Regina Bain, govt director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, leads a ribbon-cutting for the brand-new Louis Armstrong Center on June 29 in Queens, New York.

Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

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Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

Regina Bain, govt director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, leads a ribbon-cutting for the brand-new Louis Armstrong Center on June 29 in Queens, New York.

Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

Louis Armstrong was already a worldwide star — a seasoned headliner with a Hollywood profile — when his spouse, Lucille, shocked him with the acquisition of a modest home in Corona, Queens, in 1943. He bought his first glimpse of the place contemporary off tour, rolling up in a taxicab. (He invited the cab driver to come back in and test it out with him.) “The more Lucille showed me around the house the more thrill’d I got,” Armstrong later wrote. “I felt very grand over it all.”

For the remainder of his life, Armstrong crammed the home together with his presence, working towards his horn and entertaining mates. He additionally presided over a world of his personal making: do-it-yourself tape recordings, scrapbook photograph collages, an outpouring of phrases both clattered on a typewriter or scrawled in a looping longhand. After he died in 1971, Lucille started to ascertain this mass of fabric as an archive, planning for its preservation.

The Louis Armstrong Archive, the world’s largest for any single jazz musician, was established at Queens College in 1991. A dozen years later, the brick-faced residence, already a registered landmark, opened to the general public because the Louis Armstrong House Museum — a lovingly tended time capsule, and a humble however hallowed website of pilgrimage for followers from around the globe.

Now it has a gleaming new neighbor simply throughout the road: the Louis Armstrong Center, a $26 million facility that may vastly broaden entry to the museum and home the 60,000 gadgets within the archive, bringing them again to the block. At the official ribbon-cutting final week, a brass band led a New Orleans second line to the brand new constructing. Then got here a ceremonial fanfare performed by a choir of trumpeters, together with Jon Faddis and Bria Skonberg. Inside, visitors perused an interactive digital kiosk and several other show circumstances filled with artifacts, like Armstrong’s trumpet, just a few of his mixed-media collages, and two of his passports.

Patrons browse the show circumstances on the new Armstrong Center, that includes choices from the artist’s huge archive.

Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

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Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

“We’ve had people from around the world come here,” Armstrong biographer Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s Director of Research Collections, tells NPR. “They know about the house. They know about the museum. They’ve taken the tour. They’ve been to Corona. They don’t quite know the archival side: They’ve never seen the collages, they’ve never heard the tapes. And so the house will always be the gem, the jewel. That’ll still be number one. But now we have the space that we can properly show the archives.”

The Louis Armstrong Center was a brainchild of Michael Cogswell, the founding Executive Director of the House Museum, who died in 2020. Among its steadfast champions was the museum’s former Board chair, philanthropist Jerome Chazen, who died last year. That their dream lastly got here to fruition, after greater than 20 years of hopeful planning, is a testomony to the energy of that imaginative and prescient — and the efforts of those that carried it ahead. “We’re thankful for the community that raised us up,” says Regina Bain, Executive Director of the House Museum. “It’s all in the spirit of Louis and Lucille — because they made such an impact on this community, and on this block, that people wanted to fight for this space.”

The inaugural exhibition on the Louis Armstrong Center was curated by pianist Jason Moran, who relished the prospect to dive into the gathering and floor new insights. “It’s ultra-important,” he says of the archive’s new residence, “especially for Black people who create sound — our thing is already kind of in the atmosphere, right? So to have something so solid, which I think is Armstrong’s vision. He says, ‘No, I need solid material. I’ve got to have a photograph. I’ve got to have my own recordings that I make. I’ve got to decorate them myself.’ “

Moran titled the exhibition “Here to Stay,” borrowing a lyric from one of many George and Ira Gershwin songs that Armstrong redrew with his interpretation. The phrase is plain-spoken however highly effective, like Armstrong’s music — and on his block in Corona in 2023, it carries a hoop of reality.

Jason Moran speaks on the opening of the Louis Armstrong Center. The pianist curated the museum’s inaugural exhibition.

Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum

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Bowery Image Group/Andrew Kelly for Louis Armstrong House Museum