The Photographs of Don Hunstein - "Keeping Time: The Unseen Archive of Columbia Records" [From the Archives]

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

“… [In 1955, Hunstein] moved into the job of staff photographer, and there he stayed until Columbia dismantled its in-house photo studio in 1986. For the label, Hunstein photographed classical virtuosos and jazz masters, soul belters and country patriarchs, folkies and rockers, Broadway casts and spoken-word poets, legends in the making and flashes in the pan.

As the years and decades rolled by, Hunstein unselfconsciously built a visual chronicle of music and culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century. His photographs trace changes in fashion and performance styles through the decades. Hunstein's archives move from the buttoned-down 1950s to the casual 1960s to the over-the-top 1970s to the stylized 1980s, and from the restrained professional entertainer to the aggressively self-marketed star. For better and worse, Hunstein's filter was the roster of Columbia Records and its associated labels; it is, inevitably, an incomplete musical panorama. Nevertheless, the list is simply astonishing …”

Don Hunstein’s images of music’s most influential artists are unforgettable.

As Columbia Records’ staff photographer for more than four decades, Hunstein earned the trust and confidence of the most celebrated singers, songwriters, composers and musicians of our time, including Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Bernstein, Dave Brubeck, Tony Bennett and Thelonious Monk, to name a few.

Hunstein photographed these greats with noticeable informality, demonstrating a perpetual ease with his subjects. With his relaxed approach, he was able to glean private moments from public lives filled with fascinating, telling and intimate details. Logging his daily assignments, Hunstein created an archive of profound images that parallel the soundtracks to our lives.

To this day, his work exists as a unique record chronicling the creative efforts and energies of the world’s greatest musicians.

Edited by journalist and Grammy-nominated music producer Leo Sachs and with text by New York Times chief popular music critic Jon Pareles, Keeping Time: The Unseen Archive of Columbia Records [San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2013] places Hunstein’s photos in the context of musical and social change, adding an untold chapter to the cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century.

As the staff photographer for Columbia Records starting in 1955, Don Hunstein literally held history in his hands.

INTRODUCTION:

by

JON PARELES

"Discretion was the better part of valor. Shoot, then disappear."

- Don Hunstein

“Of the countless images that the photographer Don Hunstein shot in a five-decade career, a select few hang on the walls of his Upper West Side apartment in New York. Two make a diptych: a pair of photographs taken, moments apart, at the 1959 sessions for Miles Davis's landmark album, Kind of Blue.

One photo focuses on Davis himself, cradling his trumpet, thoughtful and far-seeing. The other blurs Davis to show his discovery and a musical catalyst in his quintet: the determined young saxophonist John Coltrane (pages 150-151).

Each photo is nothing less than an iconic moment from jazz history, a rare inside glimpse of a masterpiece being made. And together they are more than that. They give visual form to jazz itself, to music shaped by individual musicians and instantaneous change, in which the focus can shift from player to player at any moment. It's just one of the intimate, quietly astute musical and psychological insights to be gleaned from Hunstein's extraordinary body of work.

Hunsiein himself shrugs off any such grand concept for his images. "There was nothing metaphysical about what I did," he said in conversation with the music producer Leo Sacks. "I'd just like to think I had a good eye for detail, that I captured the moment at hand. But mostly, I just did my job." That job was as still photographer for Columbia Records, through three decades of its heyday.

Hunstein was born in 1928 in Saint Louis and lived there until he graduated from Washington University in 1950. He gol serious about photography, working with a Leica IIIg, while serving with the Air Force in Korea. Back in civilian life, a college roommate invited Hunstein to New York in 1954. He shopped his photographs to Madison Avenue ad agencies and worked as a studio assistant at a large commercial photo house, then as the assistant to the former entertainment editor of Life magazine. The contacts led him to a job at a rapidly expanding Columbia Records.

"The label was growing, and so was the record business, and Columbia's publicists needed someone to handle the flow of stills to the media," he remembered. "Someone trusted my judgment!"

He quickly moved into the job of staff photographer, and there he stayed until Columbia dismantled its in-house photo studio in 1986. For the label, Hunstein photographed classical virtuosos and jazz masters, soul belters and country patriarchs, folkies and rockers, Broadway casts and spoken-word poets, legends in the making and flashes in the pan.

As the years and decades rolled by, Hunstein unselfconsciously built a visual chronicle of music and culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century. His photographs trace changes in fashion and performance styles through the decades. Hunstein's archives move from the buttoned-down 1950s to the casual 1960s to the over-the-top 1970s to the stylized 1980s, and from the restrained professional entertainer to the aggressively self-marketed star. For better and worse, Hunstein's filter was the roster of Columbia Records and its associated labels; it is, inevitably, an incomplete musical panorama. Nevertheless, the list is simply astonishing.

Hunstein photographed Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk. He photographed Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass, Placido Domingo, Yo-Yo Ma. He photographed Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Robert Goulet. He photographed Aretha Franklin. Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Sam Cooke, Labelle, Teddy Pendergrass, Minnie Riperton, Luther Vandross, He photographed Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes, He photographed Johnny Cash, George Jones, Charlie Daniels, the Flying Burrito Brothers. He photographed Pete Seeger, Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds,Joan Baez, Phoebe Snow, and, extensively. Bob Dylan, including Dylan's First two album covers.

Though he worked mostly in New York City, Hunstein also traveled where the company's assignments led. His work carried him to Moscow with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and to Warsaw where a reverent Bernstein played Chopin's own piano. He ventured to Nashville to photograph country stars, to London for British rockers, and to Havana Jam in 1979, when American and Cuban musicians long separated by politics got a precious chance to learn from one another.

In an era before home video and reality TV, before the making-of documentaries and cell phone cameras, before MTV and Facebook, Hunstein's career gave him close-up access to moments the public would never see otherwise. He photographed musicians at work and musicians unwinding, musicians very conscious of creating an image and musicians with their guards down. For many listeners, Hunstein's images of Davis, Dylan, Gould, Monk, and Bernstein have grown inseparable from the artists' music. Hunstein's photos were, in those less exhibitionistic times, the lasting, iconic images of the musicians, to be pondered and scrutinized on album covers or in magazines.

While Hunstein did capture some extraordinary shots of performers onstage, he preferred making photographs that were set outside the spotlight: backstage, at recording sessions, in musicians' homes, on the street, in the Columbia photo studio he ran until 1986. They were rarer, more private moments, but Hunstein claims his reasons were pragmatic. "Less distracting," he said.

For Hunstein, a typical day's work left little time for grand artistic aspirations. "There was the album cover shoot in the morning and then, after lunch, a session with a newly promoted Columbia executive to send to the trades," Hunstein recalled. "Later that evening, I could be at a recording session that could last until the wee hours." He was dedicated to his work. Hunstein's 1966 honeymoon trip to Europe, the beginning of his marriage to his wife, DeeAnne, included a stopover in London to photograph Simon and Garfunkel while they were on tour.

Hunstein's job, clearly, was to present attractive images of Columbia Records stars. But his bedrock instincts were journalistic: He photographed realities, not fantasies. "I was merely a living witness," Hunstein said. "What does any good journalist do? Record what's going on. Observe the artist and their expressions, then leap in. You've got to react to something that's happening, or anticipate that it's about to happen."

He generally approached his subjects as a documentarian saving the moment— keeping the time—rather than as a fashion photographer contriving and glamorizing a pose. Hunstein cites as his model the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who championed the "decisive moment," the image that captures the unique, fleeting alignment of an event and a composition in light and shade. "To take photographs means to recognize — simultaneously and within a fraction of a second — both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that gives it meaning," Cartier-Bresson wrote in a 1976 essay, "The Mind's Eye."

Keeping Time unmistakably demonstrates Hunstein's sense of visual form as he worked within and beyond the necessities of the job at hand. Whether his subjects were looking directly into his camera or going about their business while he observed them, his photos appear strictly matter-of-fact. But their straightforward reportage can't conceal their visual elegance. The shots were often taken for workaday purposes, like publicity handouts or trade magazine stories. But grouped as they are in this book, their aesthetic choices add up.

Consider Hunstein's many recording studio photographs. The studios hold microphones, sheet music, equipment, and tendrils of smoke, along with the musicians and their instruments. They are unromantic workaday spaces, places of professional camaraderie; musicians concentrate, joke around, confer, play. Hunstein appreciated the Kind of Blue sessions — which, like many he photographed, took place at Columbia's own 30th Street Studios — not only for their music, but for their no-frills setting.

"There were no special effects, just ordinary ceiling lights," he told the jazz critic Ashley Kahn for the book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo Press, 2001] "It was great for what I did because there was an overall lighting, nice and even. It was the plainest kind of situation."

But in his photographs, Hunstein's recording studios are not plain. With their shadows and their calibrated depth of field, their mixture of sharpness and softness, they can be as mysterious as film noir stills. Each image hints at the intangible but crucial decisions, the pressures and inspirations, that will shape the music made by these particular musicians in this particular room. The photographs are by nature silent, but they are charged with musical possibility and human character.

Hunstein's images of a ravaged but noble Billie Holiday, of a studious Julie Andrews, of Bob Dylan intent at an upright piano in his rock-star shades, are glimpses of artists thinking and creating, not preening. Surely the shutter must have clicked, but the reverie seems unbroken. Hunstein was always careful to stay the inconspicuous observer. He eased himself into his subjects' confidence: listening, watching, telling a joke or two. Then, it seems, he all but vanished into the background as far as the musicians were concerned, even with his camera in hand. He was a company-sanctioned spy of sorts, but one who was as respectful as he was probing.

"I followed my guidelines, always," Hunstein said. "Discretion was the better part of valor. Shoot, then disappear. I never photographed during takes. I never wanted to be in the way, to be intrusive. I hope I never was."

Hunstein was also thoroughly adept at making photo-studio portraits. From the beginning, his jobs at Columbia included not only casual shots and documentation, but also art-directed concept photos intended to fit (and market) the twelve-by-twelve square of an LP cover. Through the decades, Hunstein also adapted to performers' growing sophistication and control — sometimes defensive, sometimes flamboyant — over their public presentation. Remnants of innocence were rapidly giving way to artifice.

Hunstein's seventies-era photos of Nashville's rhinestone cowboys and of R&B singers on the roster of Philadelphia International Records — musical opposites but sartorial kin in their fur, leather, sequins, and studs — demonstrate how a Hunstein photo could relish a costume in all its gaudy detail. But in the performers' faces, his journalistic side persists: he brings out the flesh-and-blood humanity behind the showmanship. Hunstein photographed artists, not mannequins.

It must be Hunstein's own amiability that's reflected hack at him in more informal portraits, like the ones he made of Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash, and — sitting perched on a windowsill at Columbia Records' offices for the cover of his debut album — Bob Dylan. The young performers look baby-faced and trusting, with their ambitions clear and their public masks not yet firmly in place. "I tried to create an atmosphere so the artist was relaxed and open," Hunstein recalled. "That was essential. That was key."

Some of Hunstein's subjects, like the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, deliberately posed themselves for him. To much of the outside world, Gould was a reclusive figure who gave up a concert career for the perfectibility of studio recording, but he welcomed Hunstein periodically through the years. Gould stationed himself in playful, canny poses, hinting at the geometric thinking that he brought to his repertoire of Bach and Mozart. One Hunstein photo became the model for a statue of Gould that now stands at the Glenn Gould Studio at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto.

"Gould often wouldn't let anybody else take his picture," DeeAnne Hunstein explained. "Pail of it was Don's manner of treating all the people that he photographed. He didn't treat them like celebrities or stars or anything like that. They were just people he was photographing, and he liked being on a one-to-one level with everyone."

The Bob Dylan of the early 1960s, with his career rocketing from Greenwich Village folk clubs to Carnegie Hall and the Newport Folk Festival appearances, repeatedly faced Hunstein's camera. The photos capture a young musician inventing himself on the fly, already a knowing media figure.

What may be Hunstein's best-known photo is the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, as he and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, walk down the middle of a snowy Jones Street (pages 200-201). It's an image of youthful Greenwich Village bohemia that mixed candor and calculation.

"Dylan himself was by then already quite image conscious and self-assured," Hunstein said about that afternoon, "and he knew how to play to the camera." Hunstein had photographed Dylan and Rotolo in their West Fourth Street apartment; Hunstein thought it was "bleak." He wanted to try outdoors, in the neighborhood. Although it was a bitterly cold winter day, Rotolo later told the New York Times, Dylan "wore a very thin jacket, because image was all." And Hunstein had to work fast. "The light was fading so quickly," he said, "that I was able to shoot only one color roll and a few black and whites." They were enough.

The remarkable breadth of Hunstein's portfolio — which encompasses Count Basie and the Clash, Dmitri Shostakovich and Tony Bennett, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Blue Oyster Cult — is inseparable from the history of Columbia Records, which assembled an artist roster that now seems almost impossibly diverse. It's a memorial to an era when major labels look themselves seriously as libraries of culture.

Founded in 1888, Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in recorded music. Technologically, Columbia had successfully placed its bet in 1948 on the ascendance of the 33 l/3 rpm LP. The longer recording time and lower noise of LPs made them a welcome format for classical music, jazz, and Broadway cast albums, while it gave pop singers a chance to simulate the concert experience of varied moods and tempos. Like other major labels — particularly its main rival at the time, RCA — Columbia strove to serve diverse consumer tastes.

"This business is like running a gambling house," Columbia's president, Goddard Lieberson, told Time magazine in 1959. "You've got to cover yourself in all directions."

He was being playful, but Columbia did set out to release a broad spectrum of music. It also conscientiously documented the making of that music, sending Hunstein to sessions, like those for Kind of Blue, that proved to be historic. In the 1950s, Columbia was the genteel major label, with an extensive catalog of symphonies, musicals, and forward-looking jazz. Under the A&R guidance of ("Sing Along with") Mitch Miller, the label famously steered clear of rock-and-roll ruffians, preferring pop crooners like Johnny Mathis and Frankie Laine. (We can only speculate about what Hunstein's camera would have made of the wild men of 1950s rock and R&B.) Bob Dylan was an unplugged folksinger, in the mold of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, when Columbia signed him; Aieiha Franklin was aiming for jazz clubs.

But by the late 1960s, Columbia was catching up with current rock. It scrambled to get into psychedelia, landing Janis Joplin, the Byrds, and the Electric Flag (and a chance for Hunstein to photograph them). Yet into the 1970s and 1980s, even as it aimed for rock, R&B, and country hits, Columbia held on to its jazz and classical divisions. The overwhelming range of Columbia's roster kept Hunstein's workdays stimulating, and made his catalog of photographs into what is now an invaluable trove.

Those days are gone. In the digital cd twenty-first century, major labels have been embattled on many fronts, forcing cutbacks in every department. Their artist rosters have dwindled to concentrate on narrowly targeted radio hits. Columbia no longer runs its own recording studio. And its in-house photo studio, once Hunstein's domain, was dismantled in the 1980s. (Fortunately, the photo archives were maintained.)

So Keeping Time is a triple memento. It's a quietly revealing close-up of artists who graced and transfigured the twentieth century. It's a keepsake from an era when media companies deeply embraced their role as curators of culture. Most of all, it's the legacy of a photographer who worked for both musicians and their label, for art and commerce enmeshed, gradually and modestly revealing an enduring vision of his own.”

- JON PARELES 

AFTERWORD

by 

JON PARELES

“With the simple flip of a digit from the 1960s to the 1970s, it suddenly seemed everything had changed. The communal Aquarian Age had not dawned, and Woodstock nation had disappeared with the summer of 1969. Vietnam was still at war, and the civil-rights dream of integration had given way to separatism and factionalism.

In the music business, a new sense of calculation was setting in. With baby boomers coming of age as consumers and as a new mass audience, the fertile creative disarray of the late 1960s was fast being systematized and exploited. Free-form radio was being replaced by stations with limited playlists — "underground" variations on the Top 40 — and by researched formats that targeted separate segments of the audience: by age, by race, by gender.

Filling those new niches, musical genres started splintering, too. There would be not just rock but pop-rock, hard rock, blues-rock, heavy metal, and eventually punk rock and new wave; not just soul but funk and smooth soul and vocal-group soul; not just jazz but smooth jazz and jazz-rock fusion. The roster of Columbia Records and its growing number of associated labels mirrored that diversity, becoming especially strong with singer-songwriters — Billy Joel, Phoebe Snow, Bill Withers, James Taylor—and in soul music with groups like Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers, Labelle, and, in the mid-1970s, the Jacksons (including Michael).

Musicians, meanwhile, were growing more self-conscious about fame, and about the public images that Hunstein's work would provide for them. 

Sunglasses grew larger; backstage access dwindled. The casual, approachable, behind-the-scenes images of musicians at work that Hunstein offered in the 1950s and 1960s were rarer. They were giving way to the costumed and posed. Though Hunstein still found opportunities for imposed shots, he also played up his formal portraiture, which offered different photographic messages. The costumes, in the madcap efflorescence of 1970s fashion, became flashier, more theatrical. Musicians were becoming glittering emissaries of celebrity, sci-fi apparitions, rhinestone cowboys and cowgirls. Fewer pop stars pretended to be everyday people; they aspired to be icons.

Hunstein brought his lighting and compositional skills to these images, his sense of geometry and depth. Yet he also, clearly, brought the same sense of observant rapport he'd brought to Glenn Gould or Duke Ellington: the sense that photographer and musician were doing a job together. These performers aren't distant, unapproachable stars. They're fellow humans, caught in a shared moment.”

Jon Eardley [From the Archives]

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

“… [Born in 1943], Jon Eardley is a musician who must certainly be categorized as a "modern." Yet, his playing, unlike that of so many young trumpet players, is not strident or spiritless. The seeds of his virile, warm style, the gorgeous tone, the disciplined, yet. free-swinging manner of his playing were planted back in Jon's early "gut bucket" days. Only 26 now, he was fortunate to have started his jazz career in another era — before jazz musicians for some strange reason began manifesting a real or studied attitude that the fundamental principles of jazz had changed, and that it need no longer be a warm and happy thing.” ...

“When Jon Eardley first joined Gerry Mulligan's Quartet many people immediately closeted him with Chet Baker for the simple reason that he was playing with Gerry Mulligan. It is true that Jon was exercising a certain restraint in fitting his personality to the quartet but he never sounded like Baker. However, it took his own recordings and those with Phil Woods to establish clearly that his was a harmonically richer and more virile style.

Now Jon is with Mulligan again. This time it is the sextet, a group much freer and less demanding on the personality than the quartet.”

- Ira Gitler, Jazz author and critic

I always wondered what happened to trumpeter Jon Eardley.

After a stint with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s quartet and sextet and a couple of recordings under his own name for Prestige in the mid-1950’s, he seemed to disappear from the Jazz scene.

Although he did replace Chet Baker on trumpet in Geru’s quartet, and favored the middle register of the horn like Chettie, I agree with Ira Gitler assertion that he “...never sounded like Chet.”

To my ears, Jon had a sharper, more pronounced attack and the melodic ideas that flowed in an out of his improvisations seemed somehow more punctuated, if not, punched out of the horn.

Jon was very fluid, rarely repeated himself, and built solos that sounded sturdy and definite; almost like the way a building is constructed - from the ground up.

Ultimately, I discovered that Jon had in fact disappeared from the Jazz scene in the USA because he had relocated to Europe.

Over the years, I pieced together some information about Jon’s overseas and how he established a new career there working with studio orchestras primarily in Germany while doing the occasional Jazz gig on the Continent and in England.

But it wasn’t until I found a 1978 interview that Jon gave to Les Tomkins that all the pieces came together that gave continuity to his career after he left the United States.

Jon interview with Les is also available online at www.jazzprofessional.com.

All of the interviews in the Jazz Professional website were taped over a period of some thirty years and transcribed by Les Tomkins, the English journalist, singer and jazz aficionado.

Born on 31st October 1930 he quickly moved into the jazz world, running a jazz club near London in 1950 in which many British jazz stars performed. In 1957 he became the secretary of the Contemporary Jazz Society, and remained so until 1960.

There he began interviewing jazz musicians, especially famous Americans visiting England. Some of these interviews were submitted to, and published by the contemporary jazz newspaper Melody Maker. In 1961-2 he freelanced as a contributor to Jazz News, then, in 1962 he began an association with Crescendo magazine that kept him occupied well into the 1980s. By 1966 he was the magazine's editor and art editor.

From 1970 he continued as a freelance editor, contributor, and art director to the magazine.

© -Les Tomkins, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“[1978] It was very nice to come to Britain again; this was my third or fourth time here. In August and September, I came over and did a set of sessions for the Jazz Centre Society; I came back this time more or less on a busman’s holiday. I’ve done a couple of jobs again, but I really wanted to get away from Germany, because I’d had so much work in the last few months, and was anxious to get a bit of a holiday.

I live in Cologne now, together with my wife and two children. I work with what they call the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, which is the German radio in Cologne. This has been the case for practically nine years, and now it’s come to the point that they’ve decided they want the orchestra I work with to be full–time. In other words, when I can’t play the trumpet any more they’ll still pay me. Because of the fact that I am married and have children, I don’t like to travel too much. You can understand that—I like to be around my children while they’re growing up.

Therefore it’s a good base of operations for me; from there, I can go practically anywhere in Europe. Every once in a while, when I feel like going around to do some concerts, and so forth.

Yes, Herb Geller is another American in Germany. He has the same situation that I have now—only in Hamburg. It’s very strange, you know I’ve been in contact with Herb through other people, but, although he’s been where he is for even longer than I’ve been in Cologne, we haven’t met person to person yet. And it’s because both of us are so unendingly busy; we do so much playing. As far as we’re both concerned, though, we know what kind of music each of us is doing—and a lot of it is quite good music, to tell you the truth. We do quite a bit of everything, but the orchestras we’re both with do a lot of jazz things as well.

In fact, the Germans in both orchestras are very jazz strong; they’re well orientated towards jazz, and they want to play, you know. And it’s very, very nice to be in the atmosphere, because of that.

Every now and again I run into British musicians over there; this past year I met up with Pete King and Mike Carr. Not too many groups come through Cologne, because there’s not too much of a jazz club scene there. But they do come quite a lot to Hamburg and Berlin.

Unfortunately, I haven’t heard a lot of jazz here; I would like to hear considerably more than I have. Of course, I’ve heard some things on record, that I think are very nice. There are some amazing British jazz musicians living today; I don’t know whether they’re being well taken care of here in their own country, but if they’re not, they certainly should be, I can tell you. People like Pete King and Kenny Wheeler—they’re absolute giants in their own fields, and the whole world should know about them.

The extent to which they are heard, and recorded, is not nearly as much as they deserve.

I’ve been working with the pianist Mike Pyne, and the last job was with Allan Ganley on drums and Peter Ind on bass. Very nice. Every job I’ve worked over here has been very, very much fun. I really enjoy playing with them—otherwise I wouldn’t have come back so soon.

As for my origins—I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Which is not a very large town; I’d say it has between fifty and seventy thousand people—that’s not considered a large town in America. Anyway, it’s where I grew up and went to school. My father played trumpet; at one time he was on the road with one of the Paul Whiteman orchestras. And he was the one who really taught me the beginnings of what I had to do to play the trumpet, as well as an early approach to jazz. He had a very good idea of jazz music and the way the trumpet should be played.

He introduced me to such people as Louis Armstrong and Red Nichols. For a while he sat right in the Whiteman trumpet section, with Bix Beiderbecke right next to him. That must have been an honour—at least, he thought it was; I do, too. He talked to me very much about Bix; in fact, Bix even came to the house when I was a very small child—he used to play with me on his knee. Of course, I was much too young to really know him, but they have pictures of it at home.

The first jazz I listened to was on records of Louis with the Hot Five, and of Red Nichols with the Five Pennies. I heard some of the very few recordings that Bix made—some of them with the Whiteman group, and with Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and those people. From the little I heard, it was clear that he was a fantastic player. Those bell tones—even with the old way of recording; you can imagine what they would have sounded like, should they have been recorded today.

I remember, the first music that I ever wrote down—I took Louis’ solo off the record of “Potato Head Blues”. The breaks, and everything that he played. I was fascinated by that, and I said to myself: “I’ve got to be able to play that one day.” As a result, I could one day—naturally, not so very good as he. That was a marvellous recording.

So I was geared towards jazz; although, at the same time, my father insisted that I learned the trumpet correctly. Actually, he taught me what I knew: the scales and a few other things; then I had about six lessons from a classical instructor, and he more or less taught me to read.

From there on, I took it myself; I ended up playing with the junior and senior high school orchestras—even as soloist in senior high school, I’d developed a tremendous interest for it. I didn’t like it at first, you know; I’d rather play baseball than practice my trumpet. But my father made me see it another way—and I’m very glad that he did, because I’ve had so much fun from it.

I’ve played several instruments of the trumpet family—all of them, actually. The first horn I had, that my father gave to me, was a cornet. Then the next horn was a trumpet, and I played that all through school. Now, at the time I was with Gerry Mulligan I played trumpet as well, but shortly thereafter—in between the time that I left Gerry and the time that I came to Europe—I was playing E flat contralto trumpet, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And that was another marvellous instrument. I’ve been trying to find one ever since mine was stolen in Pittsburgh—but I haven’t been able to do so. One of the things I’ve done since I’ve been here in Britain is look for one. I had one built for me in Brussels, but it was made as a trumpet, and I didn’t really care too much for that. What I used to have was an old Conn E flat contralto cornet; it was absolutely a museum piece, really—a collector’s item. See, it’s the same thing as they call here in Britain a tenor horn, with the lower sound only built like a cornet. In the States we call that an alto horn; so that’s why I call it E flat contralto trumpet. Yes, if anybody reading this knows of one, I’d surely like to hear about it—it would be really a marvellous thing if I could locate one.

When I left high school, I went into the Army, and I was quite fortunate to get a position with the United States Air Force Band, in Washington, DC, where I went immediately after my basic training in Texas. And here in DC, I came in contact with the Washington musicians—and I had my first impressions of modern jazz. The jazz of Charlie Parker. Before that, I guess you could have called me strictly a Dixieland trumpet player; when I came to Washington, I learned about so many other musicians.

Lester Young was really a milestone in my education; Charlie Parker as well, and naturally the trumpet players that went with them—like Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown.

I heard the Billy Eckstine band when Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Freddie Webster were all in the trumpet section; that was a tremendous experience for me. This was in 1946/ 47; being in Washington wasn’t the same as New York, but nevertheless I saw so many important people, because there were a couple of clubs in DC that presented them.

Hearing all that, naturally my brain took off in another direction; I started to try to get with it, so to speak—to play that style. And I became friends with some of the younger musicians in Washington—people like Jack Payne, Spencer Sinatra, Bob Swope and Marky Markowitz. I played with them quite a bit while I was in the Service; we used to have sessions several places, right around the DC area—in Virginia, Maryland and so forth. Really, I guess you could say it was there that I developed the way I play today—that was the beginning of it.

After I left the Army, I went home to Pennsylvania, and I got together with a young piano player from Cleveland, by the name of Rudy Black, who was a fantastic musician. We formed our own quartet, with two local fellows from Altuna, who weren’t bad at all; in the ensuing two or three years they became really top–class. They were Jay Cave, who played bass, and Christie Febbo, who played drums. I believe Jay is somewhere around New Orleans today, if I’m not mistaken; he was with one of the Tony Bennett orchestras on the road not too long ago. So we worked an awful lot around Pennsylvania with this quartet. At these times, naturally, we played only jazz; the greatest people for me were Diz, Fats, Miles, Freddie Webster—people like that.

But it got to be a thing around there: “Jon Eardley plays good jazz trumpet, but he doesn’t play good enough—that’s the reason he’s here in Altuna.” I got sick of hearing it from so many people; one day I said: “Okay, we’ll find out”, and I just left, went to New York, got a small apartment there.

About three–and–a–half to four weeks after I got there, I was playing a session one night in the Open Door, in Greenwich Village, where there were a rhythm section and three trumpet players playing. The trumpet players were myself, Tony Fruscella and Don Josephs; I didn’t have any idea what was happening—I was just enjoying myself. And after we’d finished one tune, a young lady came over and asked me a question; she said: “Tell me, how many white shirts do you have?” I said: “Well three or four. Why?” She said: “Come over here. My husband wants to meet you.” I walked over to the table, and there sat Gerry Mulligan.

Gerry said: “Would you like to come to work for me?” I said: “Well, sure—why not?” This was a Friday evening; he said: “Okay, we open Monday in Baltimore.” I said: “Well we’re not going to rehearse or anything like that?” He said: “No. I’ll stop by your house tomorrow, and bring you a record player and a stack of records.” He brought me about a ten–inch stack of records, and told me: “You must learn them by Monday.” So I did; I learned all the tunes that were on the recordings with him and Chet, or him and Bob Brookmeyer. We opened up in Baltimore, and after that I was with Gerry, on and off, for three or four years.

We got along very well, Gerry and I. He’s quite an intense personality, but we still got on well. That first quartet we had, with Frank Isola and Red Mitchell, was one we had an awful lot of fun with—and Gerry will vouch for that as well as me, I’m sure. Then, when it was made into a sextet—we still had a lot of fun. It was with Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims; the bass and drums changed a bit, with Chico Hamilton coming in every once in a while on drums, and Dave Bailey staying towards the end. On bass, it was Bill Crow, then Peck Morrison.

Prior to this time, though, I did do some other recordings. Just before I went with Gerry, I did a recording with Phil Woods, where we did one thing of mine called “Pot Pie”, as well as “Mad About The Boy” and “Robin’s Bobbin’”; I think the album was just called “The New Jazz Quintet: Jon Eardley and Phil Woods”. And I really enjoyed working with that group as well, because Phil is such a magnificent musician, and we always got along very well, too. Also I did a recording with J. R. Monterose that I was happy about.

After joining Gerry, I did another album in Hollywood, called “Jon Eardley In Hollywood”, with Pete Jolly, Red Mitchell and Larry Bunker; we had a very nice time playing together as well. Later, I did some more records with Phil; one was a septet, including Milty Gold and Zoot Sims. Almost all of them were with the same rhythm section—George Syran, Teddy Kotick and Nick Stabulas.

Phil and I worked with that rhythm section during the course of a couple of years, because we both worked at a place called The Nut Club, right at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village; it was a strip club, and we were the house band. We had a lot of fun there. Actually, Phil Rafio played the piano at the beginning down at this place; George Syran came on later. For a while, J. R. Monterose worked on the band also.

For me, Phil Woods sounds just as great now as he did then. Yes, that’s for sure—he’s been a completely consistent player. I worked some jobs with Bird as well—a couple of Sunday afternoon concerts at the Open Door—and that was very instructive. But Phil was very young then, you know, and he was like a whole mountain—full of fire. Certainly, those recordings we made at that time weren’t bad at all.

When I left Gerry’s band in ‘57, I went back home for a while to Altuna, where I stayed for about four years. Of course, I had a few problems then—adjusting to different scenes and everything. Now, in 1956, I did a European tour with Gerry Mulligan, with Zoot Sims, Bobby Brookmeyer, Bill Crow and Dave Bailey—and I met my wife of today in Brussels at this time. I went back to the States, but I kept writing to her, though I didn’t come back. Finally, it got to the place where we decided: why just write? So I came back, and we’ve been together ever since—that was ‘63.

From ‘63 till ‘69 I was right around the Brussels area in Belgium. I worked with the Flemish TV orchestra for a time, and I did quite a few jazz concerts, such as one with Klaus Doldinger in Munich. For one of the Festivals, I wrote a number for seven trumpets; that was myself, Benny Bailey, Idries Suliemann, Jano Morales, Nick Fizette . . . Dusko Goykovich, I believe—it’s been quite a while now.

Anyhow, we lived around Brussels for about six years. Then, in ‘68 and ‘69, I was doing a lot of jazz gigs with a group known as the George Maycock Trio. And both of them–the pianist George Maycock and the drummer—Big Fletcher, that is—lived in Dusseldorf, Germany. They’re both originally from Panama, I think; they came to Germany with a show, in the ‘fifties some time, and liked it so well that they stayed there. I liked especially working with them, because they had that American feel, from swinging, you know.

We did quite a bit of playing here and there, and then in ‘69, I believe it was, we got a job in a jazz club in Dusseldorf, the Pork ‘n’ Beans, six nights a week—we stayed there for over seven months. Naturally, I met and got to know quite a number of German people there. And I liked it so very much the people, the language, everything that when there was an opening, that a saxophonist friend of mine told me about, with the Harold Banter Orchestra, with the West German Radio in Cologne, for a trumpet player, I was interested. I talked it over with my wife, and she said: “Well, why not? Go check it out.” So I went down to Cologne, tried out with the orchestra; everybody, including Mr. Banter, liked the way I played very much. and they asked me to join. This I did, and in the end moved my entire family from Belgium over to Cologne. I’ve been with that orchestra now since the beginning of ‘70.

I’ve been very happy there, really. They’ve given me quite a lot of solo work to do with the orchestra, and we’ve recorded some very interesting things, that I think you’d enjoy hearing. My contentment is mainly because of the fact that, after doing a great deal of travelling in my life, I can now settle down and relax in one place. I’m making a good living there. My children are growing up.

I would go back to America, but only for a slight jazz tour—maybe a few concerts, something like that. I don’t really have any intention of living there any more. My family have practically all passed away; so, other than the friends that I write to occasionally, I don’t have any reasons to go back. My life, I’m afraid, is as an expatriate–and I dig it, that’s all.

I love coming to England very much; well, actually, I’m an Englishman twice removed, because my family came from Stoke. The Englishness in my accent is something that my grandfather made sure of: every time I’d go there speaking like an American, he would threaten to give me a thick ear, you know. And my grandfather was as English as you can get, I’ll tell you—that’s definite. So coming here is really like returning to a natural habitat.

The question of whether jazz has made progress since the ‘forties and ‘fifties is a very interesting one. Let’s face it, there’s not as much being produced today as there was then, when you really come down to it. In the ‘forties and ‘fifties we had several giants, who came up and blossomed at the same time. Today, we have fantastic musicians as well, but they’re orientated into an entirely different scope. I don’t put today’s music down I think it’s great. Some of the things that I’ve heard from the States. .. like, for instance, Tom Scott, and New York rhythm sections with people like Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Dave Grusin—they’re fantastic musicians, and I appreciate listening to what they do. But it’s an entirely different thing to what the musicians did in the ‘forties and ‘fifties. At the same time, I imagine in fact, I’m sure—that these musicians that are recording with people like Tom Scott can play anything. They play what they’re playing today because it sells, you know. And I can say this much in the ‘forties and ‘fifties, they didn’t play it because it sold.

Now, Quincy Jones, as we know, has done some absolutely tremendous things, with the likes of Frank Rosolino, Hubert Laws, and complete orchestras. I mean, those are the good things that have come out of jazz recently, in my estimation. Of course, I hear Phil Woods every once in a while, on a transcription or something.

But there are hundreds of good young American players—people like Bill Watrous. In Germany, in the last two or three years, I’ve heard orchestras that come over from the States that are absolutely marvellous; Woody Herman, Buddy Rich—they’re superb orchestras. The young Americans—they play beautiful, but somehow they have a different orientation.

When the soloists play yes, they play good, correct, fine but there’s a little melodic warmth missing, that used to be there in the ‘forties and ‘fifties, and that made that extra little something that turned you on. Otherwise—as far as musicians and music are concerned, they’re fantastic.

When I listen to anybody who plays good, my feeling is: let him make a few mistakes; that doesn’t make any difference, but if he plays it from the heart, that’s something else. But today the thinking seems to be: you’re not allowed to make a mistake. It’s even the same way in Germany; they’re striving for perfection sometimes a little bit too much so. Jazz shouldn’t be like that; if you get a good feel from listening to somebody play, that’s the important thing—not exactly what he played, whether he was in tune, or whether he made any mistakes. What matters is the feel that comes out of the music, that conveys itself from him to you.

As for the electronic things today well, I’ve had some good feelings from some heavy stuff like that.

There’s quite a bit of it played in Germany. Just recently, I heard Al Jarreau in Cologne—he had a very good feeling, and he had everything, a mountainous sound system. So I can’t say that it detracts at all. I can’t put down the electronic instruments—I think that sort of talk is just a cop–out for some people. It can all be done very well.

But I think electronic attachments to the trumpet are a waste of time, personally. Now, you can go so far with the electronics; I’m talking about microphones, sound and so forth, but when you need echo devices, modulators and things like that—maybe they’re great on an electric piano, or for a singer, when used with taste. For the trumpet I can listen to about five minutes of such things, and then I don’t want to hear any more for at least another year. I just know that’s the way I feel about the trumpet. Now, don’t let me say that I don’t have any respect for Miles Davis, because he’s a fantastic trumpet player—but what he’s been doing recently, as far as I’m concerned, is rubbish. I’m sorry, that’s my feeling—I don’t get turned on from listening to him any more. I only hear a bunch of funny noises.

Well—I’m entitled to my opinion.

There are certainly some very good trumpet players around today. One of the best is right here in Britain—Kenny Wheeler. And then again I’ve heard another one here who sounds very nice—Henry Lowther. In LA there’s Chuck Findley, and people like that. Sure, there are trumpet players around—but there are very few who can constantly get that warmth through like Kenny Wheeler does. Specially on that last album he did in the States with Keith Jarrett. That’s beautiful—I absolutely adore it.

To speak of my own recorded efforts—I have a new one out now on Spotlite . It’s a recording I did with just flugelhorn and piano, together with Mike Pyne. The majority of the tunes are old standards. I was very happy doing that, and I really do think it got a very good feeling.

In addition, I’ve done two other albums for Spotlite in the recent months. One was a quintet album with Pete King on saxophone, John Taylor on piano, Ron Mathewson on bass. And Mickey Roker was the drummer; he was in town at the time with Dizzy Gillespie, at Ronnie’s.

Then the most recent one I’ve done is with that wonderful pianist Al Haig. That as well was done with three British musicians—Allan Ganley was on drums, Daryll Runswick was on bass and Art Themen played saxophone. Al Haig and I played bits of sessions together in New York in earlier days, but we don’t remember where and when. But we knew each other’s playing; naturally, I knew Al’s—he always sounds beautiful. The feel was good on the album, I think; that should be coming out in the next few months also, you know. Yes, it’s very good that Al is back on the scene, after an interval; he’s sounding just as good as ever, too.

Recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of flugelhorn playing. The Germans, where I work in Cologne, they like that flugelhorn very much; as a result, I’ve been recording a lot on it. Then again, overall more is being done on flugelhorn today than was done before.

My recent short tour here, which included such London venues as the Seven Dials and the Bull’s Head, was with, basically, Pete King, Mike Pyne, Peter Ind and Allan Ganley, and it was certainly a lot of fun. After going back to Germany for four days’ work, I returned again to visit Tony Williams of Spotlite Records and his family at their home, with my entire family. In fact, we spent Christmas here—which we enjoyed immensely.

I’ve had a beautiful arrangement as well, since I’ve been put in contact with Dick Knowles, from the Jazz Centre Society. The JCS set up both of my recent trips for me, and they’ve really done a beautiful job. I’m so very happy to know them, to be in contact, and be able to do some things here in Britain. It makes me feel very good.

Dick Knowles and I have already talked about me doing another round of concerts here in the Spring; so I’m looking forward to that.”

Here's Jon on Tadd Dameron's Sid's Delight with J.R. Monterose on tenor sax, George Syran on piano, Teddy Kotick on bass and Nick Stabulas on drums.