Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues: A Fresh Look at Satchmo from His Home Tapes

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Whether you find Sacha Jenkins’ documentary, Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues — now streaming on Apple TV + — a revelation or just a happy reminder will depend on how much you know about the legendary jazz musician going in.

If you’re old enough, you will at least remember Armstrong from television variety shows of the 60s, in his fifth decade as an entertainer, his teeth-baring grin, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, with his cheeks bulging as he blew his trumpet.

Younger people will have heard his raspy singing on the ubiquitous “It’s a Wonderful World” or “La Vie en Rose” in Wall-E. If you are a jazz fan, you know Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong is considered a giant, a foundational figure in jazz and the art of improvisation, though “cool” musicians from the post-war era rejected his mugging and ingratiating performances.

Armstrong, who died of a heart attack in 1971 at 69, left a vast archive of film and television clips, writings and a memoir, enough material to make a Ken Burns-style series. But director Jenkins has taken a different tack, boiling it down to a tidy 104 minutes, spiced with extensive excerpts from Armstrong’s reel-to-reel tape recordings at his home study in Queens, New York.

Like his contemporary Richard Nixon, Armstrong really liked to record conversations, which offer some fascinating and humorous insights into his private life. The liveliest revelation is that the man widely thought of as the ambassador of joy and racial harmony used words like “c**ksucker and motherf**ker when talking about racists, which is kind of satisfying to hear. Also, he was enthusiastic about laxatives and pot.

Jenkins, who has previously made films on Rick James and Wu-Tang Clan, weaves these tapes with excerpts from Armstrong’s memoir, read off-screen by the rapper Nas. (Read our interview with Jenkins here).

Like a jazz solo, Jenkins films plays around the melody rather than sticking to conventional chronological biography and talking heads, and gathering episodes around certain subjects, from musical influence to politics and personal style. Between television interviews with Orson Welles, David Frost and Dick Cavett, there’s a lot of off-camera commentary in contemporary and archival sound bites.

We get cultural context from jazz critics Leonard Feather and Dan Morgenstern, responses to Armstrong’s legacy from fellow Black artists such as Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka and the actor Ossie Davis. Closer to home, we also hear from Armstrong’s second wife, the musician Liz Hardin, who pushed him into a starring role, as well as his fourth and last wife, Lucille Armstrong.

Off-screen, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis admits he wasn’t initially an Armstrong fan. As a student, Marsalis was one of those young musicians who were repelled by Armstrong’s “Uncle Tomming.” But he had his head turned around when his father Ellis sent him a recording of Armstrong’s to study, and he realized how staggeringly difficult Armstrong’s music was to master, with a subsequent appreciation of how difficult it was to be Louis Armstrong.

The question of Armstrong’s commitment to civil rights is treated even-handedly. Privately, Armstrong expressed his bitterness about playing “99 million hotels I couldn’t stay at,” but he elected not to join Civil Rights marches and usually avoided talking about politics.

One prominent exception was an interview in 1957 when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower as “two faced” with “no guts” for initially failing to end segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas When the school was opened to Black students, Armstrong sent Eisenhower a congratulatory telegram.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

Louis Armstrong: Black and Blues. Directed by Sacha Jenkins, with Louis Armstrong, Lucille Armstrong, Dick Cavett and Wynton Marsalis. Now available on Apple TV+.