One day years ago, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was hanging with Willie Nelson and Ray Charles when the two older musicians started to talk about their long and diverse careers.
“Ray, you know, you and I, we did it all,” Nelson said in Marsalis’s retelling of that conversation. “We did the American popular song.”
“Yeah, Willie, we sure did,” Charles replied as Marsalis remembers the scene. “We did the jazz, we did the country. We do the folk songs, rock and roll, we do everything.“
No one else covered that range, he said.
“I said, ‘Wow,’” Marsalis says on a recent video call. “I said, ‘What about Louis Armstrong?’”
“And Ray said, “I’m talking about a human being!’” Marsalis says, laughing at the distinction Charles made between Armstrong and mere mortals like Nelson and him.
“And Willie said, ‘That sure is the truth, Ray.”
Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who nearly died this spring, is happily back practicing for his eventual return to work, shown in the upstairs den of his Corona, New York home on June 23, 1971. Armstrong had newsmen in to show his recovery from his near-fatal illness and to thank his fans for their mail during his 10 week hospital stay. (AP Photo/John Rooney) Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis will appear at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Tuesday, May 20, 2025 with a jazz ensemble to provide the live score to the silent movie “Louis,” which tells the story of the childhood of jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. (Photo courtesy of Jazz at the Lincoln Center) Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong signs autographs for fans circa 1948. (Photo by Edward S. Kitch / Associated Press) Jazz great Louis Armstrong gestures to the crowd at the Atlanta Jazz Festival in Atlanta in this June 6, 1966 photo. (Photo by Associated Press) Wynton Marsalis attends the New York premiere of HBO’s “Wynton Marsalis: A Youngarts Masterclass” at Museum of Modern Art on Sept. 3, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for HBO) Portrait of jazz musician and actor Louis Armstrong posing with his trumpet, late 1920s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Jazz trumpeter Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong raises his trumpet in the air while holding posting for a promotional portrait, circa 1955. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis perform at the 2009 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds Race Course on April 25, 2009 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Rick Diamond/Getty Images) Show Caption1 of 8Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who nearly died this spring, is happily back practicing for his eventual return to work, shown in the upstairs den of his Corona, New York home on June 23, 1971. Armstrong had newsmen in to show his recovery from his near-fatal illness and to thank his fans for their mail during his 10 week hospital stay. (AP Photo/John Rooney) ExpandThe truth, as Marsalis describes it repeatedly in a recent interview, is that there was no one like Louis Armstrong before he picked up a trumpet as a child in New Orleans, and there’ll never be another one like him.
“He taught us how to make instruments sound like people talking and singing,” Marsalis says, ticking off the many ways in which Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans in 1901 and died in 1971 in New York City, changed the way people play and hear music.
“Then he was so accurate harmonically,” he says. “Man, you can listen to 100 records, Louis Armstrong never misses one harmony. His level of musicianship is unbelievable. The accuracy of his playing. So if you’re a trumpet player or a saxophone player, everybody’s trying to play like him.”
Marsalis, whose acclaimed career as a trumpeter and composer has earned honors including a Pulitzer Prize and nine Grammy Awards, knows what it’s like to try to play like Pops, as Armstrong was often called.
“Louis: A Silent Movie with Live Accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad” comes to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on May 20, on the first West Coast presentation of a special night of film and music.
Originally released in 2010, director Dan Pritzker’s “Louis” stars Anthony Coleman in the title role and Jackie Earle Haley, Shanti Lowry, and Anthony Mackie as supporting characters. Shot in gorgeous sepia tones by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, the Chaplin-esque silent feature imagines the life of Louis as a 6-year-old in New Orleans as he starts to play music on the cornet.
Marsalis and a 10-piece jazz ensemble play a score that incorporates his original period-style songs with new arrangements of pieces by Jelly Roll Morton, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington.
Pianist Licad adds music by the 19th-century New Orleans-born pianist and composer Louis M. Gottschalk, whose groundbreaking music blended European classical and New World indigenous sounds into an original American music that was a precursor to jazz.
‘That man was a king’
Marsalis, like Armstrong, is a native New Orleanian. He was raised in a musical family led by his jazz pianist father, Ellis Marsalis. Armstrong was a significant figure throughout Marsalis’s early life, though he admits he didn’t appreciate him fully at first.
“I always knew, but I didn’t like what he was associated with,” the 63-year-old says of his boyhood impressions of Armstrong in the ’60s. “I grew up in the civil rights movement, and we equated [Armstrong’s public image then] with Uncle Tom-ing, you know, handkerchief-heading and minstrel show.
“It wasn’t until I started trying to learn his music, which I was 18 then, that I started to understand,” Marsalis says. “Learning more history. When you don’t know things, you just go off whatever you feel they are.
“As I began to educate myself, well, OK, I started to understand exactly who the man was,” he says. “But at first, just all the kind of movies with him singing to horses and smiling all the time? That wasn’t it, you know what I mean?”
Marsalis, who was 9 when Armstrong died, says he’s glad he never met him before he really understood Armstrong’s life and legacy.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to have disrespectful or ignorant thoughts around a man that great,” he says. “Not that I would have ever said anything disrespectful, because everybody who ever met him said he was such a regal presence.”
Pianist McCoy Tyner once told Marsalis about a night when Armstrong came into a club where he and saxophonist John Coltrane were playing.
“He said, ‘Man, that man was a king,’” Marsalis says of Tyner. “He said, ‘He wasn’t like you think from seeing these movies. When you saw him, you just wanted to get on your knees.’”
As the Coltrane group played that night, a murmuring, a rustling flowed through the crowd, Tyner told Marsalis.
“People were all standing up and trying to get Louis Armstrong’s autograph,” he says. “He said it was such a commotion in the club, the kind of love and feeling people had for Louis Armstrong.”
‘The mythic elements’
“Louis” isn’t a straightforward biopic about young Armstrong. Not a lot is known about his early days, and Marsalis says it’s more important to know the feelings than the facts of those days.
“He wasn’t trying for that,” Marsalis says of “Louis” and Pritzker, with whom he also collaborated on the 2019 film “Bolden,” about the life of the New Orleanian cornetist Buddy Bolden. “He was trying to deal with some of the mythic elements of the music and the people.
“You have the presence of the police and the sweetness of the people, just going about their business,” he continues. “You got the marching band, the stern band directors. This kind of cavalcade of characters that are important to the mythology.”
That mythologizing of Armstrong’s earliest days for the film extends to the stories fellow musicians have told about him for decades.
There’s the one about jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie‘s apartment and socks, for instance.
“Dizzy told me he got an apartment around the corner from Louis Armstrong to be near him,” Marsalis says. “I was like, ‘Man, c’mon, you Dizzy Gillespie!’ He said, ‘That was Louis Armstrong, man, I knew nothing like that would ever happen again.’”
Another time, Marsalis was at Gillespie’s house when he learned why Diz wore his socks the way he did.
“I was sitting in front of a picture of an album of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald,” he says, describing the cover of the album “Ella and Louis.” “There’s a picture of the two of them looking like grandma and grandpa on the front of it. And on that record, Pops’ socks are all rolled down.
“And Dizzy said, ‘You see right there? His socks are rolled down.”
‘You know he was great’
On Aug. 4, 2023, the 122nd anniversary of Armstrong’s birthday, Blue Engine Records released “Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.” The album is a live recording from 2006 at Lincoln Center, where Marsalis has been director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center for many years.
“It’s kind of a modernized version of it,” he says. “We did swing and different things, but we still remain true to his concept of arranging it.”
Even for a trumpet maestro like Marsalis, playing the horn like Armstrong is never a simple matter.
“You better have your own way to do it because you’re not going to do it like him,” he says, laughing. “Like, that’s just not going to be done. A guy like that, there’s a lot of trumpet being played. He wasn’t a joke.
“The logic of his solos, he knew how to create coherent, melodic solos and improvised pieces that sounded like they were written,” Marsalis continues. “And melodically, he knew so many melodies.
“He grew up singing. He could sing church music. He knew American popular song. Ragtime, every kind of song, man. Folk songs, spirituals.
“He’s one of the few people that could sing any kind of melody and make it his own,” Marsalis says. “From a tango to an opera aria to a song they sang in the houses of ill repute. It was just him.”
As a jazz scholar and musician, it’s clear Marsalis enjoys the chance to proselytize on the Gospel of Louis.
“I mean, we have to keep him out here, you know?” he says of the need to keep Armstrong’s music and life a vibrant part of the culture. “It’s our responsibility to teach our younger people about who our heroes are. It’s on us.
“I mean, if you know him, you know he was great,” Marsalis says.
Many may only know him for his signature vocal song, “What a Wonderful World,” he says. But there’s so much more.
And unlike how Marsalis first saw Armstrong as a square old man in the ’60s, he’s actually always been cool, as Marsalis describes in one final story, this one courtesy of bassist Arvell Shaw who played in the bands of both Armstrong and Marsalis.
“Arvell, man, he told me a story where they were pulling up to a checkpoint in East Germany when it was really East Germany,” Marsalis says. “He said they were smoking weed on the bus, and the driver didn’t tell them they were coming up to the checkpoint. He said, ‘Man, We start throwing the joints out the window and opening windows, trying to get the smoke out.”
A guard with a dog stepped onto the bus. Armstrong was in his usual spot in the back.
“Then he walked off the bus, and they were all like, ‘Ohhhhh,’” Marsalis says of Shaw’s account. “Then the guy shows up with six guards, and they were like, ‘Oh my God!” and all of them had dogs. The first guard that got on pointed and said, ‘Louis Armstrong.’ Then they all started jumping up and down, ‘Louis Armstrong! Louis Armstrong!’
“Arvell said they had Pops get out of the bus and take pictures with like some old-time camera,” Marsalis says. “They couldn’t believe that this was actually Louis Armstrong here.
“He said, ‘Man, that’s just how people treated him.’”
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What: Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and a 10-piece jazz ensemble with pianist Cecile Licad play live for a screening of “Louis,” a silent movie about Louis Armstrong.
When: 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20
Where: The Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Dr., Irvine
How much: $80 to $240
For more: Thebarclay.org
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