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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
Kit Eakle’s ’Jaz’N’theViolin’ String Band
Sept 14
2:00 pm
VIFF Centre, VIFF Cinema
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Credits
Producer
Terry Zwigoff
Cinematography
John Knoop, Chris Li
Editor
Victoria Lewis
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