The Jazz Pictures

ISBN: 1892041111

Author: Crouch, Stanley

Condition: New

Carol Friedman began photographing the era's legendary jazz musicians in 1978. This series of portraits would come to be the core of her work--first as a student and throughout her career as a studio photographers--for the next twenty years. Believing that musical personality transcended performance, Friedman did not make her pictures while the music was being played. The resulting images do indeed capture the music--and as well portray the idiosyncratic charm and personal style that has been the hallmark of jazz men and women ab initio.This collection offers a generous assemblage of these photographs. Shot in black and white, these elegant images make evident the photographer's admiration for--and keen attention to--her subjects and the musical form of jazz itself.Friedman is clearly focused on style and drama--and on the emotion that she elicits from her subjects. Whether photographed in studio settings or jazz club dressing rooms, these photographs reveal a side of these gifted individuals that has seldom been seen.We are shown Sarah Vaughn as the quintessential diva, Ornette Coleman presenting deliberate irony, Wynton Marsalis in his stylish appropriation of young Ellington, Chet Baker, his demeanor perched between matinee idol and hopeless drug addict, Abbey Lincoln flaunting joyful omniscience and Count Basie in all his regal splendor. Photographs of Miles Davis, Eubie Blake, Stan Getz, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Randy Weston, Art Blakey, Red Garland, Dexter Gordon, Gil Evans, Shirley Horn, Joe Henderson, Kenny Barron, Johnny Hartman, Gerry Mulligan, Cecil Taylor, Roy Eldridge and Joe Williams are among those included in this collection of 100 duotones.This volume includes a foreword by Gordon Parks and an introduction by essayist Stanley Crouch.