These are the most interesting jazz images i’ve seen! The exhibition in Quai Branly museum in Paris was amazingly rich with visual complements to my favorite genre of music. Catch it if you can but if you don’t, here’s my report:
Miles Davis remains one of my favorites—the following are mostly LP covers from the mid 20th century:
Bud Freeman,
To go through all of my images and get inspired to prepare them for this post, I’ve been listening to Mingus’ “better get it in your soul”.
Just look at this super cool Count Basie cover by Andy Warhol:
Benny Carter plays pretty:
Sidney Bechet in Paris in 1952:
Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet,
Daddy plays the horn,
The beautiful music of Charlie (the Bird) Parker,
I like these very 50’s percussion disc covers,
I am listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane’s “Nutty”,
Now some posters from the 1920’s forward—Cary Hauser’s Jonny Mene La Danse from 1928:
Look at the musicians here:
Jan Mara’s Mezze Mezzrow is soooo not “Kenny (my middle name is boring) G”!
A relatively more recent poster from the Lincoln Center:
Now some paintings—Harlem Jazz by Winold Reiss, 1925:
The Lindy Hop by Miguel Covarrubias, 1936:
James Weeks‘ Two Musicians;
Nicolas de Stael‘s Musicians:
Blues by Archibald J. Motley Jr, 1929
Bernard Buffet‘s light drawings:
This Coltrane image is haunting:
and a very politically incorrect piece here called “cake-walk”—can’t imagine an American museum showing this:
Last but not least was this fabulous Fred Astair’s homage to Mr Bojangles on a huge screen that I manipulated of course!
to see him dance watch this absolutely great clip here.
It was very hard to take these pictures (some were on very fast slide shows!) and to clean and edit them later but it was a labor of love; I’ve been wanting to do a post about Jazz for the longest time but where to start? Where to end? Who to cover? This was the shortest way I could record my visit to the Land of Jazz. Thank you Daniel Soutif!
Voilà! Now you know…I have not even started talking about some of my other favorites: Louis Armstrong, Bill Evans, Fats Waller, Keith Jarrett, Ahmad Jamal, Lionel Hampton, etc…
To see some cool clips from the coolest of them all, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, go here
for a taste of the great Monk, go here
to hear the Bird, click here
to see the genius of Fred Astaire here.