conga was barely heard until Candido took over the quinto. The student who was playing clave, was baptized by Sanabria “The Ambiguous Clave Player,” because of his lack of clave verve, I imagine.

As I was enjoying my intermittent conversations with Xavier and Elena, Bobby Sanabria made his entrance wearing a red hat and a black cape, walking on one leg, assisted by a cane, and uttering guttural sounds; he was supposed to be Eleguá but he looked more like Zorro. Sanabria showered the audience with candy. This reminded me of the Q&A after his presentation on the life and career of Tito Puente in Albany, when he threw Vic Firth promotional sticks to audience members who asked questions. Once again I thought: “Somebody is going to get hit in the face,” but this time by a Hershey bar or a bag of Skittles. Mercifully, no one was hurt and we all enjoyed the chocolate.

Then the Café exploded. Sanabria drove those kids like a mad plantation foreman, whipping them into a tsunami of expression and improvisation. At one point he beckoned the one female trumpet player front stage; she looked dumbfounded. She was this tiny girl and Sanabria made her dance like a trompo, except that the poor woman did not know how to dance so le salió batata. On the other hand, when she took a solo, boy, could she play. The show was amazing: the technical skill and rich improvisational vocabulary of those kids was vast. One trombone player was a colleague of Sanabria so his proficiency was not surprising. The “ambiguous” clave player was metronomical but did not have an opportunity to shine; that’s the irony of the clave: it is key but no one leaves a performance saying, in awe, “Wow, that was some clave player!”

I forget what time it was when the show concluded. I said goodbye to Xavier, Teresa, and Elena and as I walked the fifteen or sixteen blocks between the Café and my hotel, I hummed the tune that began to play at the Café immediately after the band finished its set. As I walked past revellers and all kinds of restaurants, I kept thinking of a dry martini and Oaxacan tacos with lemon spiced grasshoppers (chapulines). That’s what I ate at the Global Galaxy Eatery, on 15th and Irving Place, across the street from the Seafarers International House, the place I stayed, on this third day.