“Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” documentarian Sacha Jenkins is lifeless. His spouse Raquel Cepeda confirmed his passing on Instagram in a put up asking for privateness for his or her household at the moment.
Hailing from Philadelphia and born in 1971, Jenkins started his profession as a journalist earlier than turning into an acclaimed documentarian. He based Graphic Scenes & Xplicit Language, an early journal dedicated to graffiti artwork, and co-founded hip-hop journal Beat Down in addition to the alt-culture journal Ego Journey.
Jenkins was the sort of journalist for whom making the transition to documentary filmmaking was a pure one, and a hip-hop sensibility infused his movie work — both immediately as in his 2015 directorial debut “Recent Dressed” about hip-hop trend or the 2019 miniseries “Wu-Tang: Of Mics and Males,” for which he was Emmy nominated, or extra when it comes to angle, reminiscent of having Nas narrate Satchmo’s letters in Apple TV+’s “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”
“Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” world premiered at TIFF 2022 and was campaigned closely by Apple throughout that awards season. It received the IDA Award for Finest Music Documentary, and IndieWire featured it at our November 2022 Contemplate This FYC Brunch, the place this author interviewed Jenkins and producer Julie Anderson onstage.
The movie broke out of a number of music documentary conventions, using a singular collage-like graphic model to convey Armstrong’s phrases to life, fairly than counting on speaking head interviewees. Discovering a brand new strategy to inform tales that could possibly be very easy was his specialty — and a part of the explanation Eminem selected him to co-author his 2008 autobiography “The Method I Am.”
Clearly exhausted from simply having flown into LA from London, the place he had been selling the “Black & Blues” simply beforehand, he confirmed a deadpan wit in our onstage interview at our brunch nonetheless. Once I requested him how he prevented music doc tropes, he mentioned, “I haven’t watched these different movies.”
“I’m supposedly a hip-hop man,” Jenkins added. “However I’ll let you know, I made movies about Rick James and the Wu-Tang Clan and now Louis Armstrong, and it’s the identical story each time,” he mentioned. “Louis Armstrong went to reform college for a gun cost at 14. And if you happen to undergo the streets of New York proper now, 14-year-olds are killing one another with weapons daily.”
“Is it jazz, is it blues, is it techno… to me, relating to Black music in America, there aren’t any genres,” he mentioned. “It’s simply the music is a mirrored image of and a response to the surroundings. And sadly, in some methods, the surroundings hasn’t modified. However that surroundings doesn’t cease us from being very inventive. It doesn’t cease us from expressing ourselves. And that, to me, was a very powerful level of the movie.”
Jenkins directed two remaining movies, afterward: “Sunday Finest,” about how Ed Sullivan platformed Black artists in the course of the Civil Rights period, and “All Up within the Biz: The Life and Rhymes of Biz Markie.”