“Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” documentarian Sacha Jenkins is dead. His wife Raquel Cepeda confirmed his passing on Instagram in a post asking for privacy for their family at this time.
Hailing from Philadelphia and born in 1971, Jenkins began his career as a journalist before becoming an acclaimed documentarian. He founded Graphic Scenes & Xplicit Language, an early magazine devoted to graffiti art, and co-founded hip-hop magazine Beat Down as well as the alt-culture magazine Ego Trip.
Jenkins was the kind of journalist for whom making the transition to documentary filmmaking was a natural one, and a hip-hop sensibility infused his film work — either directly as in his 2015 directorial debut “Fresh Dressed” about hip-hop fashion or the 2019 miniseries “Wu-Tang: Of Mics and Men,” for which he was Emmy nominated, or more in terms of attitude, such as 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 heavily by Apple during that awards season. It won the IDA Award for Best Music Documentary, and IndieWire featured it at our November 2022 Consider This FYC Brunch, where this writer interviewed Jenkins and producer Julie Anderson onstage.
The film broke out of a lot of music documentary conventions, utilizing a unique collage-like graphic style to bring Armstrong’s words to life, rather than relying on talking head interviewees. Finding a new way to tell stories that could be very straightforward was his specialty — and part of the reason Eminem chose him to co-author his 2008 autobiography “The Way I Am.”
Obviously exhausted from just having flown into LA from London, where he had been promoting the “Black & Blues” just beforehand, he showed a deadpan wit in our onstage interview at our brunch nonetheless. When I asked him how he avoided music doc tropes, he said, “I haven’t watched those other films.”
“I’m supposedly a hip-hop guy,” Jenkins added. “But I will tell you, I made films about Rick James and the Wu-Tang Clan and now Louis Armstrong, and it’s the same story every time,” he said. “Louis Armstrong went to reform school for a gun charge at 14. And if you go through the streets of New York right now, 14-year-olds are killing each other with guns every day.”
“Is it jazz, is it blues, is it techno… to me, when it comes to Black music in America, there are no genres,” he said. “It’s just the music is a reflection of and a reaction to the environment. And unfortunately, in some ways, the environment hasn’t changed. But that environment doesn’t stop us from being very creative. It doesn’t stop us from expressing ourselves. And that, to me, was the most important point of the film.”
Jenkins directed two final films, afterward: “Sunday Best,” about how Ed Sullivan platformed Black artists during the Civil Rights era, and “All Up in the Biz: The Life and Rhymes of Biz Markie.”
