Music is my life : Louis Armstrong, autobiography, and American jazz /

This is not another biography of jazz icon Louis Armstrong (one can find many such biographies). Rather, Stein (American studies, Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, Germany) seeks to assess Armstrong's many and varied autobiographical "performances" across several media: written (two published autobiographical works, plus hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and thousands of personal letters), oral (Armstrong's archival materials include not only taped interviews but also hundreds of hours of taped private conversation), and visual (a photo-collage hobbyist, Armstrong created numerous collages of photographs, newspaper articles, magazine clippings, postcards, and other ephemera). These, along with Armstrong's best-known legacies--his celebrated musical recordings and appearances in movies and on stage--provide insight into this important cultural figure in 20th-century America. Stein analyzes Armstrong "as a transmedial artist" and maps "the intramedial effects of [his] autobiographical performances," arguing that the complexity of Armstrong's career as "read" through these various autobiographical lenses has not been properly or completely understood through previous biographical accounts. Additionally, Stein assesses the role that autobiography--defined more broadly across numerous media forms--can play in jazz studies. Meticulous citations and helpful appendixes enhance the strength of this important, though complex, work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. T. E. Buehrer Kenyon College