JAZZ: The Iconic Images of Ted Williams.

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“The best Jazz photographer in the world.”

- Julian “Cannonball” Adderley

“In Chicago, if you weren’t captured by Ted, it was like you were never there.”

- Ira Sullivan

“His images were published in major magazines—including Playboy, Ebony, and Life—but he himself remained largely unknown.” 

- Robert Morgan, Iconic Images

A COOL APPRAISAL

“The field of jazz music provides one of the most fascinating challenges to a photographer of any that I know.

The compositions are infinitely varied, involving as they do intriguing patterns set up by microphones, mike booms, and light and shade bouncing off brass instruments.

The moods are just as variable, running the gamut from bright outdoor scenes of summer jazz festivals to the smoky dimness of some of the low dives in which too much jazz is still heard.

And character? Jazz musicians are among the world’s most ruggedly individual inhabitants, and you can have a photographer's field day capturing the facial expressions of these men.

Yet remarkably few photographers get good pictures from jazz. Too many are satisfied with routine shots - head-on pictures of the star (perhaps with the bell of his horn obscuring his face). Or they are hindered by the mike booms and other paraphernalia, instead of taking advantage of them. And, evidently, not enough photographers are yet sufficiently adept at available light shooting to get all the mood possibilities out of dim rooms and spotlights, or concert hall lighting.

As managing editor of DownBeat. I've almost given up on most photographers, even those who are jazz fans and should be able to get good stuff. I stick with Ted Williams, who blends all the elements of jazz into stirring, story-telling pictures.”

The above serves as a Foreword to JAZZ: The Iconic Images of Ted Williams and was written by Eugene 'Gene' Lees a music critic, writer, biographer and lyricist who worked for DownBeat magazine from 1959-1962, part of that time as the magazine’s Managing Editor. Gene also contributed liner notes for the recordings of numerous musicians including Stan Getz and John Coltrane, wrote biographies of Oscar Peterson and Woody Herman and served as the editor and primary writer of the Jazzletter since its inception in 1982.  After a long and distinguished career, Lees passed away in 2010.

ENERGY IS ETERNAL DELIGHT: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF TED WILLIAMS

- JAMES CLARKE

“With a tangible sense of pride, Ted Williams once declared that ‘I just have a deep love for the music, the people and photography’" His feeling for, and knowledge of, the jazz world ran deep and lifelong, and this passion suffused his photographs of the jazz scene with sensitivity and energy. Jazz and Ted Williams formed something approximating a duet; dovetailing near perfectly across four decades.

Most of Ted Williams' archive, comprising both original negatives and photographs, has never been seen before - until now. This book celebrates Williams' jazz photography, one of the richest unseen archives from the jazz era. It's an archive that charts the sweep of jazz and the creative souls who brought the art form to life during the heart of the twentieth century.

During the final years of his life, Williams edited the photographs and began providing captions that detailed where and when an image had been taken. It was a work in progress that he was unable to see through to completion. Williams' jazz photography has been widely celebrated for the way in which it takes viewers on a heartfelt journey into both the on- and off-stage lives of touring, hardworking and often legendary - jazz musicians.

Born in 1925 to an African-American father and a Mexican father, Williams, and his brother Bobby, grew up in a close-knit family. His widow, Adrienne, later recalled ‘When I first met him, he was kind of introverted." She has made the point, however, that although shy, Ted "loved life."

It's perhaps not too much of a leap of the imagination, then, to say that Williams' love of life was the heartbeat in the work for which he would be rightly celebrated.

After World War Two, during which he served in the US Coast Guard, Williams studied saxophone and clarinet before shifting creative gear and attending the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. At that time, the city was the epicenter of American jazz, with Maxwell Street - Williams' territory - at its heart. He became one of the first African-American students to study at IIT, where he pursued photography under the teaching of three key innovators in the tradition of American photography: Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Art Siegel. He was also taught by visionary designer, Buckminster Fuller.

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, Williams' images were published in the iconic American magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, Time, Playboy and Ebony. Not only did he craft pictures that captured the spirit of a jazz performer and the spontaneity of their performance but, beyond the world of music, he also photographed a number of iconic moments in America's Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

Williams' images of the jazz scene captured the playful and the impassioned, the intense and the intimate, and were featured in the essential music magazines, DownBeat and Metronome. It was DownBeat that commissioned his first major piece: a 21-page feature documenting the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. This spread included now-classic and enduring Williams images of such artists as Lester Young, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. Williams' photographs also made the cover of DownBeat on a number of occasions, enshrining Duke Ellington. Mahalia Jackson and Lambert. Hendricks & Ross in the pop-culture pantheon. Williams' talents were also later engaged for album cover images for record labels Vee-Jay and Mercury.

Typically working only with available light, Williams' images emanated an intimacy and spontaneity towards his subjects, and it's in that dynamic where the honesty and truth of his photos is to be found. His longer-term ambition had been that the general public would get to view his images in exhibition settings. In this way, Williams believed that the photographs would offer some illumination on mid-twentieth-century African-American culture.

Williams images captured the focus, the energy and the delight of jazz artists. He pictured jazz legends in their creative element and in doing so he honored a form that has been described as one of America's great contributions to the world's happiness. He photographed virtually every major name in jazz and blues: Dizzy Gillespie. John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk. Dinah Washington. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. Indeed, he photographed Charlie Parker performing on two occasions, one of which was a set at the Persian Room in Chicago, in 1949.

Williams worked as a freelance photographer and he travelled across the US. Europe, Latin America and the Far East on assignment. In the late 1960s, he settled in Los Angeles where he archived his work, storing 100,000 images in shoeboxes and the most modest of files. Critically, Williams' photo archive comprises one of the largest collections of pictures of Duke Ellington taken by a single photographer. The Ellington photos are especially important to jazz history as they include rare images depicting the artist in non-musical situations.

Williams' impassioned work capturing the spirit of jazz also extended to the photographs he took of the American Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps his most recognized photograph from this era is an iconic image of Martin Luther King at the Illinois Rally for Civil Rights, taken on June 21 1964 at Chicago's Soldier Field; King standing with his right fist raised and clenched as he addresses a huge audience. Similarly, as a staff photographer for Ebony magazine. Williams would travel to Vietnam to document the experience of black soldiers during the war.

Recalling Williams' creative impulse. Adrienne has commented that "He just loved shooting. Ted shot different. He loved jazz, he loved music. Most photographers will find a subject and pose their subject. He always liked to jump around, he never sat still. He always carried a camera or two everywhere he went. He'd see something and he'd have to stop."

Williams died from kidney failure on October 13 2009. He remains a figurehead for African-American photographers and a key practitioner in the history of American photography. He has left behind a dazzling photographic odyssey through the world of jazz.

If a picture can capture both the outer and the inner life of a performer then Ted Williams' photographs conjured the magic of an essential American art form.”

The above was written by James Clarke and served as the Introduction to JAZZ: The Iconic Images of Ted Williams.

James Clarke has written several books about movies and writes regularly for major film and media magazines. He has produced and written a number of short-film dramas and documentaries and his work has been screened at film festivals in the UK and the US.