Louis Armstrong: Black & Blues, TV review — how the virtuoso musician changed popular music

Everyone knows Louis Armstrong’s name: he is an icon of American popular music. But his accomplishments are fading from the contemporary mind. His broad smile lingers on, so too his wonderful deep-trawling voice and his blaring trumpet tone. The strains of a sentimental song are engraved on the collective memory, his 1967 version of “What a Wonderful World”. But the extent to which he revolutionised jazz and pop has receded into the background, like a smudgy mountain range in the distance.

Louis Armstrong: Black & Blues seeks to reintroduce him to a modern audience. The Apple TV Plus documentary has been directed by Sacha Jenkins, who has previously helmed television documentaries about rap group the Wu-Tang Clan (Of Mics and Men) and the history of race in the US (Everything’s Gonna Be All White). The New York rap grandee Nas voices extracts from Armstrong’s letters in the film, an inspired move linking different eras of black American vocalism. We hear a lot of Armstrong’s speaking tones too, raspy yet elastic, turning words like “rudimentals” into rumbling musical phrases.

“He could do with his voice what he could do with his horn,” says the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, one of the film’s voiceover commentators. He is referring to scatting, the nonsense language that turns singers into musical instruments. Armstrong did not invent scatting, as the documentary implies, but he pioneered it with songs such as his 1926 hit “Heebie Jeebies”. He was that rarest of all-rounders, perhaps unique, a virtuoso instrumentalist and bandleader who was also a superb singer. The roles infused each other. He treated his trumpet as though it were the lead singer in a piece of music, embarking on dizzying patterns of high notes that other musicians could not reach. As the first great jazz soloist, he brought a fundamental change to the sound of popular music.

Louis Armstrong: Black & Blues dashes through these tumultuous 1920s innovations with a scattering of superlatives and an eye on the clock. It is more interested in Armstrong as a prominent black American in a racist nation.

In one interpretation — certainly not the film’s — he could be seen as an object lesson in the American dream. He was born in New Orleans in 1901 in the direst poverty and died aged 69 as one of the most famous people in the world, lauded by the rich and the powerful. “This one’s for you, Rex,” he wisecracked to King George V during a royal command performance in 1932 in London. But his accommodation with the establishment made him problematic for younger generations of black Americans.

He was castigated as an “Uncle Tom”, grinning and mugging for white audiences, rarely speaking out against racial oppression. Similarly, his crossover success in the pop charts turned censorious jazz critics against him. For them, “What a Wonderful World” was the clinching example of a once brilliant musician squandering his artistry. In James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues”, a young musician dismisses Armstrong’s music as “old-time, down-home crap”. Yet Baldwin himself, as the film points out, was only able to enjoy listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” when Armstrong played his version of it.

Louis Armstrong: Black & Blues provides a nuanced, sympathetic rebuttal of the crude accusations of Uncle Tom-ism that Armstrong faced. His experiences of racism and cautious engagements with the civil rights struggle are revealed. Snippets from his archive of tape-recorded conversations with friends and family reveal a sharper, more profane character than the cuddly public persona of his Satchmo nickname. There is less insight about his musical development, however. That is the high note that eludes an otherwise well-made and enjoyable documentary.

★★★★☆

On Apple TV Plus from October 28