There are great artists. Then there are artists of such enormous power that they literally transform the world. I’m thinking of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Dostoevsky, Picasso. Louis Armstrong is flying on the Olympian plane. Yet he’s the rare example of an artist whose very fame, image, and media mythology can actually obscure his revolutionary grandeur as a creator. When he first came to prominence, in the ’20s and early ’30s, you heard the Armstrong revolution in every note he played or sang. He blasted the trumpet into an incandescent upper register, hitting high Cs audiences would talk about for days, yet it’s not as if this was some feat of musical mountain-climbing. He was in his own space, playing from the skies. Each note vibrated like a glowing pearl lit from within. Nobody had ever sounded as good as that. CommandAs such.
“Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” directed by Sacha Jenkins, is a captivating documentary that does justice to the monumental nature of Louis Armstrong’s genius, and one of the film’s tantalizing paradoxes is that even as Armstrong remains a holy 20th-century icon, the film is likely to open many viewers’ eyes — for the first time — to who he really was.
A clip of Artie Shaw, a late saxophonist and legend, saying: “I would say jazz almost stems from Louis Armstrong.”Although Armstrong is the most important jazz innovator, his contribution to jazz is far greater than that. Armstrong was the first to understand the concept of improvisation. And that was more than a musical invention — it was a personal/existential one, an analog for the 20th-century impulse of forging one’s destiny moment by moment. Armstrong was the inventor of the Systemthe ability to use his musical imagination to create music.
This was the foundation of not just jazz, but also rock. ‘n’ roll. If Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis took the blues and injected it with an electrified spirit that made it move and bounce and explode, Armstrong showed them the way by beating them to it — his music was the blues reconfigured into a complex free-form joy. Archie Shepp, a jazz legend describes Armstrong as “an extraordinary musician.” “the first soloist to break away from Western harmony, and to reintroduce the melodic and rhythmic elements of African music.”Armstrong was the driver of the locomotive and this was the major musical paradigm shift of 20th century. It’s no wonder that he broke through so many barriers with the train. He was the first Black performer in a club, ballroom, or radio station to open one. He also became the first Black movie actor to have his title above the title.
We hear the good story of Armstrong’s invention for scat-singing in the documentary. It was during a 1926 recording session. “Heebie Jeebies.”Armstrong had dropped his lyric sheets on the ground and lost it, but OKeh records president, who was seated at the booth, ordered Armstrong to keep singing. Armstrong thought back to his childhood, when he sang on New Orleans streets to earn money and made up melodies using no words. Armstrong filled that studio space with his own music, and it was stunning. (It was also the prototype for every guitar solo you’ve ever heard.)
Armstrong explained, however, that making something from nothing was an art made out of necessity. On “The Mike Douglas Show” in the ’60s, he recalls how as a kid he would go to the market and buy a bundle of fish heads wrapped in newspaper; this was the stuff the fish mongers were throwing away, so it cost pennies. He would take it home, where his mother slow-cooked the fish heads with stewed tomatoes, which made for a succulent feast — and then he took his sandwiches to school the next day, and every kid wanted a bite.
The movie vividly captures Armstrong’s youth, how he discovered the cornet while serving an 18-month detention in the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, and how he gravitated to the Storyville red-light district (he worked in brothels there), which was the down-and-dirty musical heart of New Orleans. He idolized Joe “King”Oliver and by the age of his 20s, he was playing with Oliver. Armstrong was told to stand at 15 feet from the stage in Chicago. Otherwise he’d overpower Oliver, who didn’t take long to figure out that his protégé was a greater player than he was.
Wynton Marsalis, a sly bard of Armstrong appreciation in Ken Burns’ “Jazz,” is interviewed extensively here as well, and Marsalis talks about how when he was growing up he didn’t appreciate Armstrong, because he couldn’t get past his image. “In New Orleans,”Marsalis recalls “so much of what we call Uncle Tommin’ went on, playing Dixie and shufflin’. In my time I hated that with unbelievable passion.”His father then sent Armstrong a tape, and after Armstrong had left New Orleans, he said. “Why don’t you learn one of these Pops solos?” Marsalis couldn’t play it; the endurance required was too great — the power to stay in the upper register, and the liquid force of those notes. That’s when he saw the virtuosity. It was a vision.
One of the greatest revelations was “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” is that it deals with how much of Armstrong’s happy public image was a mask of survival. We see many clips of Armstrong on talk shows, where he can be obsequious (and also, if you really listen to him, quietly aggressive), and there’s a startling monologue by Ossie Davis, who like Wynton Marsalis is merciless about his original feelings toward Armstrong. “We knew he could play the horn,”Davis says “but that didn’t save him from our malice and our ridicule. Everywhere we looked, there would be old Louis, sweat poppin’, eyes buggin’, mouth wide open, grinnin’ oh my lord from ear to ear. Doin’ his thing for the white man.” Davis didn’t change that opinion until 1966, when he was working with Armstrong and Cicely Tyson on the movie “A Man Called Adam,”Armstrong was on an empty set, and Davis saw him one day. Armstrong was sitting alone, and Davis noticed a look that was so haunted and stone-cold it shaken him. He saw that “beneath that gravel voice and that shuffle, under all that mouth with more teeth than a piano had keys, was a horn that could kill a man.”
We are able to see Armstrong’s side thanks to Jenkins’ archival research. This film includes audiotape recordings of Armstrong speaking in private. He seems different. He curses people with a blue streak. “motherfucker,”He throws the N word around in a way which allows you to feel its ungodly sting as well as his transcendence. Then he shows you anger and calculation below the image. Armstrong had to navigate the showbiz world, which was dangerous in its exploitation, when he discovered that his manager was making 20,000 Pounds per week from him while he was only getting 100 Pounds. We hear a tape of Armstrong recalling his reaction to this, and it’s shocking in its lethal defiance. Armstrong then met Joe Glaser who was powerful and Mobbed him up, and became his manager. Armstrong made the best of a terrible situation. He was also a genius at navigation.
“Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” could have delved more richly into Armstrong’s musical development. It gives you a strong taste of his early days, but then it kind of leaps forward to the ’50s and ’60s, when he was already an elder statesman of jazz. He literally blew his lips out leaving scars on his lips. The movie portrays a terrifying portrait of Jim Crow America and the compassion and caution it instilled in him. (He bought 300 bags of coal to help the poor his first time in Baltimore. And though he never became a Civil Rights activist, in 1957 he denounced President Eisenhower — and then sent him a wire asking if Eisenhower would join him to enter Central High in Little Rock during that cataclysmic integration war. Of course, it never happened. Louis Armstrong was aware that his protest was in every note he played. America, the country he was raised in, relied on technology and ideology. Armstrong provided the musical pulse of liberty.