Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues

Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues (2022) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Sacha Jenkins. Built from never-before-heard personal tape recordings and decades of archival footage, it hands the microphone back to Armstrong himself — letting Satchmo narrate his own extraordinary life.

The film doesn't stop at the famous grin and the trumpet. It follows Armstrong from the poverty of early New Orleans through the invention of modern jazz phrasing, to the moment he publicly called out President Eisenhower for stalling on civil rights during the Little Rock crisis. Wynton Marsalis, Orson Welles, Ray Charles, and James Baldwin all appear in the archive.

Released on Apple TV+, the film landed on multiple year-end lists as one of 2022's finest music documentaries. Stream Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues (2022) online on iFILM.