The Chris Moeller Archives

Louis and Buddy

Filmmaker Dan Pritzker, who also happens to be a musician and one of America's richest men, shot a pair of films simultaneously in 2007 about New Orleans musical legends. One is "Louis," inspired by the life of the immortal trumpeter and America's vital musical figure, Louis Armstrong. Starring Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley in a villainous role, "Louis" was produced as a 68-minute, silent, and mostly black-and-white film. Last summer, the finished film played in five U.S. cities with Wynton Marsalis adding the musical score, and presenting that score live with a group of 11 other musicians in the five cities. There's no DVD release date yet, but the film can be saved in Netflix queues. Here's the trailer for this unusual looking film.

The second film, "Bolden!", is in "post-production," according to the Internet Movie Database, and may be released in theaters by the end of 2011. "Bolden!" expands upon the legend of one of Armstrong's predecessors on the New Orleans jazz scene-- Buddy Bolden, a man who may, in fact, have been the first improvisational jazz musician on the planet, and also therefore, the very progenitor of American popular music. The cornetist "King" Bolden, who will be portrayed by Anthony Mackie ("Half Nelson," "The Hurt Locker"), exists today in history almost entirely through our storytelling tradition. His Crescent City performances predate audio recordings. Folklore has it that a single wax recording of a Bolden ensemble existed and was lost when a storage shed was torn down in New Orleans in the early '60s. Indeed, only one photograph of the man is known to exist.

Bolden's mind slipped into dementia and schizophrenia at an early age (likely due to alcohol) and he was done playing his horn in 1907 at the age of just 30 (Armstrong was 6 years old in 1907 in the New Orleans neighborhood of honky-tonks and "sporting houses" that Bolden primarily played). Never a man of financial means (a barber in his second career), Bolden spent the last 25 years of his life in the Louisiana state mental hospital, and the location of his burial in 1931 is unknown today. In 2007, Pritzker told the New York Times that Bolden was like "a shaman that turned on the lights." This was Ken Burns' take on Buddy Bolden in 2001 when he presented his "Jazz" miniseries on PBS.

posted by CM @ 7:07 PM