Cool Notes From Prague

Prague was still under Communist rule in the mid-1960s when jazz legend Louis Armstrong and his band stopped there to give the avant-garde locals a taste of quintessentially American music. Reporters followed Armstrong from tours of the old city to his smoke-filled dressing room backstage, and audiences were enchanted by his gravelly voice, beaming smile and unparalleled trumpeting.

The tour came back to life Tuesday night in Hollywood, replayed in a recently restored Czech documentary for a crowd of about 300 National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences members. The grainy, black and white film, shown at the Harmony Gold Theater on Sunset Boulevard, was receiving its first screening since being restored by the Grammy Foundation, a nonprofit educational arm of the Recording Academy.

The foundation borrowed and restored numerous vintage clips of jazz players from archives in New Jersey, Queens, N.Y., and Stockton, Calif., and has shared some of the footage with the academy to be used to educate public schoolchildren.

Also screened were newly restored clips of jazz pianists Dave Brubeck and Bud Powell, evoking an era when smoking was ubiquitous.

Watching a Dave Brubeck Quartet performance for an Australian TV program from the 1960s, Tuesday’s crowd laughed when the show’s well-coiffed host appeared in an easy chair, smoking a cigarette throughout the 30-minute program, and when Brubeck’s band performed the jingle of the show’s sponsor, Craven Filter cigarettes.

After the screening, as the crowd dispersed, Prague native Rudy Lukes found Armstrong’s drummer, Danny Barcelona, in the audience. Lukes reminisced about the night Armstrong performed in Prague. “It was just charged!” said Lukes, who was 17 when he attended the show. “It was avant-garde! There were very few Western performers who came to Eastern Europe.”

For Barcelona, warm memories of that tour linger through the decades. His most vivid remembrance of the trip? “I remember the beer,” he said. “They had very good beer there.”

Brooklyn in His Heart

Ronnie Marmo can’t leave Brooklyn behind. The New York-born actor came to Los Angeles three years ago. In the beginning, he would resist taking the jobs that seemed easiest for him to get: the stereotypical mobster parts that casting directors seemed to associate with an Italian American from Brooklyn. “I’d comb my hair forward, do the Matthew Perry thing,” Marmo jokes about his early auditions. But to no avail. “Until you’re Bobby D. [Robert De Niro], you’re an Italian boy.”

With time, Marmo embraced his inner wise guy. In the Scott Kalvert movie “Deuces Wild,” to be released May 3, Marmo appears with Stephen Dorff and Matt Dillon as Moof, a knife-wielding Brooklyn gang member. He describes the movie as “‘West Side Story’ without the music.” In “Irish Eyes,” a movie to be released later this year, he stars opposite Daniel Baldwin as Jimmy the Bomb--as the name suggests, a tough guy.

“It’s a great time to be Italian American in this business--’Sopranos’ really opened the door,” he says, before modifying his answer a little. “It’s a curse, and it’s amazing because it separates you from [everybody else].”

Marmo steps away from stereotypes at 68 Cent Crew, a theater company he co-founded and where he acts as creative director. The company, named for the amount of money Marmo had in his pocket the day he was cast as Moof, performs at the Space Theatre in Hollywood. His next role there: Leo Frank, a man wrongly accused of rape and murder.

Marmo has a minimalist approach to acting: Find your mark, read your lines. “Some people have to go in a corner to pray and chant before an audition. That’s not me,” he says. “I come from the old school. Jimmy Cagney, Bogart--these are my heroes.”

Although he says he’s excited about Hollywood, he still gets homesick. He will hang out at Albano’s Brooklyn Pizzeria on Melrose and “pretend I’m back home.”

Sightings

L.L. Cool J getting into a Mercedes at 3rd Street and Orlando Avenue at lunchtime Tuesday.... Jason Schwartzman around the corner at Doughboys eatery on 3rd Street, leaving with his dog and a friend.

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City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail angles@latimes.com