[Dixielandjazz] Review: Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz-- NYTimes 12-15

[Norman Vickers]

To: Musicians and Jazzfans; DJML

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Here's review of Ben Cawthra's book: Blue Notes in Black and White:
Photography and jazz from NYTimes December 15.

Click the link to see the photos.  Otherwise, it's printed below.

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/books/blue-notes-in-black-and-white-by-ben
jamin-cawthra-review.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/books/blue-notes-in-black-and-white-by-be
njamin-cawthra-review.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print> &pagewanted=print

  _____  

December 15, 2011


They Put the Face on an American Sound


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ben_ratliff/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> BEN RATLIFF


BLUE NOTES IN BLACK AND WHITE

Photography and Jazz

By Benjamin Cawthra

Illustrated. 345 pages. University of Chicago Press. $45.

Benjamin Cawthra's "Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz" is
not entirely, or specifically, about its subtitle. That would be a book with
a lot more images, or at least with more concentrated information on the
history of all kinds of jazz photography over the last century, in
newspapers and magazines and in the promotional campaigns of record
companies.

Instead, this occasionally powerful but uneven book is a selective and
essayistic history on how the still-image camera conferred cultural
legitimacy to jazz as black music, for the most part between the late 1930s
and the mid-1960s. It analyzes the early photo spreads on jazz in Life
magazine, as well as the writing and the layouts; the development of bebop,
with its own visual code, as rendered by the jazz press; and the diverging
looks of late-1950s jazz as suggested by album covers released by
independent labels in New York and Los Angeles. (Shadows and cigarette smoke
versus sunlight and oceanfront.) It deals at length with Dizzy Gillespie,
Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, and how pictures of them on and off stage
helped build or maintain their personas.
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/16/arts/20111216-BOOK.html?=intrp>
Slide Show: More jazz images.

The book focuses on art photographers, or photojournalists with a serious
interest in photography as art, and it shows you their relationships and
lines of influence. (
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/arts/design/15stock.html?scp=1&sq=dennis%
20stock&st=cse> Dennis Stock, who took the book's cover photo of Miles Davis
in 1957, worked as an assistant to Gjon Mili, the innovative
Albanian-American photojournalist;
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/arts/music/18leonard.html?scp=3&sq=%22the
%20birth%20of%20bebop%22&st=cse> Herman Leonard worked for Yousuf Karsh, the
Armenian-Canadian portraitist;
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/arts/design/14claxton.html?scp=1&sq=willi
am%20claxton&st=cse> William Claxton studied the images of Leonard; Roy
DeCarava benefited from the patronage of Edward Steichen.) It considers
aesthetic, ethical and political questions engaged by photographers
including
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DEEDC123FF936A15757C0A960
9C8B63&scp=2&sq=william%20gottlieb&st=cse> William Gottlieb,
<http://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/16/obituaries/gjon-mili-life-magazine-photog
rapher-dies.html> Mili and
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/roy_decarava/i
ndex.html?scp=1-spot&sq=roy%20de%20carava&st=cse> DeCarava.   It is to a
lesser extent about the individual photographers' technique and visual
style: Leonard's, glamorous and backlighted; Mili's, stark and stroboscopic;
DeCarava's, shadowy and suggestive.

It is also about power relationships between photographers and their
subjects, or between photographers and editorial strictures, lack of
curiosity, ignorance. It's about white people photographing black people,
and then about black people photographing black people. It's about
reception, an inquiry into how the most reproduced images in jazz helped
change general opinion about the music. And it is always about race.

Dr. Cawthra is an associate professor of history at California State,
Fullerton, and this is his first book. In his acknowledgments, he explains
that he came to both subjects, jazz and photography, in the last decade or
so. That's good: you sense an author consumed and excited by his subject.
He's synthesized loads of the literature and argument around jazz, and he
builds particularly on recent works of historiography.

"Blue Notes" has on its mind Scott DeVeaux's 1997 book, "The Birth of
Bebop," which argues for an understanding of that music as a slow, organic,
social and aesthetic development rather than a bolt of transgression, and
John Gennari's 2006 study "Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics." And
also, to some degree, Ken Burns's television series "Jazz," with its
subplots about the music's slow move toward public respectability and its
importance in the history of civil rights.

Dr. Cawthra argues that the early images of jazz, before the music was
noticed much by the mainstream press, amounted to a "secret history" until
the 1980s, when they were rediscovered. Here he's telling you that this book
will not be like "Black Beauty, White Heat," by Frank Driggs and Harris
Lewine from 1982, a book exploding with images and little text, suggesting
the variety and messiness of jazz as business and performance. And perhaps
he's explaining why he deals only in passing with the huge number of
pictures taken in the 1950s and '60s by the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith,
an archive that has recently come to light and has already had its own
dedicated book, Sam Stephenson's
<http://www.nytimes.com/gift-guide/holiday-2009/giftguide-giftbooks/list.htm
l?scp=7&sq=SAM%20STEPHENSON&st=cse> "The Jazz Loft Project."

Because "Blue Notes in Black and White" leans toward photography with a
higher purpose, it has less time for images by more purely journalistic or
commercial photographers. You won't read here about Teenie Harris, who took
backstage photos of touring musicians during the '40s and '50s for The
Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper (some of those photographs are on
display in a  <http://teenie.cmoa.org/interactive/index.html> major
retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh); or about Popsie
Randolph, manager for the Benny Goodman and Woody Herman orchestras, who
sidelined as a commercial photographer.

The book's analysis of certain photographs sometimes serves the author's
guiding idea more than it serves the pictures themselves. Miles Davis's
career took off when the LP format was relatively new; the author explains
how Davis, in one way or another, altered the role of the photographed jazz
musician, through his staged photos for Columbia Records and otherwise.
(Even, for instance, in the casual indignation he shows in a newspaper
photograph taken just after he'd been beaten by the police outside a New
York club in 1959.)

About a portrait of Davis on the cover of the album "Milestones," taken by
Stock, Dr. Cawthra writes, "Stock stares at Davis through his lens, a
traditional position of power expressed as surveillance, but rather than
project subservience by looking down or away, Davis stares directly back."
Definitely. There is a defiant energy in that photograph.

But describing another photo of Stock's, the book-cover image of Davis
playing in a nightclub, we read this: "Stock's Davis seems withdrawn and
unapproachable as he occupies a visual plane distinct from his listeners,
even though he appears to be performing at ground level rather than on a
stage. He is less a tactile sculpture than an elusive shadow in a dark
room." I don't know about that. To others it might just look like a musician
half-turned from the audience for a number of possible reasons on a low
stage. It's not that mysterious.

Late in the book Dr. Cawthra finds his stride in a strong chapter on
DeCarava and John Coltrane, comparing them as artists. They both kept
finding ways to enlarge the possibilities of their art forms, he writes,
even as they had problems with public acceptance. (Some of Coltrane's
audiences found his playing difficult starting in the late 1950s; DeCarava
encountered resistance from magazine editors and art directors at around the
same time, even after he had been included in "The Family of Man," the group
exhibition organized by Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.)

They both encouraged younger black artists in their fields: DeCarava with
his Kamoinge Workshop, a cooperative formed to create commercial
opportunities for black photographers, and Coltrane with his hiring of
Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp as sidemen.

They were investigating a kind of folk-art urgency, an art of community and
communication and survival. DeCarava, who died in 2009, explicitly spoke of
his work as coming from a "black aesthetic."

It matters, of course, that DeCarava's pictures of Coltrane, kinetically
powerful and lighted naturally, are some of the greatest of all images in
jazz. So it's disappointing that they aren't in the book, presumably due to
permissions issues. The only DeCarava image reproduced in the chapter is
from the cover of "The Sweet Flypaper of Life," his book-length photo essay
with Langston Hughes.

"Blue Notes" keeps flickering between narrow and wide focus. At his best Dr.
Cawthra analyzes pictures of individual musicians and elucidates their
context, searching for messages and narratives about jazz as a whole. But he
seems unable to write about jazz photography without recapitulating history
of related subjects: the writing, graphics and marketing of journalism; the
record business; and the music itself, through its styles and eras and
general aesthetics. These are matters that have been covered better
elsewhere, in other books that barely mention photography at all.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2011

The Books of The Times review on Friday, about "Blue Notes in Black and
White: Photography and Jazz," by Benjamin Cawthra, misstated the name of a
photojournalist who took many pictures of jazz musicians. He was W. Eugene
Smith, not Eugene W. Smith.