Jenkins, Sacha (1971- )

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    Louis Armstrong’s Last Laugh

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    Private recordings, heard in the new documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” add a further dimension to the artist.The tapes are thrilling, revelatory, wrenching: the warm-gravel voice of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most famous voice of the 20th century, speaking harsh truths about American racism, about the dehumanizing hatred he and millions of others endured in a world he still, to the end, insisted was wonderful. He tells the stories — of a fan declaring “I don’t like Negroes” to his face; of a gofer on a film set treating him with disrespect no white star would face — with fresh outrage and can-you-believe-this? weariness.He also tells them with his full humor and showmanship, his musicality clear in the rhythm of his swearing.The public can hear these stories, privately recorded by Armstrong as part of his own lifelong project of self-documentation, in the Sacha Jenkins documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” (streaming on Apple TV+). Often, Armstrong recalls getting the last laugh on those who disrespected him — he harangues that gofer, and the studio, too, telling both where to stick their movie.It’s no revelation that a Black man born less than 40 years after the abolition of slavery endured harrowing racism, or that stardom on par with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s offered him no exemption. Armstrong faced blowback in 1957 for speaking against discrimination, and donated to the Civil Rights movement. Usually, though, he avoided controversy.By the 1960s, Armstrong’s reticence — as well as that wide-grinning, eye-rolling performance style that echoes minstrelsy — inspired backlash, most painfully among younger jazz musicians who revered his recordings of the 1920s, the very headwaters of jazz.That backlash has been exhaustively hashed over ever since, with critics often dividing the Armstrong legacy in two. On the one hand: the young genius-artist-virtuoso, who perfected the arts of swing, scat singing, and improvisational solos, hitting trumpet notes so high they tickled God’s toes. On the other: the global entertainer with hits in six decades and a penchant for sentimental pop and discomfiting tunes like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”Well into this millennium, defenses of Armstrong’s later years have been, well, defensive. But Jenkins’s film, following the lead of Ricky Riccardi’s 2012 biography “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” draws deeply on the Armstrong archives to make an assertive argument, often in Armstrong’s own words, that the man called Pops was deeply committed to the cause of racial justice.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” Jenkins said in a Zoom interview. “America’s going through something. In many ways, things haven’t changed, and in many ways things have gone backward.”Armstrong at home. Apple TV+At the same time of the film’s release, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is preparing for its 20th anniversary and the opening this spring of its new Louis Armstrong Center. The museum’s executive director, Regina Bain, said that the center will exponentially increase the museum’s educational outreach, a core mission with roots in Armstrong’s own development — he was given his first formal musical training as an adolescent at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans. The center also will host concerts, exhibit the Armstrong archives and showcase its Armstrong Now program, which puts artists in dialogue with Armstrong’s legacy.Bain acknowledged that legacy’s complexity. “When you look at him,” she said by phone, “you should see what most people see: an icon and a musical genius with a gorgeous smile and an effusive personality full of joy. And you should also see the racial terror that he and the people around him went through, and affected his life and body, and that he was still able to move through.”“It’s extremely important to tell your story in a way that doesn’t have any tainting or tampering,” said Jeremy Pelt, one of today’s top trumpeters, composers and bandleaders, in a phone interview. He’s published two books of interviews with Black jazz musicians (“Griot” volumes 1 and 2) for just this reason. “To be able to expose yourself, and deal with what you’ve gone through — it’s essential and freeing, even in the last chorus of your life.”For 23 years, David Ostwald has led the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, playing weekly gigs at Birdland. Ostwald has long championed Armstrong as a pioneer of civil rights, making the case in a 1991 New York Times guest essay that Armstrong, as early as 1929, actually did address race in his music. His example: “Black & Blue,” the song on which Jenkins’s film title riffs. On it, Armstrong sings, “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide what is in my face.”Asked how he feels to see that argument going mainstream, Ostwald released a whoop. “Finally,” he said.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” said the documentary’s director, Sacha Jenkins.Apple TV+Ostwald credited Wynton Marsalis with having made Armstrong “OK again” in the jazz world. In the film, Marsalis describes growing up hating “with an unbelievable passion” the “Uncle Tomming” that Armstrong has often been accused of. But listening closely to Armstrong’s trumpet jolted Marsalis, the future artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has since championed Armstrong. In the documentary, he says that Armstrong “was trying to use his music to transform and reform and lead the country closer to his ideals.”Armstrong’s musical legacy has likewise been contested. His solos, especially from the 1920s, have long been celebrated — in one of Pelt’s “Griot” interviews, the saxophonist J.D. Allen says that for jazz players, “all roads lead back to Pops.” But Ostwald recalled being regarded as “weird” for playing traditional and old-time jazz in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “People were saying the music’s going to die, but I always felt that Armstrong was too powerful a force to ever go away, even if some people did misunderstand him.”Today, young musicians feel increasingly free to find inspiration throughout Armstrong’s career. Like most Juilliard jazz graduates, the up-and-coming trombonist, composer and bandleader Kalia Vandever studied Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings of the 1920s. But she also prizes his 1950s duets with Ella Fitzgerald: “I love the way that he transitions from singing into playing,” she said. “It’s seamless and sounds like one voice.” Listen to Vandever’s playing on her “Regrowth” album, and you may feel the connection, though the music sounds nothing like “Heebie Jeebies.”With each fresh look at Armstrong’s life and influence, perhaps the old artist/entertainer distinction is fading. In a video introduction shown before the deeply moving tour at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Bain offers, with welcome precision, a third way to think about Armstrong: as “one of the founding figures of jazz and America’s first Black popular music icon.” The message: He’s both. And both matter. More

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      ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Review: In His Own Words

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      Personal tapes and letters bring fresh insights into the jazz great as a musician and a Black man.In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”By foregrounding the gravel, grace and salty frankness of Armstrong’s voice, and mining an archival mother lode of audio and video interviews and clips, Jenkins delivers a bountiful portrait of one of the 20th century’s superstars — on Armstrong’s own terms.As welcome as this is, the documentary’s most affecting attribute may be a reckoning by several Black male artists with what Armstrong means to them. After all, his broad smile, his cameo roles in Hollywood films, his seeming muteness on racial issues had some critics, many of them younger, discounting him for his complicity, his “Uncle Tomming,” as fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis put it early in the film, confessing to how he once felt about Armstrong. With the aid of Marsalis, Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka (via audio clips) and the actor Ossie Davis, Jenkins recontextualizes the man.In a tribute from the “With Ossie & Ruby” television show, Davis shares an epiphany he had when he and Armstrong were on set for ‌the 1966 movie “A Man Called Adam.” During a break, he happened on Armstrong lost in a moment of somber repose, one that quickly gave way to his trademark grin. In that swing, Davis discovered a new kinship: “What I saw in that look shook me. It was my father, my uncle, myself down through the generations.”There is no paucity of expert witnesses who never had doubts about Armstrong’s depth, starting with Lucille Armstrong (whose story about their first house is a keeper). They also include the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the centennial edition of Armstrong’s memoir “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” and the composer Leonard Bernstein, who describes the melodies Armstrong plied as “looking for a lost note.” The poetry in that phrase seems to underscore Armstrong’s lineage as a descendant of the African Diaspora.Among the film’s ample pleasures is the only known footage of Armstrong in the recording studio. His head tilted back while scatting, he holds a handkerchief to mop his forehead. The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.Louis Armstrong’s Black & BluesRated R for Satchmo’s salty language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available on Apple TV+. More

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      in Movies

      Coming to Terms With the Legacy of Rick James

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      For a new documentary, the director and the star’s daughter examine both his pioneering work and his misogyny, as well as a sexual-assault conviction.It’s no question that Rick James is a legend for helping bring “punk-funk” to the mainstream with classics like “Mary Jane” and “Super Freak”; for breaking down the color barrier in rock ’n’ roll; and for confronting the whiteness of MTV in the ’80s. But how do you reckon with the man who is just as famous for committing sexual assault and perpetuating misogyny in the music industry? To Sacha Jenkins, director of the fascinating new documentary, “Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James,” the answer is complicated.“I think it’s undeniable that he was a brilliant, genius musician and artist, and I think it’s undeniable that he had demons, and it’s undeniable that he did some really horrible, unsavory things,” Jenkins said on a recent video call from Martha’s Vineyard. “So, how do you reconcile the two?”Jenkins talks about his work on the film with the same analytical approach he took to James’s life, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions about the person behind the larger-than-life image. There is certainly a plethora of biographical information for viewers to take into account in his documentary, debuting Friday on Showtime. “I just wanted to provide folks the tools to make their own decisions,” he added.Jenkins traces James’s story chronologically, from the outspoken musician’s childhood home in 1960s Buffalo, which the singer describes as having, “nice hills, ghetto, rats this big,” stretching out his arms in an archival interview seen in the film.“Bitchin’” details how James began selling drugs there, and how he was in and out of jail several times as a teenager until he joined the military. By 18, he had already experienced the trauma of being sexually abused as a child, getting “whoopings” from his mother and witnessing his father beating her.“I guess you can say, in a way, I was an abused child,” James recalls matter-of-factly in an interview. “But I had a lot of love in my family.”The director Sacha Jenkins, left, with James’s brother, Carmen Sims, center, and Gregory Cromwell, who worked security for James.Christine Shaw, via Mass AppealIt’s fair to suggest that James, who died at 56 in 2004, was already contending with demons he never truly confronted. Even his daughter, Ty James, who is interviewed in the documentary and is a producer, wasn’t privy to the details of his adolescent trauma. “It floated around a little bit, but it wasn’t something that I was totally abreast of,” she said on a separate video call.The world watched those demons play out in personal and professional affairs that were frustrating, toxic and, ultimately, devastating. In essence, he wanted freedom to be a devil-may-care rock star like Mick Jagger — with just as much access to drugs and women. After all, early in his career he performed with Levon Helm (before the Band), and formed the Mynah Birds with the rockers Nick St. Nicholas (who would go on to Steppenwolf) and Neil Young. Later, James battled Motown, because the label wanted to place him in the doo-wop genre, and white-owned networks like MTV because they refused to play music by Black artists.“We’re being sat in the back of the bus, television-style,” he tells a reporter. “This isn’t ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ There are Black people here, and we make music. Don’t we exist?”He had the loud, unapologetic flair of a Black man who grew up powerless, getting beat up by white kids on the block, and who proved revolutionary in another white space: the music industry. In 1981, he called out law enforcement brutality in the song “Mr. Policeman.” “I’m very vocal about injustice,” he says in archival footage. “I’ve never been one to bite my tongue and I never will.”So, in some ways, James was a hero. Even Jenkins, a musician himself, relates to him. “I was someone who liked rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, skateboarding — a broad range of things. And I was sort of an oddball,” recalled the director, known for “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men” and “Word Is Bond.” He continued, “But today, you can have rappers who are influenced by heavy metal, and no one’s going to say, ‘You’re a white boy or you’re a sellout.’ Rick was an early proponent of that.”But the empowerment he gained from his success also granted him excess and entitlement he’d never experienced growing up. “You mix all of those early learnings with an environment where no one tells you no, that math adds up to a bad equation,” Jenkins continued.This “bad equation” included, by the singer’s own estimate, a $6,000-to-$8,000 weekly cocaine addiction, a parade of women in and out of his home — some of whom, the film claims, he videotaped performing sexual acts at parties. “Daddy had his share of women, that’s for sure,” Ty James says in the film.She first met her father when she was 13 and she and her brother were sent to stay with him. She remembers “walking over naked girls at 7 in the morning.”James battled MTV when it refused to play music by Black artists.Mark Weiss, via ShowtimeTy James didn’t meet her father until she was sent to live with him at 13. ShowtimeThis was indicative of the era when rock stars hosting orgies in their mansions or using drugs on tour buses were normalized — even popularized. Jenkins argues that contextualizing the time period is just as critical to examining the musician’s legacy. “You can judge Rick James by today’s metrics, or you can try to be realistic about the times he was living in and what he was doing,” he said.By maintaining a bad-boy image, James and many others “would probably stand out like a sore thumb and be ostracized” today, Gail Mitchell, executive director of R&B and hip-hop at Billboard magazine, says in the film. Offstage, the budding musician Roxanne Shante recalls how he took her under his wing but also how he referred to a woman he was living with as “Bitch” so many times that Shante thought that was the woman’s name.Still, the songs he wrote and produced for female acts like Teena Marie and the Mary Jane Girls highlighted a surprising consciousness. “I knew I could write for girls,” James says in the film. “It was easy for me to write for them. I’ve been such an asshole to them that I could kind of reverse and know how they feel.”But in 1991, he was arrested for holding a 24-year-old woman hostage, tying her up, forcing her to perform sex acts and burning her with a crack cocaine pipe. James served five years in prison.To omit that period when considering his legacy is to avoid the whole truth and his humanity — both good and bad. That’s something even Ty James, a self-professed “daddy’s girl,” had to face before agreeing to be a part of “Bitchin’.”“I said, ‘You know what? I’m totally OK with that because my dad did his time for the things he got in trouble for,’” she said. “It goes to show that nobody’s perfect, especially dealing with the type of demons he dealt with. I’d already lived through it. Coming to terms with that was the hardest part.”As Jenkins said, every Rick James fan has wrestled with these contradictions at some point, including the director. “He processed his flaws in a way that created songs that still stand the test of time,” he reflected. “He made music reflective of his life experiences — being a Black man of a certain class in America. Is it misogynist? Sure. But has misogyny gone away suddenly? Has racism gone away suddenly? I don’t think so.” More