#WONDERFUL WORLD MOVIE MOVIE#

#WONDERFUL WORLD MOVIE MOVIE#

Lobby card for the now-lost movie Ex-Flame filmed in California in 1930, and featuring Armstrong alongside trombonist Lawrence Brown, pianist Henry Prince, saxophonist Les Hite and 22-year-old drummer Lionel Hampton.

Black and Blue, a 1929 B-side on Okeh Records’ “popular music” listings (a label that had previously marketed him for “race records”), has been called American music’s first bona fide protest song against racial inequality. That same year, he cut the first integrated vocal duet, Rockin’ Chair, with white singer Hoagy Carmichael. Knockin’ a Jug, which featured black and white musicians, was one of the US’s first integrated recordings. The list of firsts he oversaw is staggering. Yet as Riccardi emphasises, meeting culture in the middle meant Armstrong could change things from within. Reviewers wrote of “rhythmical jungle noises”, his “hippopotamus physiognomy”, “gravelly gorilla roar”, and “wild Negro African ancestor’s primitive cries”. On his first night in London in 1932, Armstrong couldn’t get to bed until 5am because hotels wouldn’t admit black guests. His times in Europe were no less challenging. He was sent to jail again while on a pit stop in Memphis, after onlookers grew suspicious about the band’s nice suits, “fancy-looking cigarette holders”, and that the manager’s white wife was sitting on the bus. On tour in the deep south, Armstrong was turned away constantly from lodgings, struggled getting gigs from racist promoters and was harassed by police. Just as he got started, Armstrong was jailed and kicked out of California for smoking cannabis he was later chased from Chicago by gun-toting gangsters and forced to travel with permanent armed protection.

But going against the usual complaints of critics – who portray the period in almost-Faustian terms – Riccardi sees Armstrong’s escape from jazz royalty as the man’s true making.įor one, crossing over (or “selling out”) as an African American in the 1930s was hardly a ticket to gold and glamour. Riccardi’s book spans 1929 to 1947, when Armstrong became the world’s biggest pop star. I say, ‘OK, how many of you have ever checked out Louis Armstrong?’ Blank faces.” “I go into universities now, and everybody knows every Charlie Parker solo in every key. Riccardi, a director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, recalls that his master’s at Rutgers University in jazz history devoted just two hours to Armstrong in the whole programme. I cringed as a black American.”Īrmstrong’s reputation has improved since, but there’s still much room to recover – and not least in elite circles. While lauding Armstrong as “one of the greatest people of the 20th century”, he was “offended by his presentations … At the time of the rise of Malcolm X, the authority of Martin Luther King, examples in the popular media like Muhammad Ali and others, there was Armstrong – a kind of throwback from another era, with this borderline minstrelsy role that he played. The handkerchief-holding persona – cheerful, fond of silly jokes – he’d perfected had echoes of an “Uncle Tom”, a black person who happily does the bidding of a white master.īob O’Meally, the head of jazz studies at Columbia University in New York, remains divided. Photograph: Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House MuseumĪfrican Americans found Armstrong more troubling still. As Ben suspects that it is his own cynicism corroding the beauty around him, he realizes that it's all a matter of perspective.On the set of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, the earliest surviving footage of Armstrong on film. Ben's life begins to turn around with the arrival of Ibou's beautiful and sexy sister Khadi (Sanaa Lathan, 'The Family That Preys') from Senegal, who moves into Ibou's room in Ben's apartment. When Ibou is suddenly struck ill and an insensitive municipal employee exacerbates the emergency situation, Ben pours his energy into a lawsuit against the city for depraved indifference. Struggling in all aspects of his life, Ben's only comforts come from smoking marijuana alone and regular chess games with his smart and opinionated Senegalese roommate Ibou (Michael Kenneth Williams, 'The Wire,' 'The Road'). A bittersweet comedy about families, friends and a frivolous fight against corporate institutions, Matthew Broderick ('Finding Amanda', 'The Producers') plays Ben Singer, a failed children's folk singer, a newly unemployed proofreader and an every-other-weekend dad to his young daughter (Jodelle Ferland), who prefers pretty much anything to listening to her dad's pessimistic ramblings.

Wonderful world movie