[Dixielandjazz] Satchmo's Story - "Louis"

[Stephen G Barbone]

Listmates;

Anybody see this show that has been touring the USA? I had to miss the  
local showing in Philly last night because of a gig. If anyone has  
seen it, please write about the program, The band and Cicele Licad's  
treatment of Gottshalk's music.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Satchmo’s Story, Music Substituting for Words

by Nate Chinen - NY TIMES - Aug 31,2010

During the epilogue of “Louis,” an energetic but muddled new silent  
film that played at the Apollo Theater on Monday night, a wide-eyed  
Louis Armstrongarrives at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, confronted  
for the first time with a functional New Orleans institution, and the  
prospect of discipline. He’s being lectured, sternly but kindly, by  
the home’s band director, Prof. Peter Davis. The film is nearing a  
close, in other words, but Armstrong’s story as we know it is poised  
to begin.

“Louis,” directed by Dan Pritzker, is a picaresque set against  
Armstrong’s boyhood, in a streetscape of prostitutes and scoundrels.  
With a pace and cinematic language openly inspired by Charlie Chaplin,  
it’s as much a riff on silent movies as it is a coming-of-age tale  
with a whiff of political farce. But the main draw at the Apollo, as  
in the few other places around the country where the movie has  
screened, was a live accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis, whose  
repurposed music makes up much of the soundtrack.

Strictly on its musical merits, this made for excellent entertainment.  
Mr. Marsalis was in his wheelhouse, playing the trumpet with a 10- 
piece band whose members were mostly drafted from the ranks of his  
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

They addressed a selective range of his works, articulate and soulful,  
along with chestnuts by Armstrong, Duke Ellington and a few others.  
And they shared the stage with Cecile Licad, a classical pianist who  
delved authoritatively into period pieces by the Creole composer Louis  
Moreau Gottschalk. The patchwork nature of the score meant that timing  
was absolutely critical, and the musicians, conducted by Andy Farber,  
hit every mark.

But that was just their baseline requirement. Silent-movie  
accompaniment, like circus music, is inherently an art of  
synchronization: it’s about sharpening the idea of a gunshot, a  
pratfall, a sudden reveal. Mr. Marsalis and his band also tapped into  
deeper currents of compatibility, bringing added dimension to the  
images with brassy crosstalk and brightly percolating rhythm.

The chase scenes in “Louis” took best advantage of that asset: when  
the pint-size Armstrong sprinted down an alleyway or peered around a  
corner, the music felt like an extension of his point of view. (Scott  
Steiner, the film’s music editor, deserves a special citation for  
making those transitions seem both crisp and natural.)

What drags “Louis” down is almost everything besides the music. Shot  
partly on location, it has a look of elegant decay but a palette like  
the Pottery Barn catalog; Vilmos Zsigmond, the esteemed  
cinematographer, seems conflicted at times by his assignment here,  
stuck between nostalgia and reinvention.

The plot, both too complicated and too inane for recapitulation, pits  
Armstrong — played winningly enough by Anthony Coleman — against  
corrupt and lecherous forces. Chief among them is Judge Leander Perry,  
portrayed by Jackie Earle Haley as a Chaplinesque dyspeptic, complete  
with Hitler mustache. The inevitable damsel in distress is Grace  
(Shanti Lowry), a brand-new mother and star attraction at Mahogany  
Hall, the Storyville bordello.

Mr. Pritzker couches some of this in the guise of genre convention,  
but he also has a weakness for empty diversion and blunt-force  
symbolism. Several of his bordello scenes, filled with writhing women  
and slow-panning camera shots, have a visual style more in line with a  
Bacardi commercial or an Akon video.

There’s a heavy-handed scene in which Grace glides through a cemetery  
in flowing white garments, cradling her baby. (She later figures in an  
even cornier dream sequence, set in the heavens.) At another point the  
legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden, then an inmate at an insane asylum,  
goes by in the back of a cart; as he passes the young Armstrong, he  
actually hands him a crown. (This doesn’t bode well for “Bolden!,” a  
companion film of Mr. Pritzker’s now in postproduction.)

And while it’s a given that “Louis” would take liberties with the  
historical record — that’s what movies do, even the good ones — the  
figures included from Armstrong’s actual childhood seem thrown in in a  
way that feels contrived. So too do the inside jokes, which seek easy  
laughs at the expense of narrative immersion. One such gag involved  
the phrase “hanging chad,” followed by the sight of a Diebold vote- 
counting machine.

Then there was the matter of Professor Davis at the Colored Waif’s  
Home. In a sly bit of casting, he’s played by Mr. Marsalis’s younger  
brother Delfeayo Marsalis, whose sudden appearance on screen, at least  
for the jazz-literate audience at the Apollo, was the equivalent of a  
nudge to the ribs. A legitimately funny point was being made there,  
something about the naturally didactic and edifying urges of the  
Marsalis family. You can only wonder how Wynton Marsalis, an executive  
producer of “Louis,” weighs those urges against the thrust of the film.