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Louie Bluie film image; five smiling men posing for a photo outside a store

Kit Eakle’s Jaz’n’theViolin String Band

+ Louie Bluie Film Screening

VIFF Live

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Louie Bluie, the stage name of Howard Armstrong, was one of many fiddle players who gave birth to the new sounds of jazz and blues at the beginning of the twentieth century. The role of the fiddle in roots of jazz and the blues are exemplified in the joyous and long, life-affirming career of Louie Bluie.

Kit Eakle’s ’Jaz’N’theViolin’ gives his music context, playing the music of the often forgotten, larger than life black fiddlers and jazz violinists like Louie Bluie, Lonnie Johnson, and the Memphis Jugband, who pioneered this music.

Kit Eakle – violin
John Reischman – mandolin
John Lyon – guitar
Brent Gubbels – bass

About Louie Bluie (the film) (Terry Zwigoff, USA, 1985, 60 min)

The first film by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb; Ghost World; Bad Santa) a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America. As beguiling a raconteur as he is a performer, Louie makes for a wildly entertaining movie subject, and Zwigoff honors him with an unsentimental but endlessly affectionate tribute. Full of infectious music and comedy, Louie Bluie is a humane evocation of the kind of pop-cultural marginalia that Zwigoff would continue to excavate in the coming years.

 

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Louie Bluie peers into the areas where nothing is certain, except that these people live and strive and laugh and make music. It is a wonderful film.

Roger Ebert

Guest

Kit Eakle’s ’Jaz’N’theViolin’ String Band

Date

Sept 14

Time

2:00 pm

Venue

VIFF Centre, VIFF Cinema

19+
150 min

Book Tickets

Sunday September 14

2:00 pm
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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Credits

Producer

Terry Zwigoff

Cinematography

John Knoop, Chris Li

Editor

Victoria Lewis

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