[Dixielandjazz] Jazzlife - the book

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This fine article from the San Jose Mercury News, Wed, Dec. 14, 2005.
A bit long, but worth the read.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
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Chasing the giants of jazz
WILLIAM CLAXTON'S 1960 PHOTOS CAPTURED A NATION AND ITS MUSICAL ROOTS
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News

We should all have the nerve: When he was 16 and growing up in Los Angeles,
budding photographer William Claxton sneaked backstage at the famous Orpheum
Theatre, knocked on Duke Ellington's dressing room door, introduced himself
to America's greatest musician, and wound up snapping Duke's photo. ``We
were friends until he died,'' Claxton says.

He isn't kidding. Or exaggerating.

For decades, Claxton, now 78, has been a leading fashion and celebrity
photographer, putting his wife, model Peggy Moffitt, in the pages of Time in
a topless swimsuit in 1964 (the magazine, gun-shy, used a back shot) and
capturing Steve McQueen in a fast car in 1962. Those are iconic images.

But it's jazz that first captured Claxton's heart and, really, never let it
go. And it was jazz musicians -- Ellington, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan,
even the young Miles Davis -- who became his friends. For all his hanging
out with Sinatra, Streisand, McQueen and the like, ``Those were
assignments,'' he says. ``I was never a celebrity chaser. Only the musicians
was I a nut about.''

There is a special beauty and intimacy -- a truth -- to Claxton's jazz
images, some of the most revealing ever taken in the music's centurylong
history. ``Claxton was and still is a remarkably sensitive photographer,''
says Orrin Keepnews, the famous jazz record producer in New York and
Berkeley who commissioned Claxton for a number of projects. ``There's a
great human warmth and sensitivity in this guy's work.''

And now hundreds of those images -- about one-third of which have never
before been published -- have been painstakingly reproduced on thick paper
in a lavish volume -- at 695 oversize pages, it's heavy enough to tip over a
coffee table -- titled ``Jazzlife: A Journey for Jazz Across America in
1960.''

That year, Claxton, then 32, and German musicologist Joachim E. Berendt, who
was about 35, rented a 1959 Impala with giant tail fins and a cardboard
cover over the official license plate that read ``See the USA in Your
Chevrolet'' and took off from New York to New Orleans (there are scores of
musical images from that lost world) to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

They were searching for jazz and its roots, not only at clubs but on the
streets, in black churches, at Southern crossroads and on St. Simon Island
off the coast of Georgia, one in the chain of islands where George and Ira
Gershwin set ``Porgy and Bess.''

The book that resulted was first published in 1961; the new ``Jazzlife'' is
its fattened up successor. And while Berendt, who died in an accident in
2000, framed each stop on the itinerary with a learned and insightful essay,
Claxton's images are what make the music and its players leap to life.

Claxton is so proud of it. His older brother was a pianist, his mother a
singer. ``I started off knowing so many musicians as a young kid,'' he says,
``that I was always at home with them and felt that they were my family.''

He captured jazz at a time when it was still popular and ubiquitous, he
points out over lunch in San Francisco, telling stories about the music's
golden age and his role in preserving it with his old Nikon F and Leica M3
cameras.

The images speak clearly of the times -- and of just how comfortable the
musicians felt around Claxton.

There's Ellington on stage in Las Vegas, popping his fingers and looking
debonair, gazing, eyebrows arched, just past Claxton's fly-on-the-wall lens.

There's vibraphonist Cal Tjader, the picture of youth, sprawled on the deck
of his boat, beating a pair of ``bongos'' made from coffee cans, in the
Sausalito sunshine.

There's pianist Thelonious Monk, the enigma, here looking happily dazed,
sipping a champagne cocktail at a San Francisco cafe, staring straight into
the camera.

Claxton -- ``Clax'' to musicians and friends -- shot that one during the Bay
Area leg of the 1960 journey. He was piggybacking an assignment from
Riverside Records to shoot a photo of Monk, who happened to be playing with
his band at the Blackhawk night club, for an upcoming LP cover. The label
wanted a shot of Monk on a cable car, an idea Claxton thought ``corny'' but
pursued nonetheless.

``So I called Thelonious' hotel -- many times, with no answer,'' he
remembers. ``He was always asleep or out. Or both: out of it. But finally I
got him, explained what I hoped to do, and said, `Why don't we meet at this
place, this outdoor cafe in North Beach?' '' It was a short cab drive from
where the cable cars turn around.

Monk wasn't into it. ``I ain't got no cable car eyes,'' he told Claxton.

Nonetheless, the pianist made it to the cafe at around 2 p.m. -- breakfast
time for Monk, who still wasn't up for the photo. That's when Claxton
noticed a laminated card on the table with a picture of an attractive,
smiling young woman, advertising ``champagne cocktails.''

They ``tasted like 7-Up,'' Claxton remembers, laughing, ``and after we had a
few of them, Monk said, `Oh, man, you know a cable car sounds like a good
idea!' I said, `Let's go.' ''

And that's how the well-known album cover happened: It shows Monk, in
raincoat and fedora and with a suitcase in his hand, hanging out of the
cable car.

``If anyone was going to pin me down and make me put together a list of the
half dozen best jazz covers of all time,'' says Keepnews, who gave Claxton
the assignment, ``I would fight to have that one included. Monk on the cable
car. . . . He did a great job with that one, when you stop and consider who
he was dealing with. Monk was not outstandingly cooperative with things like
that.''

Claxton, however, says ``It isn't a great picture.'' He mostly tried for
less predictable images: trumpeter Donald Byrd practicing on Manhattan's A
train, the handful of other passengers pretending not to notice; blues
singer Roosevelt Charles, his face contorted between heavenward praise and
madness, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola; trombonist Kid Ory,
an old Louis Armstrong sidekick from New Orleans, performing in the shadows
on stage at his own On the Levee nightclub on the Embarcadero in San
Francisco, where the Ivy League types flocked to hear traditional jazz 45
years ago.

To Claxton, even they were ``moldy figs. I was on the lookout for bebop,
even post-bop,'' he says. ``I was trying to be a cool guy in a cool world.''

Growing up in the Swing Era, keeping scrapbooks about Benny Goodman, Count
Basie and Lena Horne, and never dreaming that one day he would meet them,
his direction was set. He attended UCLA, majored in psychology (``I was
fancied by the mind and I was really interested in creativity'') and spent
off hours at the small, private, black jazz clubs on Central Avenue where
``booze was served in coffee cups.''

He met Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus (``always a grump''), Benny Carter and
other heroes. After graduating in 1951, he began shooting recording sessions
and musicians' portraits for album covers: trumpeter Shorty Rogers (who
wrote a tune called ``Clickin' with Clax''), the young Ornette Coleman
(``terribly shy; oh, he could hardly speak'') who soon would upend the jazz
world with his revolutionary saxophone, and trumpeter Chet Baker, whose
sexy-lethargic image essentially was created by Claxton.

Claxton also met Igor Stravinsky at a photo shoot for Columbia Records and
went on to attend a number of Sunday afternoon cocktail parties thrown by
the composer and his wife, Vera, in what is now West Hollywood. Over the
years, he photographed Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Judy Garland, Spike
Lee and Sting. A year or two ago, he spent a day photographing Paul
McCartney (``a very smart man and a very nice man'') for a recording date,
and last June he documented an Elton John reunion with songwriter Bernie
Taupin.

In the end, though, jazz accounts for the most personal part of Claxton's
legacy. And the 1960 road trip stands out for him, because it let him
fulfill a dream: ``I always loved photojournalism,'' he says. ``I wanted to
be a Life magazine photojournalist. And on that trip I think I captured the
state of the union by photographing the people, the cars, the restaurants,
the gas stations, the churches, and I think it made it that much richer.

``People say, `Boy, you not only covered the jazz world, you captured an
important slice of America.' It was an unusual time, right before the civil
rights era really happened. It was a short, transitory moment.''

There are so many special moments in ``Jazzlife.'' One finds saxophonist
Hank Mobley standing in the middle of Harlem's 125th Street at night.
There's a fascinating street scene happening right next to him, but Mobley
seems happily oblivious. He stares right at the camera, his arms
outstretched in some sort of salute, his face lit up with a smile.

Years later, Mobley died in Philadelphia. A man with a drinking problem, he
had landed on welfare and fallen off the scene. But here he is, once again
happy to be alive. That's how we'll remember him. Thanks to Clax.

JAZZLIFE:
A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960
Photographs by William Claxton, text by Joachim E. Berendt
Taschen, 695 pp., $200
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Details from the publisher's site:

William Claxton. Jazzlife
Claxton, William / Berendt, Joachim E.
Hardcover + CD, 29.1 x 40.7 cm (11.5 x 16 in.), 696 pages

     Jazzlife (Bonus CD)
     The sights and sounds of American jazz
In 1959 and 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted German musicologist
Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz music.
The result of their collaboration was an amazing collection of photographs
and recordings of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians.

The book Jazzlife, the original fruit of their labors, has become a
collector¹s item that is highly treasured among jazz and photography fans.
In 2003, TASCHEN began reassembling this important collection of
material‹along with many never-before-seen color images from those trips.
They are brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword
by Claxton tracing his travels with Berendt and his love affair with jazz
music in general. Utilizing the benefits of today's digital technology, a
restored audio CD from Joachim Berendt's original recordings has been
produced and is included in this package. Jazz fans will be delighted to be
able to take a jazz-trip through time, both seeing and hearing the music as
Claxton and Berendt originally experienced it.

€ Featuring photographs of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington,
Muddy Waters, Gabor Szabo, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Ella
Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and
many more 
€ Includes bonus CD of digitally remastered recordings of music made during
Berendt and Claxton¹s journey (originally released in 1960 as two records)

The photographer: William Claxton holds a special place in the history of
American‹particularly jazz‹photography. Since his early career‹shooting for
LIFE, Paris Match, and Vogue, among other magazines‹Claxton has worked with
and become friends with many Hollywood luminaries and jazz musicians, most
notably Steve McQueen and Chet Baker (whom Claxton first photographed in
1952 when Baker was young and still unknown). Claxton, whose jazz imagery
has graced the covers of countless albums and magazine covers for over five
decades, is considered the preeminent photographer of jazz music. TASCHEN
has also published Claxton¹s Jazz seen and Steve McQueen.

The author: In Germany, Joachim E. Berendt was called the ³jazz pope², and
indeed he was the most influential non-musician in the German jazz scene for
more than 50 years. He was founding member of South West German Radio
(Südwestfunk) and produced more than 250 records, including many issued on
the MPS-SABA label. In 1953, he first published The Jazzbuch, which became
the most successful history book on jazz worldwide. His collection of
records, books and jazz documents became the basis for the Jazzinstitut
Darmstadt before he died in an accident in 2000. His contributions to jazz
are internationally recognized to this day.
Editions:
English: 3-8228-3066-6 (November 2005)
French: 3-8228-4971-5 (November 2005)
German: 3-8228-4970-7 (November 2005)

List Prices:
USD 200.00 | GBP 100.00 | EUR 150.00 | JPY 25000.00
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