[Dixielandjazz] Art & Design in the Jazz Age

[Stephen Barbone]

> david richoux <tubaman at batnet.com> wrote
>
> Hi all,
>
> There is a new exhibit in a San Francisco museum  that has a lot of
> very interesting product design and art items from the "Art Deco" era
> (roughly the same time frame as the starting/popularization of jazz and
> they do explain some links between the two..)  It was first shown at
> the Victoria and Albert and will be here in the Bay Area until early
> July (also will be in Boston later.)
>
> This article should be available on-line for the next few days:
> http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/visual_arts/8396491.htm

For those interested in links between visual and aural arts, there is also the
recently released paperback version of the following book, now available:

Jazz Modernism
>From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce
by Alfred Appel Jr.
Yale University Press $25.00 US.

"Arguing for 'classic' jazz's central place in the great modernist tradition in the
artist, the author locates thematic and creative points of intersection in the rhythms
of Louis Armstrong's scat singing and Hemingway's prose, for example, and Duke
Ellington's phrasings and the works of Brancusi and Man Ray.
Appel's analogies are both persuasive and provocative. He delights in the anecdotal
and his joy is contagious." Part of William P. Kelly's review of the hard cover book
in 2002.

I have the hard cover version and enjoy it immensely. I also enjoyed watching many of
the modern artists digging the modern jazz players in NYC from 1952 to 1964 or so.
They were there next to teachers and students from Juilliard (Leonard Bernstein et
al). They were very much in awe of Monk, Coltrane, Parker, Ornette Coleman et al
during that decade. I suspect that visual artists and aural artists have drawn much
inspiration from each other throughout history.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

PS. I don't know about Ernest Hemingway, but did sit next to, and buy his sister a
drink, (double martini) in Petosky, Michigan one night as she was digging an OKOM band
at the Holiday Inn there circa 1975 or so. She was definitely an OKOM fan.