‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’: A New Documentary Humanizes the Music Innovator

From the very first minutes of American filmmaker Sacha Jenkins’ documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, we get a searing, intimate glimpse into the mind of the jazz great. With the camera up close and capturing all the faces Armstrong pulls as he sings and plays trumpet, the song “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” highlights just how outspoken the artist was. “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case/’Cause I can’t hide what is in my face,” he sings at one point.

Through the course of an hour and 46 minutes, we hear narration from rapper Nas and American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, describing the life and times of Armstrong and how it was truly like no other. A civil rights activist and extraordinary music, the film digs into tape recordings by Armstrong and his wife Lucille Wilson and archival video footage from performances, speeches and appearances. Jenkins says in a video interview with Rolling Stone India that these recordings were so varied that it often indicated just how much codeswitching Armstrong and Wilson did as black Americans “to be respected.”

Jenkins says, “Lucille, for instance, when you see her speak in public, she’s very elegant. She’s very articulate, she’s very presentable, so to speak. But there are tapes with Lucille on them and Louis, where they are completely different people. They’re people from the hood; people who are using slang and talking in a particular way, and it just shows you how human these people were. What’s so great and revealing about these tapes, you learn that he was just a regular guy who had extraordinary gifts.”

From scat singing to using his distinctively gravelly voice on songs that rule the world even today, Jenkins hails Armstrong as a musical innovator who changed popular music. Undoubtedly, as Marsalis points out during the documentary, Armstrong was – and is – a singular figure in jazz history. Jenkins extends this by talking about how “you can’t really compare Louis Armstrong to anyone.” The director adds, “There is no one before him or after him […] You can’t say, ‘Who’s more important, Louis Armstrong or Kendrick Lamar?’ It’s like, apples and watermelons. It’s two different things. But I do know that there would not be a Kendrick Lamar had there not been the innovations of Louis Armstrong, that much I know.”

The documentary also takes viewers through the many globe-trotting tours of Armstrong, where he was a cultural ambassador of sorts for the U.S., even though, ironically, African-Americans were not respected or treated equally in his homeland. When asked about Armstrong’s travels, including his visit to India in the Sixties, Jenkins says, “What’s interesting about his global footprint was that he traveled the world. This is before the Backstreet Boys or Jay-Z. He was being booked around the world before the Beatles. He was going places where most African Americans and or most musicians hadn’t gone. So the idea of pre-internet, pre-television, being able to touch people, all real-time and firsthand around the world, I think is pretty impressive.”

Watch the trailer for ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ below. Stream on Apple TV+.