Review | Lively History Lesson in Houses of Assorted Repute

Wynton Marsalis’s Latest Local Visit Found Him Expertly Leading Live Accompaniment to Modern Silent Film ‘LOUIS’

Wynton Marsalis | Photo: Courtesy

At the post-performance reception for last week’s appearance by Wynton Marsalis and ensemble, providing a thrilling live accompaniment to the modern silent film LOUIS, an embellished and sometimes racy tale of Louis Armstrong’s formative years, the famed trumpeter was addressing the gathering in the Arlington court and paying props to his collaborators. He pointed out the stellar pianist Cecile Licad, whose playing of early 20th-century music by Louis Gottschalk is a key component of the project, and had words of praise for director and collaborator Daniel Pritzker, who first approached Marsalis about the film/performance concept in 2005.

“I liked him right away,” Marsalis effused, “because he could name all the members of Buddy Bolden’s band.” Bolden is the enigmatic legend of early New Orleans jazz, considered a pioneering force in the birth of jazz as we know it, but who never recorded and spent his later years in a psychiatric facility. Pritzker ended up directing the biopic Bolden in 2019, an interesting but flawed film, with a chronologically circular and dizzy structure.

But LOUIS, a kind of “prequel” biopic about the childhood of Armstrong, came first. The unique end result, which premiered in 2010 and had its West Coast premiere at the Arlington Theatre on Saturday (hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures), is a contemporary silent film in which the musical component is very much live, alive and kicking and riffing in real time. Watching the film in streaming mode only goes so far: As experienced at the Arlington, the full effect is exponentially more engaging with Marsalis and his 13-piece big band onstage and in the shiver-some moment.

It makes perfect sense that both Pritzker and Marsalis would rally around the subject, and the seminal era in jazz. Over the course of 40-ish years, Marsalis has expressed his deep love for and preservationist’s advocacy for jazz of the pre-mid-1960s sort, with special reverence for Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Not incidentally, in LOUIS, Marsalis’s powerful and pitch-perfect trumpet work often stole the show and our sensory attentions and affections.

Pritzker’s obsession with silent film is funneled into a project which adheres to tropes and tics of the silent genre/era, using overly copious degrees of melodrama (including an arch villain resembling Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator), slapstick shtick, and iris shots galore.

The film doesn’t shy away from the sordid environment Armstrong grew up around, in the red light “Storyville” district of New Orleans, reputedly the very seedbed of jazz’s birthing process.

From a more contemporary perspective, LOUIS may be the raciest silent film to date, but for a logical contextual reason. Breasts are bared, hedonistic abandon is afoot in the “house,” business transpires upstairs, and a key dance sequence oozes with sensual sex work excess while the band plays on and Marsalis issues muted trumpet shouts.

One intriguing footnote with the film is the all-important visualization of the famed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, in one of his last projects before his 2016 death. His deft and roaming camerawork gives the film an admirable sheen and shimmer. A clever cameo footnote finds Zsigmond in the brief role as a still photographer who is brusquely kicked out of the room by our resident arch villain character Judge Perry.

At some points, we drift away from the filmic dimension and get lost in the music onstage, an amalgam of original material and rearranged music by Armstrong, Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton, and the dazzling jazz-cum-classical piano interludes of Gottschalk, courtesy of Licad’s limber virtuosity.

In this latest of many Marsalis performances in Santa Barbara (watch for the return of his brilliant Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra next February), the filmic context represented a valiant new twist on the ongoing agenda of shedding light on jazz historical loam. A highlight of the night at the Arlington actually came in the pre-screening performance by the band, and as it stretched out during and after the end credits. It’s always a pleasure to hear Marsalis and his top-notch allies in action, in any setting.

A special shoutout goes to a new member of Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra clan, potently gifted saxophonist/clarinetist/flutist Alexa Tarantino — who replaces the departing Ted Nash as the first female musician in the ranks, a long-awaited gender-leveling gesture. Tarantino made a powerful impact with her imaginative and spidery alto sax solo at evening’s end. Louis would approve.