Jazz Festival - The Photography of Jim Marshall

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"This extraordinary book documents, through the brilliant photography of Jim Marshall, one of the most important periods in the cultural history of the United States."

 - NAT HENTOFF

Jazz Festivals today are ubiquitous, but there was a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s when there were only two: one in Newport, RI and the other in Monterey, CA.

In Jazz Festival, Jim Marshall the emphasis is on the latter as it includes Jim’s photographs from the 1960 through 1966 Monterey Jazz Festivals. What is particularly rewarding about these photos is that they contain images of the Jazz fans who attended these MJFs, as well as, the musicians who performed at them. In a sense, these photographs provide a social-cultural photographic document of what it was like to experience the Jazz scene at the pinnacle of its acceptance by a large portion of the American public.

Here’s an overview of Jim and the book as taken from the dust jacket.

“The incomparable JIM MARSHALL (1936-2010) is known as the defining father of music photography and his intimate photographs of the greats of rock & roll, country, folk, blues and jazz are legendary. Renowned for his extraordinary access and ability to capture the perfect moment, his influence is second to none. In 2014, Marshall became the only photographer ever to be honored by the Grammys with a Trustees Award for his life's work.

Published here for the first time ever are Jim Marshall's jazz festival photographs from the 1960s. Over 95 percent of the material in this breathtaking coffee table volume has never been seen before. Marshall's remarkable photographs of the festivals at Newport and Monterey immortalize the unique energy and soul of these celebrations of jazz. This immersive body of work feels like experiencing the atmosphere of those summer days first hand. Marshall's inimitable lens captured the crowd, the fashion, the performances and unguarded moments with jazz icons like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie and many more.

Complete access to Marshall's vast archive has been granted for this book. It features a foreword by President Bill Clinton, and an introduction by legendary jazz writer and historian Nat Hentoff, who places the jazz festivals in the larger context of the civil rights movement in America at the time. 

This is the first in a series of books to be published by R|A|P in collaboration with the Jim Marshall Archive.”

A fuller appreciation of the role of Jazz festivals in American cultural life during their earliest years is contained in the following essay by Graham Marsh.

COAST TO COAST 

Stay cool, look sharp and let the music lay a taste on your ears.

“For any hipster or Young Turk riding on a blue note in the 1960s, jazz festivals were the genuine article. Whether it was at Fort Adams State Park in the resort town of Newport, Rhode Island or at the 20-acre oak-studded Monterey County Fairground in California, it must have been something else! 

Both festivals were like a vinyl record collection coming to life. Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and the endless roll call of jazz luminaries live on stage at Monterey and Newport was an outstanding experience for all those lucky enough to have been there.

You can almost feel the sun's warming rays and an ocean breeze emanating from Jim Marshall's evocative photographs in this book. Jazz Festival is not a nostalgic yearning for the past but a celebration of the continuing cultural craze for all things relating to Modern Jazz and Ivy Look clothing, which for some people who care about these things, is important. Sartorially and musically both are intrinsically still linked and both are without doubt the essence of cool, the ultimate in hip.

Miles Davis, the coolest man on the planet during his ivy-suited period, was probably most responsible for both the "look and sound" of Modern Jazz. The look was predominantly East Coast Ivy League but the sound was uniquely his own. Miles used to get most of his Ivy clothes from Charlie Davidson's Andover Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square. Davidson was a sort of bridge figure between Modern Jazz and the Ivy Look. As well as Miles Davis, Davidson was a friend of George Wein and Charlie Bourgeois, who were both closely associated with the Newport Jazz Festival, and at the same time to a famed journalist, George Frazier, himself a well-known connoisseur of clothes and jazz. Indeed, Frazier christened Miles, "The Warlord of the Weejuns!" If Miles wore it, it was instantly hip.

In the 1960s, when it came to jazz, style was part of me equation in both clothes and attitude. At Monterey and Newport black culture was openly embraced and integrated audiences were the norm. Nobody cared — as long as you looked sharp and dug the music — anything else was just jiving, there was strictly no room for squares. At both festivals, on any given day it was a sea of Bass Weejun loafers, natural shouldered seersucker jackets, essential Lacoste tennis shirts and Clarks desert boots. Definitely on the money were also button-down shirts, chinos and 501 Levi's. Topping off these proto-cool clothes was a formidable array of men and women's hats. 

From straw pork-pie snap-brims with deep Madras bands, back-buckle Ivy sports caps and deeply hip berets to Audrey Hepburn influenced wide-brimmed straw hats and headscarves plus a confection of groovy chapeaus that would not look out of place on the catwalks of a Parisian fashion show.

Just pause for a moment and take a look at the photograph … of trombonist and Blue Note alumni J. J. Johnson, taken in 1961 at Monterey. He is wearing a classic button-down, pop-over shirt with the top button fastened, a pin sharp seersucker jacket and elegantly hip eyeglasses — it doesn't get much better than that. Monterey and Newport were a veritable catalogue of Ivy cool. It was dressing fine, making time and, moreover, a visual feast for Ray-Ban and Persol shaded eyes.

Although the Ivy clothes may have been de rigueur, at the center of it all was the music. It was Ornette Coleman on stage playing his yellow plastic Selmer alto saxophone, accompanied by Don Cherry on pocket trumpet. It was John Coltrane endlessly riffing on some standard-issue show tune. Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan paring the music down and laying it out, looking like fashion plates to the assembled congregation. It was saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins taking care of business, always ahead of the musical curve. His insouciant trademark, top button only fastened on his three button jacket. These musicians were the cat's whiskers and in mid-twentieth-century America it was Modern Jazz that fused the connection between music and the Ivy Look.

The original Monterey and Newport jazz festivals have, over the years, spawned many music festivals worldwide but like Dobie Gray says in his song "The 'In' Crowd"-"The original's still the greatest!" You have bought the book, absorbed the images, now play the music!

But perhaps an even greater significance of Jazz festivals for the nation as a whole is reflected in this essay by Nat Hentoff.”

JAZZ FESTIVALS AND THE CHANGING OF AMERICA

I had never before seen such a large, integrated crowd coming together for a common purpose.

“This extraordinary book documents, through the brilliant photography of Jim Marshall, one of the most important periods in the cultural history of the United States.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Newport and Monterey jazz festivals and the battle for civil rights in the South offered starkly contrasting images of America.

After World War II, US soldiers who fought fascism abroad returned to an apartheid nation at home. Blacks and whites could be found in the same towns and cities throughout America but they existed in different worlds.

This was true for most of America but especially in the Southern states where segregation of the races was brutally enforced by Jim Crow laws that dictated how and where blacks could live, work, eat, travel, go to the bathroom or even take a drink of water. Imprisonment, beatings and lynchings were the penalties for blacks who disobeyed Jim Crow.

In the North, where segregation laws never took root, social norms made it difficult for blacks and whites to socialize together in public. One notable exception was the bars and music venues where they gathered to listen to jazz, the first uniquely American art form.

Yet jazz clubs that allowed too much race mixing, as it was called at the time, could still expect to be leaned on by local police. In the early 1940s, before I could vote, I often lied my way into Boston's Savoy Cafe, where I first came to know jazz musicians. It was the only place in town where blacks and whites were regularly on the stand and in the audience. This led police occasionally to go into the men's room, confiscate the soap, and hand the manager a ticket for unsanitary conditions. There was no law in Boston against mixing the races, but it was frowned on in official circles. I used to hear similar complaints from jazz club owners in New York City during the 1950s.

All of this began to change during the summer of 1954. On May 17, the US Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that segregation was a violation of the US Constitution. On July 11, the first White Citizens' Council was formed in Indianola, Mississippi, dedicated to preventing the integration of the South. And on July 17 and 18, the first jazz festival was held in Newport, Rhode Island.

The Citizens' Councils soon spread throughout the South, unleashing a wave of terror directed at non-violent civil rights protesters. While Jim Marshall photographed integrated crowds peacefully digging each other's company at jazz festivals, news photographs of police dogs attacking black men, women and children captured a very different reality in the South.

The roots of jazz, as well as the roots of the civil rights movement, can be found in the field hollers of slaves reaching out to each other across plantations; gospel songs and prayers connecting slavery here with stories of deliverance of Jews from slavery in the Old Testament; and the blues, the common language of jazz, echoing in Armstrong singing "What did I do to be so black and blue?"

In The Triumph of Music (Harvard University Press) Tim Blanning of Cambridge University tells how black musicians helped prepare America for the civil rights movement. As when opera singer Marian Anderson, denied permission to sing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, was invited to instead sing at the Lincoln memorial by Eleanor Roosevelt. She returned to the Lincoln memorial in 1963, during the March on Washington, to sing the spiritual, "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands."

I was there, at the back of the stage, covering this typhoon of protest for Westinghouse radio, as Mahalia Jackson performed "I've Been Buked and I've Been Scorned," before she sang out: "Tell them about your dream, Martin!"

Outside of the Newport and Monterey jazz festivals, I had never before seen such a large, integrated crowd coming together for a common purpose. As jazz reached deeply into more white Americans, America began to change.”

If you want to see what this “change” looked like at its beginnings, Jim Marshall’s Jazz Festival is a great place to start.