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Direction: Sasha Jenkins | Playtime: 106 minutes | Year: 2022
Louis Armstrong was one of the most important and greatest musicians of the 20th century. The Black and the Blues of Louis Armstrong doesn’t just talk about his music, but more importantly about Armstrong as a cultural icon and his relationship to the American civil rights movement. Much use is made of his own recordings.
Not so much film images, but sound recordings. Later in life, Armstrong had a hobby of recording conversations in his home and then listening to them later when he was alone. The resulting link archive reveals a slightly different Armstrong than the one we know.
His typical happy laugh can be heard a lot, but also a lot of swearing that many people won’t associate with his broad smile, characteristic singing, and trumpet playing. In his private life, “assholes”, “fuckers” and the n-word were all there. His reputation as a jovial man who obediently takes on all the racist humiliations of white America turns out to be false.
Not only is this image belied by his private recordings, but also by the testimonies of Ossie Davis, among others, the actor who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. ‘Armstrong versus President Eisenhower in 1953 around the time black students first had to be admitted to a formerly segregated school in the southern United States, following a court ruling that school segregation was against the US Constitution.
His claim in an interview that he was responsible, along with his letter to Eisenhower, for deploying the National Guard to protect students from violent white protest is likely an overstatement. Such television interviews, from the last phase of his life, are, in addition to his own recordings, also an important source of sound material, on the basis of which the story of his life is told.
In addition to Armstrong himself, other people also have their say, especially early on, whether through old interviews or not, such as his fourth (and final) wife Lucille Armstrong, director Orson Welles and trumpeter and jazz expert Wynton Marsalis. His wife mainly talks about their personal life, famous people (including a number of other jazz musicians) mainly about his musical genius.
It’s a well-known fact in documentaries about now-deceased artists: many in the know who say he was a genius, forward-thinking and influential. Sometimes they even tell you why. If so, Armstrong was arguably the first soloist in popular music, innovating the entire jazz genre and laying the foundation for many musical developments of the 20th century.
It almost seems like his music is actually going to explain what made his music so special, but unfortunately it stays with sweeping statements and a claim that he was the first to combine American and African music. That’s too much credit for Armstrong. Is a lesson in musicology too much to ask of a biographical documentary under two hours?
Maybe, but it would still be nice to see an attempt beyond the dance on architecture. And because Armstrong laid the foundation for all jazz improvisation after him in the 1920s and 1930s, it’s not high math. More than a few minutes probably wouldn’t have been necessary.
All of this is, of course, visualized with extensive archival footage, TV interviews and film footage from Armstrong’s acting career. Additionally, the filmmakers were also inspired by his hobby of covering the walls of his house with a collage of newspaper clippings. The words he spoke are regularly represented with a similar animated collage, a nice visual find.
The Black and the Blues of Louis Armstrong doesn’t quite live up to the marketing promise that this is his story in his own words. The fact that his letters are read by the very different-sounding rapper Nas forms a further contrast to his own voice. In addition, the filmmakers fall into a few pitfalls of the biographical documentary. Nevertheless, the documentary partly presents a new image of the innovative musician and, from unpublished private recordings, places him in a historical context different from the usual image of Armstrong.
The Black and the Blues of Louis Armstrong can be seen at AppleTV+.
