JAZZ: The Iconic Images of Ted Williams.

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“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.

From Marshall to Williams to Jazz Photography

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There's a significance, too, in the way [Jim] Marshall's photographs tend to soften the sharp cultural divisions of his time. Barriers — between races, between classes, between celebrity and civilian — are broken down under the scrutiny of Marshall's lens. … In these photographs exists real proof of the ability of Americans to heal the wounds of divisiveness through music, one of humanity's great unifiers.”

- Brian Zimmerman, Managing Editor, Downbeat

The current issue of Downbeat [December/2016] has reviews of new books about the Jazz photographers Jim Marshall and Ted Williams by Bobby Reed [editor] and Brian Zimmerman [managing editor], respectively.

Jazz has been very fortunate to have a large part of its legacy preserved in the many iconic images taken through the years by photographic artists such as William Claxton, Francis Wolff, Herman Leonard, Chuck Stewart, Esmond Edwards, William Gottlieb, Paul Hoeffler, Bob Willoughby, Lee Tanner, Ray Avery, Jan Persson, Kathy Sloane, Raymond Ross, and Burt Goldblatt.

The music and its makers are fortunate, too, in having well-trained and highly experienced professionals such as Cynthia Sesso who work in relationship to the legacy of many of these Jazz photographers as archivists, photo representation and licensors, special projects researchers and exhibitions curators. You can find out more about Cynthia, the photographers she represents and her work on their behalf by visiting her website at http://www.ctsimages.com.

Cynthia has been more than generous to the editorial staff at JazzProfiles in granting us the privilege of using the images of photographers that she represents as part of many of the features that post to the blog.

As a note in passing, Cynthia represents photographer Ted Williams’ work, as well as, many of the others listed above.

Both the Jim Marshall collection and the Ted Williams compilations would make excellent choices as holiday gifts and are represented as such in the Downbeat December 2016 issue.

Let’s begin with Bobby Reed’s review which he entitles Williams’ Amazing Artistry:

“Sports aficionados around the world revere  Ted Williams (1918-2002), one of the I greatest baseball players to ever pick up a bat. Similarly, photojournalism aficionados around the world revere a man with the same name: Ted Williams (1925-2009), one of the greatest photographers to ever pick up a camera.

During his long career, Williams shot major events in sports, politics, culture and music. He photographed Dr. Martin Luther King and many marches of the Civil Rights Movement. He covered the war in Vietnam. He photographed the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Williams' images were published in numerous magazines, including Ebony, Look, Time, Newsweek and Metronome.

Williams also enjoyed a fruitful relationship with DownBeat. He made a big splash with his extensive coverage of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. He would go on to provide the photos for some of the most famous DownBeat covers in history. Many of those images are compiled in the gorgeous, 352-page coffee-table book Jazz: The Iconic Images of Ted Williams (ACC Editions).

When Williams passed away in 2009, he left behind nearly 100,000 prints and negatives. Jazz is the first book dedicated to Williams' jazz photography, highlighting dozens of images that have never been previously published. The images are augmented with Williams' own comments as well as analysis from jazz historians and journalists.

Williams proves himself to be just as poetic with a pen as he was with a camera. Here's what he wrote about his portrait of Sarah Vaughan taken backstage in Chicago in 1948: "I was a student at The Institute of Design at the time, and called Sarah directly at her hotel (possible in those days) and received permission to photograph her in her dressing room for the next issue of a nonexistent college newspaper.

"Dave Garroway (the first Today show host) was a well-known Chicago disc jockey then and 'Sissy's' biggest and most vocal fan. When she came onstage, [Garroway] preceded her, scattering rose petals for her to walk on. This got a lot of press locally and did not resonate too well with a few bigots that took notice.

"About mid-week, a group sat in the front row and waited for Sarah to start singing, and proceeded to throw tomatoes at her.

"This photo was taken a few days before that notorious incident."

The book is chock-full of moments that will intrigue jazz buffs. For example, in 1953 at Chicago's Blue Note club, Williams photographed a rehearsal by members of pianist George Shearing's quintet. This resulted in a beautiful portrait of the group's handsome, mustachioed, bespectacled guitarist: Toots Thielemans, who would later become the most famous harmonica player in jazz history.

Williams' 1961 photo of Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton performing inside a CBS-TV studio captures the excitement and formality of the situation, with both men wearing dress shirts and neckties, Diz's cheeks inflated and Hamp's right-hand mallet a blur hovering above the vibraphone.

Williams' 1956 portrait of singer Carmen McRae has the elegance and sumptuous beauty of a Cecil Beaton portrait. Williams was equally skilled whether he was shooting a musician onstage or off. For an action shot of organ player Jimmy Smith, Williams bent down close to instrument's keys, giving the viewer a better-than-bird’s-eye-view of a master s fingers at work.

Among the DownBeat covers reproduced in the book are ones featuring Williams' photos of Oscar Peterson vividly gesturing as he explains a point (Oct. 29,1959), Art Farmer and Benny Golson laughing together (Sept. 1,1960) and Ray Charles using an engraved cigarette lighter (Sept. 12,1963).

Some of these DownBeat covers provide fantastic details about what was happening in jazz at the time. The June 30, 1966, cover has a moody shot of Dave Brubeck, hands on piano keys and head bowed. The headline for that cover story is a simple: "Dave Brubeck, Composer." But the same issue contains this screaming headline: "Don Ellis: The Avant-Garde Is Not Avant-Garde!" When Oscar Brown Jr. appeared on the cover of the Dec. 6, 1962, issue, with the headline "Rebel With A Cause," one of the other stories was "Lennie Tristano Speaks Out: What Happened To The Jazz In Jazz?"

The book's index of images is a who's who of the greatest names in jazz—Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Stan Getz among them.

Williams was an important part of jazz history, and this book belongs in the collection of anyone interested in the history of America's greatest art form.                        

—Bobby Reed”

Ordering info:

www.antiquecollectorsclub.com/

Brian Zimmerman’s review of the new book about Jim Marshall’s work is entitled Classic Images.

The best photographs linger in the mind even after you shut your eyes. It's the same with great jazz songs, whose melodies seem to stay awhile, even after the last note sounds. In both, there's a sense of eternity, which is why the marriage of the two— as in the jazz images of photographer Jim Marshall—can seem timeless.

Marshall, the only photographer to be honored with a Trustees Award by the Grammy foundation, has long been known for his iconic images of rock musicians, many of which have become signifiers of the music itself—think Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, or Johnny Cash extending his middle finger to the camera during his 1969 San Quentin Prison show. These photos do more than just document a moment: They capture spirit of the music itself. That kind of artistry requires more than merely good lighting and the right lens.

Jazz music—with its insistence on spontaneity—thrives on live performance, and during the 1960s, few cultural phenomena better embodied this notion than the Newport and Monterey jazz festivals. Even in those nascent years (the Newport Jazz Festival began in 1954, the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958), there could be gleaned from these annual gatherings a sense that jazz was speaking to the masses. Few photographers tapped into the Zeitgeist of these moments better than Marshall, whose photos have been collected into a new coffee-table book, Jazz Festival: Jim Marshall (Reel ArtPress).

Compiled by photographer Amelia Davis, the bulk of the 600-plus black-and-white images within Jazz Festival are entirely new, revelatory even to the most dedicated fans of Marshall's work. Carefully catalogued across more than 300 pages, the photos capture in Marshall's typically illuminating style jazz's leading figures of the day—John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Sonny Rollins—as well as the eager and intriguing crowds that flocked to California and Rhode Island to see them. Essays and introductions by President Bill Clinton and jazz journalist Nat Hentoff brace the reader for exploration, but the photos lend themselves to interminable searching.

Perhaps this is because Marshall's photographs seem to carve out greater slices of time than the mere split-second they document on film. Each image is packed with momentum, capturing a sense of motion, of possibility, of improvisation. In Marshall's shot of Duke Ellington and Paul Gonsalves at the 1961 Monterey Jazz Festival, notice how the image begins to play like a movie in your mind, how you can practically hear Gonsalves' iridescent solo unspooling like a soundtrack, how you can practically envision the action unfolding— Ellington clapping, urging his brilliant saxophonist on. There's life beneath these frozen moments, an energy preserved.

There's a significance, too, in the way Marshall's photographs tend to soften the sharp cultural divisions of his time. Barriers— between races, between classes, between celebrity and civilian—are broken down under the scrutiny of Marshall's lens. At Monterey in 1963, Marshall captures Miles Davis and Harry James—avatars of different styles, manners and modes—sharing a moment of levity over a cigarette. In a photo from 1961 Dizzy Gillespie, one of bebop's founding fathers, demonstrates a piano figure to Lalo Schifrin, a Jewish pianist from Buenos Aires, who adopted bop's language as his native tongue. The spirit of unity wasn't relegated to the bandstand, either. In photos of the audience — and there are dozens throughout this impressive volume — one can see a sliver of the population choosing to come together despite their differences. In Monterey, black and white audience members seek shelter from the same sun; in Newport, festival-goers of various backgrounds walk the same cobblestone streets. In these photographs exists real proof of the ability of Americans to heal the wounds of divisiveness through music, one of humanity's great unifiers.

People, though, are just one aspect of these festival photos. The landscapes of Monterey and Newport make for equally compelling subjects, and Marshall excels at distilling the essence of each place into a single image. In Monterey, festival-goers are seen stuffing pages of newspaper under the brims of their hats to keep the glare off their sunglasses, and in Newport, saxophonist Sonny Stitt leans against the hood of an elegant car, his far-off glance as majestic as the endless sky.

Marshall, who died in 2010 at age 74, started documenting musicians on film while still in high school, first in San Francisco for small-time publications, and later across the country for the likes of Rolling Stone magazine and Columbia Records. He was known for his forceful personality and voluble presence. His generosity of spirit is reflected in his work, and his photos are a gift to American history.

Marshall had no children of his own, but saw in his sweeping body of work the makings of a legacy. Of a series of photographs of Hendrix taken during the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—exquisitely framed, expertly developed—he said, "These are my children."

—Brian Zimmerman

Ordering info:

http://www.reelartpress.com