© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
The following article takes - dare I say - the illustrious [literally] history of Jazz whose rich tradition includes such luminary designers as David Stone Martin [Clef, Norgan, Verve], S. Neil Fujita [Columbia], Robert Guidi/Tri-Arts [Contemporary], Jim Flora [RCA], Reid Miles [Blue Note] among many others - to the next level as Niklaus Troxler not only makes poster art [and CD jewel case covers and book covers], but also hires the musicians for his own Jazz festival which he has staged over four days each summer in Willisau, SZ beginning in 1975.
For as Michael Bierut, a partner in New York based Pentagram Design Group puts it: "I think every designer has a fantasy that they can somehow merge their enthusiasms, and have their life and work become one. For most of us this is hard to pull off. I know some designers, for instance, who decide they want to open a restaurant. They design a logo and menus, and then discover that running a restaurant is hard. So goodbye restaurant. To succeed takes a kind of generalized fanaticism, which is actually pretty rare. Troxler has it like few others."
© Copyright ® New York Times and Alice Rawsthorn, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Niklaus Troxler: A festival's founder illustrates his passion for jazz
By ALICE RAWSTHORN MARCH 4, 2007 NY Times
“LONDON — When legions of jazz buffs descend on the Swiss farming town of Willisau for its annual jazz festival, they discover the streets filled with posters dedicated to Cecil Taylor, Dexter Gordon, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, the Kronos Quartet or whoever else is playing that year.
Ever since the first festival in 1975, the posters have been the same size, printed in the same workshop and designed by the same man, the Swiss graphic designer and founder of Jazz in Willisau, Niklaus Troxler. Some are illustrative. Others have specially created typefaces. Many are visual puns depicting images in letters. All of the posters sparkle with Troxler's twin passions for jazz and design.
Troxler has become a cult figure in both the jazz and design worlds. This spring his posters for the festival are to be celebrated in an exhibition and concert at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center. With Cecil Taylor on the bill, the concert is to be a benefit performance for Common Ground, a nonprofit organization supporting the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and it has sold out.
Over the years many graphic designers have fused a personal passion with their work, particularly in music. Take Reid Miles, who designed the covers of the records of the American jazz label Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s. Or the British designer Barney Bubbles and his psychedelic album sleeves for Hawkwind in the 1970s; and Peter Saville's artwork for Joy Division and New Order since the early 1980s. Yet few designers have fused the personal and professional as completely as Troxler, whose working life is dominated by the festival, for which he orchestrates every detail, from booking musicians to balancing the budget.
"I think every designer has a fantasy that they can somehow merge their enthusiasms, and have their life and work become one," said the graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner of the Pentagram design group in New York. "For most of us this is hard to pull off. I know some designers, for instance, who decide they want to open a restaurant. They design a logo and menus, and then discover that running a restaurant is hard. So goodbye restaurant. To succeed takes a kind of generalized fanaticism, which is actually pretty rare. Troxler has it like few others."
Born in Willisau in 1947, Troxler discovered jazz in his teens. "I'd listen to it on the radio," he recalled. "My first interest was in more traditional styles, then Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and soon Miles Davis and the avant-garde." In 1966, when he was 19, he organized his first jazz concert. Yet Troxler was also interested in graphic design, particularly in the posters of Herbert Leupin and other Swiss designers. After leaving school in 1963, he trained as a typographer and, four years later, enrolled at Lucerne Art School to study graphic design. After graduation, he worked in Paris for a few years, before returning to Willisau in 1973 to open his own design studio.
Troxler continued to put on concerts, and in 1975 he upped the ante by staging a four-day jazz festival. "The first festivals were all in the avant-garde style," he said. "We had all the great masters of free jazz — Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, Sam Rivers and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. People came from all over the world."
Having designed the posters for all of his concerts, since the first one in 1966, Troxler continued to produce them for the festivals, working from his attic studio in a wooden chalet. He executes other design projects, too, mostly for Swiss arts organizations, but the festival and its posters always take priority.
The blank canvas of the poster has long been a rich medium for graphic designers. Switzerland has a fine history of modern poster design: from Herbert Matter in the 1930s and Joseph Müller-Brockmann in the 1960s, to Wolfgang Weingart in the 1980s and, now, Ralph Schraivogel. "Today when information is carried much more effectively by other means, such as email blasts, posters have become pure acts of vanity or love," said Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "In Troxler's case, it's definitely love."
Troxler belongs to the Swiss poster tradition, despite seeing himself as an outsider. "I never wanted to look like a typical Swiss graphic designer," he said. "My influences come more from Pop Art, different art styles and, of course, the music. I always wanted to get sound into my posters, and also movement and rhythm." He begins each poster by searching for metaphors of the music, then expresses them in illustrations or typography, but never photography, which he considers to be clichéd.
For "A Tribute to Thelonious Monk" in 1986, Troxler traced Monk's profile in lettering. "I wanted to visualize Monk's favorite composition, 'Round About Midnight,'" he recalled. "First I drew portraits of him, then, finally, I did it just with type." A 1989 poster for Cecil Taylor features the top of a finger, which alludes to "the radical playing of Taylor — fast until the end, to total pain."
Troxler often creates new typefaces for his posters, like the alphabet of rubber stamps he made for Jazz Italia in 2000. He also enjoys writing words by hand, as he did with last year's poster for Marty Ehrlich. To reflect Ehrlich's interest in politics and social issues, Troxler daubed the information about the concert in white paint on a carefully selected front page of The New York Times.
Graphic purists have criticized Troxler for being too eclectic in style, but for his admirers that's part of his appeal. "I love the poster series because it so neatly recapitulates the design history of the last few decades," said Michael Bierut. "You see the influence of Push Pin eclecticism, California new wave, Swiss post-modernism and post- punk grunge, all passed through the unique prism of a guy working in a really small town in Switzerland."
