[Dixielandjazz] "Louis" - The silent movie

[Stephen G Barbone]

I urge those in the Philadelphia area to see this silent film, backed  
by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on August 31.  
(If you are not coming to see Barbone Street at the Ocean City [NJ]  
Music Pier, that is)

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
wwwmyspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

A Silent Musical

By Dave Itzkoff - NY Times - 8-28-10

At the end of the summer movie season, the fledgling director Dan  
Pritzker believes he’s got a film that will satisfy an audience  
unmoved by superhero sequels and 3-D extravaganzas: a black-and-white  
silent movie (with hints of color) based loosely on the childhood of  
Louis Armstrong. And for the price of your ticket, you also get music  
composed and arranged by Wynton Marsalis, and performed live by him  
and a group of 11 other musicians.

It may not topple “Toy Story 3” at the box office, but that is the  
premise of “Louis,” a 70-minute feature that had its debut in Chicago  
on Wednesday and will come to the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Monday  
as part of a five-city tour.

“Louis” is one of two music-themed movie projects that Mr. Pritzker,  
better known as a songwriter and guitarist in the rock-fusion band  
Sonia Dada (and a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt  
Hotels Corporation and the Marmon manufacturing group), has been  
determined to make for some 15 years. The moment of inspiration came  
for Mr. Pritzker in the late 1990s, when a stage manager first told  
him about Charles (Buddy) Bolden, the turn-of-the-20th-century cornet  
player credited as a creator of jazz.

“As the words were leaving his lips, I think it physically altered  
me,” Mr. Pritzker said. “The thought that there was this guy out there  
that impacted my life so dramatically, and I had no clue who he was,  
really resonated.”

Mr. Pritzker spent several years consulting with authors and  
musicologists on Bolden, a forerunner to Armstrong who died in 1931  
and recorded little if any of his work. In writing what became the  
scripts for “Louis” and a second feature, “Bolden,” Mr. Pritzker  
concluded that it was easier to fabricate large swaths of his stories  
because Bolden’s history was nebulous, and Armstrong’s adult life was  
documented to death.

“After he got to Chicago, everybody knows every minute of that guy’s  
life,” Mr. Pritzker said with some exaggeration. “On July 3, 1933, he  
went to a dry cleaner to pick up his shirt.”

Instead, his “Louis” puts a Chaplinesque tilt on Armstrong’s childhood  
in New Orleans, where a fictionalized version of the future trumpeter  
(played by Anthony Coleman) in 1907 plays a crucial role in a  
comically complicated affair involving a corrupt politician (Jackie  
Earl Haley) and a prostitute (Shanti Lowry) who has given birth to his  
child.

Some of the film’s details — that the young Armstrong worked on the  
back of a coal and firewood cart, using his rudimentary horn skills to  
attract customers, and ended up in the Colored Waifs’ Home, where he  
further honed his abilities — are true or true enough. Others — like  
the slapstick antics that populate the film — are, Mr. Pritzker said,  
“mythical wanderings from my imagination.”

Mr. Marsalis, a New Orleans native who was approached a few years ago  
by Mr. Pritzker to provide the music for his films, said the  
director’s fictionalized presentation of his subjects’ lives was  
perfectly appropriate.

“We have a whole history of movies that do that,” Mr. Marsalis said in  
a phone interview. “I don’t think it’s a question of whether it’s O.K.  
or not. We’d have to throw out almost every film ever made on a  
figure. It’s not a documentary.”

Besides his own original compositions, Mr. Marsalis provided  
contemporary arrangements of classic jazz tunes like Jelly Roll  
Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp,” Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local”  
and Charles Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle,” as well as several pieces  
by the 19th-century Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (those  
arrangements are played during the film by the pianist Cecile Licad).

Mr. Marsalis said he hoped the live presentations of “Louis” would  
promote interactivity with its audiences, one way or the other.

“We always like to have people saying something, good or bad,” he  
said. “If they like it, we’re going to play more of what we’re playing.”

(“Louis” played in Detroit on Thursday, and the other stops are  
Bethesda, Md., on Saturday, and Glenside, Pa., near Philadelphia, on  
Tuesday.)

Mr. Pritzker, who shot “Louis” in tandem with his movie “Bolden” in  
2007 (and spent more than $10 million in the process), originally  
planned to release the two films simultaneously. But he said the  
Armstrong film was released first because “I finished the ‘Louis’ film  
first.”

He added: “My wife said, you’d better do something with it or you’re  
going to drive me crazy.” “Bolden,” a traditional, two-hour feature  
with color and sound, and a cast that includes Anthony Mackie(“The  
Hurt Locker”) and Wendell Pierce (“The Wire,” “Treme”), will be  
released “when it’s ready to come out,” he said, most likely in late  
2011 or 2012. (It does not yet have distribution.)

Asked if he might have another film in him after these two, Mr.  
Pritzker invoked his experience as a pop songwriter, and said he could  
not imagine telling stories that did not completely capture his  
imagination.

“It’s so difficult, I can’t really see how people do it at a mercenary  
level,” he said. “I can’t see how somebody goes out and makes  
something they know they don’t love.”