If anyone deserves a charming celluloid hagiography, it’s jazz great Louis Armstrong. Film director Dan Pritzker’s 2010 silent film Louis — screened May 18 at San Diego’s Balboa Theatre with a live score by Wynton Marsalis and a 13-member band — is very far from a historical account of Armstrong’s New Orleans childhood, but then it was never intended to be. Jazz deserves its mythologies, too.
That Marsalis, another New Orleans trumpet great, would choose to write and perform music for Louis is not the no-brainer it seems. He recently admitted to the San Diego Union Tribune that as a teenager, he was “embarrassed by [Armstrong’s] antics and by his smiling and grinning.” But then Marsalis discovered the music. Today, he names Armstrong “the most important figure in our music.”
Marsalis’ live score for Louis, carefully cued to the 90-minute film’s scenes, features mostly his own compositions, incorporating elements of the New Orleans music Armstrong would have known, from bamboula dance rhythms and scat-like vocalizations to improvisation. Marsalis also composed and performed new arrangements of jazz classics such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp,” Charles Mingus’ “Boogie Stop Shuffle,” and Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local.”
Yet it’s telling that the one composer Marsalis made wide room for on his soundtrack is Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). Born in New Orleans to a white father and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was educated in the classical tradition in Europe and became a successful expatriate performer acknowledged by Chopin and Liszt. At his death at age 40, he had composed more than 300 works, including ambitious extended pieces like Symphonie Romantique: La Nuit des tropiques.
But his earliest compositions (Bamboula, Danse Des Negres; La Savane) to his last are also permeated with African-American, Creole, Caribbean, and Latin-American rhythms, blue notes, and non-European themes. “Liszt and Chopin mixed with the Caribbean,” as Marsalis describes him, Gottschalk embodies the cross-genre ideal that has animated Marsalis’ career since he became the first-ever Grammy winner both in jazz and classical, the latter for Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart trumpet concertos.
The same year Marsalis began exploring Armstrong in earnest, he also began studying classical trumpet at Juilliard (he’s now its director of Jazz Studies). Across his career, he’s composed a Swing Symphony; an oratorio, Blood on the Fields, combining jazz orchestra and classical forms; and All Rise for the New York Philharmonic. Moreover, Cecile Licad, the pianist Marsalis brought on to play Louis’s 20-plus Gottschalk works, has impeccable classical credentials (Chopin, Ravel, and Fauré recordings, as well as an all-Gottschalk album).
Despite overbright amplification, Licad performed such Gottschalk gems as Le Banjo, Fantaisie Grotesque, Suis-moi! Caprice, Souvenir de Porto Rico, Marche des Gibaros, Bamboula, and Tremolo with verve and rhythmic drive, showcasing the range of the composer’s creativity. As if to underscore the importance of Gottschalk’s straddling of classical and jazz, Marsalis had Licad work in fine renditions of Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat, Op. 9, and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 6.
Though the program, hosted by La Jolla Music Society, was billed as “a live musical performance by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad,” Marsalis graciously played the section man, allowing himself only one or two solos. They proved that Armstrong-caliber chops are alive and well. Marsalis surrounded himself with a true A-Team, including reed players Daniel Block, Jarien Jaramilla, James Carter, and Alexa Tarantino, bassist Carlos Henriquez, trumpeter Ashlin Parker, and trombonists Dion Tucker and John Allred — ably led by Andy Farber. Solos by Carter in the band’s pre-film overture and by Tarantino in the credit-roll jam afterward proved Marsalis wasn’t the only showstopping talent on stage.
But even virtuosity can outwear its welcome. Director Dan Pritzker — inspired by a screening of Chaplin’s City Lights with the Chicago Symphony — described his Louis film as “dessert after a heavy meal.” The meal was his 2019 biopic of the forgotten cornetist Buddy Bolden, whose life ended in a mental hospital. (In a key scene in Louis, Pritzker has Bolden hand his crown to the young Armstrong.)
Too much dessert can give you a sugar high. The repetitive oscillation between Licad’s up-tempo Gottschalk romps and the band’s bravura set pieces — unrelieved by slower-tempo or extended pieces — tested listeners’ stamina. Marsalis varied the texture some by drawing from jazz’s rich stylistic variety, such as elegant Ellington big-band numbers to musical quotes like Jelly Roll Morton’s “New Orleans Bump.” But with each musical segment rarely exceeding two minutes, the effect was fatiguing.
This was mostly due to the relentless pace and framing of Pritzker’s film. It’s a visual feast, from Vilmos Zsigmond’s outstanding color-graded cinematography and Hinton Battle’sstylish choreography to the painstaking set details and silent-film-era visual artifacts like iris out, intertitles, and retro-look frame-skipping. Add to that superb acting — above all by Anthony Coleman as the naïvely heroic Louis and Jackie Earle Haley as a Chaplinesque evil Judge Perry — and the audience had much to savor.
Still, the continual close-up mugging, rapid cutting, and dolly shots became too much of a good thing. The exception was one inspired scene in which Louis observes his ideal woman, Grace (the proverbial whore with a heart of gold) introducing her newborn daughter to her dead parents in a New Orleans cemetery while dancing to Chopin’s nocturne. A moment of graceful beauty in a caffeinated storm.
Louis and its rich music represent a welcome trend that includes Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Brad Mehldau’s After Bach and Apres Fauré and even Jon Batiste’s Beethoven Blues: jazz artists eagerly engaging with and carving their own canon within classical music.