Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues: a fine-grained portrait of a 20th-century trailblazer

About halfway through Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, actor Ossie Davis recalls his experience filming A Man Called Adam with Armstrong in 1966. Davis had grown up ridiculing Armstrong with his friends as a grinning, eye-rolling Uncle Tom. But during a break in filming Davis found him alone, “with the saddest, most heartbreaking expression” he’d ever seen – before Armstrong noticed Davis and instantaneously refitted his cheerful mask. Davis suddenly saw his father, his uncle, his brother in Armstrong, and the burden they all carried as Black men in America, and never saw Armstrong in the same way again.

If that’s a key note of director Sacha Jenkins’ take on Armstrong here – that the turbulent currents of race, culture, performance and personality met perhaps more in Armstrong than in any other twentieth-century figure – it’s one of many. Black & Blues also presents Armstrong in gloriously fine and unexpected detail: his deep faith in the importance of laxatives to good health, or the way, speaking offstage and off-duty, he dropped f-bombs with the same exuberant generosity with which he’d litter solos with aerobically acrobatic high Cs. I had no idea Armstrong was such a committed stoner, with several legal run-ins over his enthusiasm for what he refers to, cackling, as “Mary Wuana” and “more of a medicine”.

We also learn that Armstrong was an early adopter of home recording. He would sit, late in life, in his house in Queens, New York, recording his own memories on reel-to-reel, recording conversations with old friends and collaborators, or listening to old tapes late into the night. Jenkins builds his film around these tapes, giving it an intensely intimate feel. (Armstrong’s writings are voiced where needed by veteran rapper Nas – a nice touch by Jenkins given that Nas’s father, Olu Dara, is himself a cornet player active in the downtown scene of 70s and 80s New York.) Armstrong not only acted as his own audio archivist, he created collaged scrapbooks of press cuttings, a habit which Jenkins (a onetime graffiti zine editor) picks up and runs with, making Black & Blues itself an animated thatch of Scotch-taped text and photos.

Armstrong is given his due as an innovator throughout, with a persuasive case made that he invented scat vocalising but also did away with the affected parlour style of singing predominant in the 1920s and 30s. His rougher, more loosely phrased style brought singing closer to the conversational voice, clearing a path, one contributor argues, for R&B, soul, rock, and essentially “ninety years of American pop radio”. His playing was no less influential. He was the first jazz soloist of importance, claims Archie Shepp here, because he was the first to “break away from Western harmony” and introduce melodic and rhythmic elements from African music. “Stop it! You’re playing notes between flat and natural!” complains an elderly white pianist playing with Armstrong in New Orleans (1947). “It’s like a secret scale!” One recurrent motif in Black & Blues is the universal respect for what Armstrong achieved instrumentally, from self-conscious traditionalists like Wynton Marsalis as well as players who deliberately broke formal boundaries, such as Shepp or Miles Davis.

But Jenkins pays particularly close attention to Armstrong’s vexed relationship with America – or rather, the different Americas he was forced to live in and somehow find a way to reconcile: Black America, white America; cultural America, political America. For much of his career, Armstrong was welcomed and given star billing as a performer in white clubs and hotels that would refuse to serve him as a customer. Armstrong is clear that he loves his country and its people, but is also heard early in the film declaring, “I don’t have no flag, other than a Black flag.” Having begun his career in the 1920s, Armstrong, always willing to work around prejudice and persistently take the higher ground, was seen as meek and submissive by a younger generation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Perhaps nothing sums up the paradoxes of his situation better than when he was honoured as King of the Zulus one year at New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, a ceremonial role which entailed performing in a parade – in blackface. His version of the anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, is freighted with all this ambivalence: hurt, sorrow, pride and hope, long before Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary, feedback-ravaged take at Woodstock. Hearing Armstrong’s version, James Baldwin said it was the first time he’d ever liked the tune.

► Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.