Category: Seminar series

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SEMINAR SERIES: Jazz Studies | Brian Homer on ‘Jazz and Photography’

The Iconography of Jazz and Photography

by Brian Homer

My proposal is that the styles and techniques of photography translated into the use of photography in jazz made a profound impact on the iconography of jazz and how we view jazz. To illustrate this I am going to take some selected examples of jazz photography and look at how they were possibly influenced by other photographic uses. First, I am going to take the iconic image of John Coltrane taken by Francis Wolff, and used on the cover of Blue Train, by the designer Reid Miles.

The Blue Train session took place in 1957. The image chosen shows a reflective Coltrane with his hand to his chin looking down and intent. His sax is slung across him. This image is not in the common language of the gig/playing image that is very prevalent in jazz. Rather, I would argue that this image is in a documentary photography style and has similarities to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Woman image (1936) taken California while working for the Reconstruction Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) of a destitute and starving family.

The mother has her hand to her chin and is looking reflectively to her right with two of her children either side of her but facing away from the camera. The effect is very similar in both images – allowing the viewer into the picture to speculate on what is going through the mind of the subject. Wolff was a migrant from Germany and being a keen photographer would, no doubt, have been exposed to the documentary styles becoming prevalent in Europe and the USA.

Turning to the cover of Donald Byrd’s A New Perspective, also on Blue Note from 1964, a different photographic influence is at play. By this time, corporate identity and conceptual graphic design were developing rapidly. In this shot, by the designer Reid Miles, the main element is not the musician but the eccentrically shaped headlight cover of a Jaguar E Type, situated in the bottom left of the image. The lines of the bonnet, wings and windscreen lead to Byrd.

This kind of wide angle shot is unusual for the time. I suggest this was influenced by Russian Constructivism. Photographers in that movement were looking for modern, futuristic ways of representation that would foreground progress and technology; to achieve this they used angles, shadows.

European emigré designers and artists came to the US during the 1930s; one of these was Russian Alexey Brodovitch. Brodovitch became the designer of Harper’s Bazaar and in his layout style and use of photography was very influential. He taught many photographers including Irving Penn and Richard Avedon and while there is no evidence of a direct link to Miles it would not be surprising if in the creative milieu of New York in the 50s and 60s such influence rubbed off on an up and coming designer.

I’ll finish with two questions:

  1. First: does jazz photography now have an impact on how we perceive jazz?
  2. Second: are jazz photographers like me missing a trick in concentrating mainly on performance pictures?

Both of these would bear further study.

 

Brian’s paper was delivered on 28 February 2018 as part of the BCMCR Seminar Series. 

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SEMINAR SERIES: Jazz Studies | Nicolas Pillai on ‘Duke Ellington in Coventry’

Duke Ellington in Coventry: discovering television and jazz in the cathedral archive

by Nicolas Pillai

In February 1966, as part of the British leg of their European tour, Duke Ellington and his orchestra travelled to the Midlands city of Coventry to perform their first Concert of Sacred Music at the new cathedral. This remarkable event was televised on the Midlands ABC channel and, in this paper, I considered the concert as both a live experience and recorded artefact. I argued that the Coventry performance is significant in the way that it occupies different, seemingly contradictory, spaces: both local and national, secular and divine.

It also proposes a startling environment for jazz music; the severe, modernist cathedral designed by Basil Spence as part of a larger spatial re-conception of Coventry occurring over the 1950s and 1960s. The sound of Ellington’s orchestra echoing within this cavernous place of worship suggests a shift in the British reception of jazz, expressed through the juxtaposition of music and innovative architecture.

I described my journey through archives both regional and national, attempting to create a composite of a programme thought lost, my eventual discovery of the badly degraded programme in the Studiocanal archive and my collaboration with the archive TV company Kaleidoscope and the University of Warwick Ghost Town project which aims to screen a restored version of the programme in the cathedral, along with a recreation of the concert by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Duke Ellington Orchestra. I concluded this paper by reflecting upon the survival and afterlife of archive television, demonstrating ways in the Ellington in Coventry research it builds upon and widens the scope of my current AHRC-funded project Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969.

 

Nicolas’s paper was delivered on 21 February 2018 as part of the BCMCR Seminar Series. 

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SEMINAR SERIES: Jazz Studies | Translating Curatorial Practice

For the first seminar in the BCMCR Seminar Series, Fiona Talkington and Sid Peacock explored how curatorial practice might be understood in terms of cultural translation.

In this post, I’ll explore Fiona’s talk in a little more detail and tease out a couple of the questions that interested me.

Fiona Talkington (BBC Radio 3) – If Mountains Could Sing

Fiona presented a paper on her experiences curating Norwegian Jazz. She described how her passion for the promotion and circulation of Norwegian jazz began; and traced the journey it took, from the humble, self-effacing musicians she spoke to in Oslo’s jazz bars, to the intricate, highly creative musical collaborations she organized later in her career.

Among the collaborative highlights outlined in her paper, one stood out: Fiona set up the ‘conexions’ series wherein she brought together Norwegian and British musicians for live performances (you can see the Intro to the 2013 event here). The twist here being that in some cases they’d never played with each other before. The music they played or improvised together took on the characteristic of an informal dialogue, produced in the moment, and proved both culturally enriching and profoundly creative.

What struck me about Fiona’s account was her intuition that something about Jazz managed to transcend linguistic differences, at least to some degree. Fiona spoke of its capacity to move and affect the listener, and that the effects it produced in the listener were comparable between British and Norwegian cultures;  put another way, what she liked about Norwegian Jazz (rhythms, peaks, harmonies) was what Norwegians liked about Norwegian Jazz.

This gestures towards an interesting point about the translation of affect from Norway to Britain. It suggests that common or equivalent feelings might be produced and experienced via non-linguistic medium, even if the specific articulation of those feelings takes place in different languages. In other words, we might feel the same things (but  articulate those feelings in a different language, according to local and specific ways of understanding feelings, and so on).

I was also interested in the limitations to the cross-cultural movements of jazz. Money for jazz festivals, said Fiona, was in relative abundance when she first visited in the 90s, at least in Norway, but the shifting political and economic landscape had changed considerably since then and she reported that funding has begun to dry up. The consequences for the continued flourishing

Fiona also raised an interesting point about gender: a high proportion of the musicians that found prominence on the Norwegian Jazz scene were male, while those involved in managing festivals and setting up collaborations both in Norway and transnationally tended to be female. This gendered division of labour, at least to me, could be seen as gesturing towards broader structural patterns of inequality that shape the ways in which music is circulated globally. Certainly food for thought.