Transcript for the Piece Audio version of WNYC's Fishko Files: Jazz Photography

Jazz Photography script

At a downtown gallery in New York on a recent Thursday night, I stood in a crowd, transfixed my still pictures of Miles Davis taken by various photographers. Davis was maybe as interesting to look at as he was to hear. He’s always a draw. But old jazz photos in general are magnetic, partly because they take you back, says one member of the crowd.

Crowd member: ... the moodiness, the intensity...I have a nostalgia for something I missed, this was like the heyday, you know...

What people think of as the heyday of jazz was just as alluring for the photographers who documented it. After all, they started as jazz fans themselves.

Herman Leonard: I was a teenager. We had no television or anything like that. We had the radio, but jazz on the radio was not very available at the time because there was no audience for it.

Photographer Herman Leonard grew up in a household filled with the music
of Bach and Beethoven...

Herman Leonard: Y’know they were nice, but they didn’t excite me, until one day I turned on the radio and they had a local radio station with a disc jockey and he put on a record by Louis Jordon. I remember some of the lyrics: How high, how high am I? I won’t get sober ‘til the 4th of July; Y’know, the rhythm of the thing made my feet tap. That’s how I got into this thing.

Leonard studied photography in college; served in World War II; and then landed in New York in 1948...

Herman Leonard: In those days, there were no jazz photographers. There was no market for it. I got paid 10 dollars by Downbeat Magazine. You can’t make a living out of that...

It was common, then, for photo subjects to go to photographers’ studios.
But photographer Herman Leonard went to the subjects, he took his camera to the clubs instead.

Herman Leonard: Then I was working with a 4X5 speed graphic. It was the newspaper camera. The kind you see in old movies with these lengths of photographers and their flashbulbs going off. It’s a big camera and I could only carry maybe 10 or 15 holders...each would had two sheets of film in them. So I was limited to 20 or 30 shots the whole night.

And lighting the dark clubs was a challenge...

Herman Leonard: My whole purpose of shooting them in the beginning was to make a visual record of what I was experiencing. So I put my lights in the same places where the lights were in the club. There was always a spotlight on the microphone, so I put my light right next to their light. I wanted to preserve the atmosphere of the club; I didn’t want to change anything.

One of Leonard’s signature images is his picture of Duke Ellington, on stage, at the piano, silhouetted by dramatically white beams of light. He remembers the moment of having taken the picture so well...

Herman Leonard: I clicked the camera – of course the audience couldn’t hear it because I was pretty far back – but he heard it, and he looked over and gave me a wink. That was my reward, more than the photo, that was my reward.

Leonard’s photos put jazz players on a kind of pedestal – there’s striking light and atmospheric, curling smoke in so many of the pictures...

Herman Leonard: They all smoked! And if you used the lighting the way I used it, it accentuated the smoke. the backlight is what brought out the smoke...but with the smoke there’s animation, there’s drama. Now I didn’t design that, it just happened...

A jazz photograph, like jazz itself, is to some degree, about what just happens. It can’t really be planned beyond a certain point. For Roy DeCarava, photographing jazz players starting in the late 40s, it was more a question of removing the pedestal -- bringing the exalted musicians down to earth...

Roy DeCarava: I felt they were being ignored as people, and were just entertainers, and when they put their horn down they lost their identity. So I also wanted to show them as human beings, just people. Every gesture had meaning, and they don’t have to be playing – just the way they sit, the way they move, and the language that their bodies give off… fantastic.

DeCarava’s shot of Dizzy Gillespie dancing, for example. Or the one of Thelonious Monk just standing, holding his hat in his two hands.

Roy DeCarava: Funny thing about Monk’s music: I always identified it with children’s rhymes. It was almost like some of the things I would hear as a kid... and that’s what attracted me to him.

DeCarava had his own jazz awakening, in Harlem, in his teen years...

Roy DeCarava: On 125th Street they had 4 theaters and every musician in the world came through those four doors. In fact, I was in high school, and every Friday the shows changed – a new show would come in -- and every Friday, nobody was in school. It was just a glorious time.

With photography, he could come that much closer to jazz. After all, a photographer can’t make 2 photographs exactly alike any more than a jazz player can play a tune exactly the same way twice...

Roy DeCarava: ... that’s the interesting thing, it also works for me in photographs: it’s very difficult...to reproduce something that you have done before.

Photography, says DeCarava, is an intractable process.

Roy DeCarava: You know why? Because it’s such a success! it’s so descriptive. How can you compete with a process that can show you infinite detail that you can’t even see? How do you take that process which is (clap!) –how do you photograph feeling? I still don’t know that I know the answer, but that’s what I strive for. That’s what I want.

Herman Leonard: The camera can only photograph what’s in front of the lens…and I think a large part of whatever success I’ve had was due to improvisation. Y’know, like going to a club – you never know where the guy’s gonna stand or where he’s gonna look or what angle he’s gonna take…Sometimes improvisation yields nothing, but sometimes it yields things that you could have never imagined, and that’s the joy of it.

Improvisers shooting photos of people improvising. It makes those frozen moments in jazz so good to look at.

For WNYC, I’m Sara Fishko

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