[Dixielandjazz] William Gottlieb's obit from Washington Post

[Norman Vickers]

To: DJML

Here is Gottlieb's obituary from Washington Post.

 

 

'Golden Age of Jazz' Photographer Bill Gottlieb

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; B07

Bill Gottlieb, 89, a self-taught jazz photographer who took some of the most
indelible images of the top musicians bridging the swing and bebop jazz
eras, died April 23 at his home in Great Neck, N.Y., after a stroke.

Mr. Gottlieb's photography was initially an afterthought, mere visual
accompaniment to his regular work as a jazz scribe for The Washington Post
and the influential music magazine Down Beat during the 1940s.

After reading manuals for his Speed Graphic press camera, Mr. Gottlieb took
hundreds of witty, haunting and altogether unforgettable portraits of
musicians such as Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella
Fitzgerald. He once captured Gillespie making goo-goo eyes at Fitzgerald
during a performance.

Perhaps his most reproduced picture captured singer Billie Holiday in 1947
seemingly pouring her soul into a microphone.

Mr. Gottlieb once recalled: "She was at her most beautiful at that
particular time, which was not too long after she had come out of prison on
a drug charge. She couldn't get any drugs or alcohol while she was
incarcerated. She lost weight and came out looking gorgeous, and her voice
was I think at its peak.

"I was fortunate enough to have spent time with her during that period, and
I caught this close-up of her in a way that you could really see the anguish
that must have been coming out of her throat."

Mr. Gottlieb left the business for a long career as a children's book author
and producer of educational film strips. The publication in 1979 of his book
"The Golden Age of Jazz" led to a much-ballyhooed reappraisal of his
photography.

Critics found that he easily ranked with Gjon Mili and Herman Leonard as one
of the finest photographic interpreters of the personalities behind the
music. New Yorker magazine jazz writer Whitney Balliett noted: "Gottlieb
stopped photographing jazz musicians in 1948. No one has surpassed him yet."

William Paul Gottlieb was born in New York on Jan. 28, 1917. He was raised
in Bound Brook, N.J., where his father operated a lumber business.

He was never especially musical, and his crucial encounter with jazz
occurred during his sophomore year at Lehigh University. He contracted
trichinosis from eating undercooked pork at his apparently unkosher Jewish
fraternity, and during recovery a friend lent him a large stash of jazz
records. He was smitten.

After graduation in 1938, he landed a job he soon grew to detest in the
advertising department of The Post. One day, he asked the Sunday news editor
if he could create a jazz column. This went well for two weeks.

"I got into photography because The Post was stingy and wouldn't pay
photographers to cover my 11 o'clock concerts," he later told the New York
Times. "So I made a deal with the staff photographers that if I bought the
same camera they had, they'd teach me to use it."

Paid $10 for his weekly "Swing Sessions" column, he contributed his
photography for free.

He forged deep bonds with many of the players and managers and talked up
many black musicians on radio shows in Washington "not because I was out
crusading," he later said, "but because they were the key people in jazz."

A highlight was the early-morning jam session he engineered at Washington's
Howard Theatre between two otherwise racially segregated orchestras, Bob
Crosby's Dixieland swing group and Count Basie's big band.

During World War II, he worked in the sugar and fish divisions of the Office
of Price Administration and also was an Army Air Forces photographer.

Although his work appeared often on the cover of Down Beat, he began
rethinking his career. "Jazz was on a decline," he told The Post decades
later. "I knew my days at Down Beat were numbered, and I was still not being
paid for my photos. I'm fairly square -- I like baroque music -- and the
glamour and fascination of working with these musicians kind of wore off. I
don't smoke or drink, let alone do marijuana, so I was often the only sober
guy in the gathering. It was fascinating for a long time but I had enough. I
never looked back."

By about 1949, he started University Films, which made educational slides
for classroom use and explored subjects ranging from "How to Set a Table" to
"Space Flight." He then spent a decade with McGraw-Hill after the publishing
company bought University Films in 1969.

A veteran children's book author with such titles to his credit as "Laddie,
the Superdog (1954) and "Pal and Peter" (1956), Mr. Gottlieb then wrote "The
Golden Age of Jazz" at the behest of a neighbor who ran the Strand bookstore
in Manhattan. The book went into 12 printings and reasserted his position as
a major name in jazz photography.

He relished the newfound attention, took his photographs on tour and gave
thousands of them to the Library of Congress. His portraits of Holiday,
Charlie Parker, Mildred Bailey and Jimmy Rushing were featured in a 1994
series of U.S. postage stamps commemorating jazz performers.

Once nationally ranked in father-son tennis competitions, Mr. Gottlieb also
had been a frequent table tennis dueler with his friends Ahmet and Nesuhi
Ertegun, the jazz enthusiasts who started Atlantic Records. He said he
turned down the Erteguns as an early investor in their business, explaining,
"I told them I knew good jazz from bad but I couldn't tell a good seller
from a bad seller."

Survivors include his wife of 66 years, Delia Potofsky Gottlieb of Great
Neck; four children, Barbara Gottlieb of Richmond, Steven Gottlieb of
Chesapeake City, Md., Richard Gottlieb of New Paltz, N.Y., and Edward
Gottlieb of Ithaca, N.Y.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.