With “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” a documentary now streaming at AppleTVPlus and in select theaters, director Sacha Jenkins addresses the question—who was Louis, really?
Armstrong, the greatest New Orleans trumpeter of them all, maybe the greatest American musician of all time, called that place home from 1943 until his death in 1971. Back then, Ruffins told me, “In the Lower Ninth Ward, where I grew up, we were listening to the Commodores and Michael Jackson. When I first heard Armstrong on the radio, I was a teenager already. Still, I didn’t know who he really was.
With his film, Jenkins confronts the complexities involved in understanding Armstrong’s identity, and the misunderstandings surrounding it. Here, the story leans heavily on archives so voluminous that, beginning next spring, they will be stored in a newacross the street from the Queens house. Much of the archival material came from the trumpeter himself.
As a teenager, Jenkins founded a ’zine devoted to graffiti art. Here, he draws on the visual aesthetic offor his mixtapes. Words , drawn from interviews and correspondence, move across the screen like cut-and-paste elements; in some ways, the entire film is like a collage, meant less to flesh out biographical details than to explore conflicting feelings and pervasive tensions. At the start, the bell of Armstrong’s trumpet obscures his face entirely.
When Jenkins was just 5 or 6, before he knew anything about Armstrong, he was transfixed, he told me, bymagazine. “He was playing and looking directly into the camera as if talking to you with his instrument,” Jenkins recalled for me. “There was something about the look in his eye and the strength of his gaze that made me feel something. I didn’t know what it was.”
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