Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
58 Jazz Musicians Were Photographed for ‘Harlem 1958.' Only One Remains. - The New York Times
58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. Only One Remains.
"Art Kane’s “Harlem 1958” gathered giants of the music. Sonny Rollins, 94, looks back at the historic picture.
On Aug. 12, 1958, Art Kane gathered 58 jazz notables in front of an East 126th St. brownstone for a group portrait.
What started out as “sort of a graduation photo or class picture of all the jazz musicians,” as Kane once put it, became perhaps the most emblematic and enduring image from the genre’s golden age.
Only one of its subjects is still alive: the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, 94, who spoke in a phone interview about the image’s power at a time of pervasive segregation and racism.
“It just seemed like we weren’t appreciated,” he said from his home in Woodstock, N.Y.,“mainly because jazz was a Black art.”
“I think that picture humanized a lot of the myth of what people thought jazz was,” he added.
Today the photo titled “Harlem 1958” is better known as “A Great Day in Harlem,” after an Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary on its creation.
Kane and an assistant directed the group as best they could, with the photographer addressing them using a rolled-up New York Times as what he later called “a sort of megaphone.”
A row of children, most from the neighborhood, spontaneously lined up on the curb in front, to Kane’s delight.
The assembled musicians included giants of the swing era, such as Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young, and Count Basie …
… and bebop trailblazers like Dizzy Gillespie.
In the mid-40s, Gillespie — along with his frequent collaborator Charlie Parker — emerged as a leading exponent of the speedy, virtuosic small-group style known as bebop.
The group also included artists, like Charles Mingus, whose work pointed the way toward the more exploratory styles that followed.
By 1958, Mingus, who had moved from Los Angeles earlier in the decade, was fine-tuning the soulful, kaleidoscopic blend that would peak the next year on his masterpiece “Mingus Ah Um.”
The photograph appeared in Esquire’s January 1959 issue. Kane, then 33, was an art director at Seventeen magazine who also taught at the New School. Robert Benton, one of his students, was the art director at Esquire and asked him to brainstorm concepts for an issue focused on jazz.
The location was crucial: “Jazz came into New York City in Harlem,” Jonathan Kane, the photographer’s son and director of his archive, explained of his father’s thinking in a phone interview. (Art Kane died in 1995.)
Harlem was a hotbed of New York jazz for decades, home to swing-era meccas such as the Savoy Ballroomand the Cotton Club, and the bebop haven Minton’s Playhouse.
In the late ’50s, Rollins’s career was gaining steam, thanks in part to albums such as “Way Out West” and “Saxophone Colossus,” which went on to become jazz canon.
But showing up for the photo and watching so many of his heroes and forebears gather, he still felt like the young acolyte who had formerly waited outside the Harlem home of Coleman Hawkins, the patron saint of jazz tenor saxophone, to get an autograph.
“I was a fan,” Rollins said. “I was in the picture, but it wasn’t so much as a musician — although I happened to be there as a musician — but I had been following jazz all my short life up to that time, so I knew a great deal about the guys.”
Despite his somewhat inconspicuous placement in the front right of the photo, Rollins stands out, in part because he is only one of two musicians, along with the pianist Thelonious Monk, who is seen wearing shades.
“Sunglasses were sort of the new wave,” Rollins said. “A lot of the new guys coming out were wearing sunglasses.”
For Rollins, the presence of Hawkins was highly significant.
“My particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, were both in that picture,” Rollins said. “Those guys are much beyond me, but I guess I’ll be remembered with them when people look at this picture: ‘Oh, there’s Sonny Rollins, and wow, look, there’s Coleman Hawkins!’”
Young, the so-called “President” of the instrument, was the other most admired saxophonist of the swing era.
“I’m put in that great group of people,” Rollins said incredulously. “It’s really too much to realize.”
Though the arrangement of musicians in the frame was unplanned, certain impromptu groupings did arise.
In the center of the shot, three master drummers, Jo Jones, Gene Krupa and George Wettling, found their way into a cluster …
… while a trio of distinguished trumpeters, Rex Stewart, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, stands out on the far right.
“Like water seeks its own level, all the piano players begin to get over here and shake hands, all the drummers were over here,” said the bassist Milt Hinton in the 1994 “Great Day” doc, noting how the horn players were over in the corner, “all laughing and talking.”
Monk tended to stand out in any crowd, but his prominence here was partly by design.
As Robert Altshuler — then a publicist for Monk’s label, Riverside, who was responsible for picking him up that day and escorting him to the shoot along with the saxophonist Gigi Gryce — recalled in the “Great Day” doc, Monk kept him waiting outside his apartment for an hour-plus, the cab’s meter running all the while.
The reason, as he later learned from Gryce: “He came to the conclusion that most people, since they saw this as a special occasion, would probably wear a dark suit,” Altshuler said, “so he elected to wear a light-colored jacket.”
Jonathan Kane cited one more strategic move on Monk’s part: standing next to Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams, two of only three women in the photo.
In 1958, Williams — an admired swing-era pianist-arranger who also mentored bebop pioneers — had recently returned to the scene after a three-year hiatus, spurred by a religious awakening.
McPartland would find her greatest acclaim as the host of the beloved public-radio show “Piano Jazz,” but at the time this photo was taken, the England-born pianist was busy as a gigging bandleader, heading up a tight, swinging trio.
In the bottom left of the final photo, there’s a noticeable blank space between the pianist Luckey Roberts and the singer Maxine Sullivan.
As seen in outtakes reproduced in a commemorative 60th anniversary book named after the photo, the spot had been filled earlier on by Willie Smith, known as “the Lion,” Roberts’s friend and fellow Harlem-stride luminary.
But as one eyewitness, the pianist Mike Lipskin, later described, Smith “suffered from heat, and it was anything but temperate that August day.” Smith sat down for a rest on the steps of a nearby brownstone, out of frame, and ended up absent from the final image.
The pianist and renowned big-band leader Count Basie’s status as the only seated musician in the final photo apparently was the result of one of what Kane once called the many “little mini-dramas” unfolding among the group.
According to Jonathan Kane, one of the children gathered in front repeatedly stole Basie’s hat as a prank. “Basie had chased the kid, and it was like a little game they were playing,” he said. “Basie finally just sat down on the curb with the kids, and he’s holding his hat in his hand,” as if to say, “‘OK, I give up.’”
One of the top names in big-band jazz, Basie pioneered the hard-driving sound of Kansas City swing and later brought it to a global audience.
The saxophonist Benny Golson, then in the early phase of a long and brilliant career, appears near the top of the photograph.
Along with Rollins, Golson, then 29, was among the youngest musicians in the group, and until his death in September, the second-to-last survivor. Golson often acknowledged the import of “Harlem 1958,” once calling it a “cornucopia of enriching lives.”
For Jonathan Kane, the end result’s mix of happenstance and careful planning is part of what gives the image its magnetic power.
“He was a control freak,” he said of his father, “who also believed in serendipity.”
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Lou Donaldson, saxophonist who helped shape jazz, dies at 98 - The Washington Post
Lou Donaldson, saxophonist who helped shape jazz, dies at 98
"In a career dating to the 1940s, he played on acclaimed recordings and worked often with jazz organists.
Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist with a supple, earthy style who was a key figure in the development of three styles of jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s and sustained a career for almost seven decades, died Nov. 9 at a hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida. He was 98.
He recently had pneumonia, said his daughter, E. Carol Webster.
Mr. Donaldson emerged as a bebop protégé of alto saxophone master Charlie Parker and by the early 1950s was acknowledged as a leading proponent of the jazz idiom called hard bop, which blended bebop’s assertive rhythmic pulse with a strutting, blues-flavored harmonic approach.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Donaldson became even better known for his “soul jazz” recordings, often with organists, creating a bluesy, danceable style of music that became popular on jukeboxes and in nightclubs. His 1967 recording “Alligator Boogaloo,” with organist Dr. Lonnie Smith and guitarist George Benson, was a minor hit.
Mr. Donaldson, a minister’s son from North Carolina, brought a gospel feel to his music, but he also had training as a classical clarinetist. He wrote his college thesis on the musical transition from swing to bebop, which he embodied in his playing.
“Donaldson was second to no alto when it came to a straight balance of bebop and soul,” critic Bob Blumenthal wrote in the liner notes for a 2002 collection of Mr. Donaldson’s early recordings.
After he settled in New York in 1950 — he lived first in Harlem and later the Bronx — Mr. Donaldson established himself as a fixture of the city’s thriving jazz scene. He became a part of the house band at Minton’s, a Harlem jazz club known as a cradle of bebop, and performed at dozens of other clubs. He was nicknamed Sweet Poppa Lou for his graceful touch in playing ballads.
He met virtually everyone in the jazz world of the time and was a sideman on notable early recordings by pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1952, Mr. Donaldson made his first record for the storied Blue Note jazz label. A year later, he played alongside trumpeter Clifford Brown on the album “New Faces, New Sounds,” among the first and finest examples of hard bop.
“That was tough music early on because it was original and very few people could play like that,” Mr. Donaldson told the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “You needed a hard, gutty sound — a different swinging feel from anything else going on then.”
In 1954, Mr. Donaldson was part of an all-star session led by drummer Art Blakey, “A Night at Birdland,” originally released on three vinyl discs. The effort, hailed as one of the greatest live jazz recordings, launched the decades-long performing career of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Along with Blakey and Mr. Donaldson, “A Night at Birdland” featured Brown on trumpet, Horace Silver on piano and Curley Russell on bass. The combined albums are considered a definitive statement of the hard-bop style.
Mr. Donaldson also led his own ensembles and in 1958 recorded “Blues Walk,” a mix of standards and original compositions, which he called his favorite album. At the same time, he began to work with jazz organists, notably Jimmy Smith, John Patton and Dr. Lonnie Smith (no relation to Jimmy Smith). It was a pairing particularly suited to Mr. Donaldson’s full sound and was especially popular in Black nightclubs.
Mr. Donaldson hauled a Hammond B3 organ in a trailer behind his station wagon as he and the other musicians drove from New York to California and back again, playing what he called “the circuit” of demanding and sometimes rough clubs in inner cities.
He believed that musical developments in the 1960s had made jazz too abstract and remote from its audience. For Mr. Donaldson, appearing in urban nightclubs was a way of retaining authenticity and a connection to his listeners. “To me, all jazz — even bebop — is still dance music,” he said.
One of the great raconteurs of jazz, Mr. Donaldson could be critical and outspoken when discussing the musical life. He was a clean-living musician — he did not smoke, drink or take drugs — at a time when substance abuse was rampant in jazz. (Parker, Mr. Donaldson’s friend and musical idol, died at 34 in 1955, after years of heroin addiction.)
Mr. Donaldson tried to avoid working with musicians he knew were addicts because they were unreliable on the bandstand and too often stole the band’s earnings to buy drugs.
“Junkies are hazardous people. Real hazardous,” Mr. Donaldson said in a 2012 interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. “I remember one night I was coming up to 110th Street, Central Park, and I stopped at a light. [A musician] said: ‘Wait a minute. I got to get out, I got to get out.’ So I thought he was going out there to take a leak or something. So he comes back and opens the back door, and I hear this noise back there, cling-a-ling-a-ling. So I look back there. Four hubcaps. I said, ‘Man, are you crazy?! … You weren’t out there but a few seconds. Where did you get four hubcaps?’ You know what he had? He had a can opener …
“See, I got away from all of that by getting me a band with no junkies.”
Louis Andrew Donaldson was born Nov. 1, 1926, in Badin, North Carolina. His father was a minister, and his mother was an elementary school teacher who played and taught piano.
As a child, Mr. Donaldson resisted piano lessons and played baseball instead. He was exposed to gospel music in church and eventually took up the clarinet.
At what is now North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, he played classical music, listened to touring jazz groups, and began to learn the solos of clarinet stars Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
Drafted into the Navy during World War II, Mr. Donaldson was assigned to a radar unit at Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside Chicago. Passing by a music room one day, he heard someone playing a squeaky clarinet. He poked his head in the door and told the instructor that he could do a better job and was given a sight-reading audition on the spot.
Asked if he could play the saxophone, Mr. Donaldson replied in the affirmative, even though he had never touched the instrument. Within two weeks, he had learned the rudiments of the alto saxophone and soon joined a Navy jazz band that included trumpeters Clark Terry and Wendell Culley, saxophonist Ernie Wilkins, and other noteworthy musicians.
He practiced constantly, listened to music on the radio and went to clubs in Chicago, where he heard the electrifying Parker for the first time. After the war, he returned to North Carolina A&T and graduated in 1948. He played semipro baseball for two years, then concentrated on music and moved to New York.
During a career that lasted into his early 90s, Mr. Donaldson recorded more than 70 albums and toured throughout North America, Europe and Japan. He was named a Jazz Master of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013 and lived most recently in Ormond Beach, Florida.
His wife of 56 years and longtime manager, the former Maker Turner, died in 2006, and their daughter Lydia Tutt-Jones died in 1994. In addition to his daughter Carol, survivors include a sister and two grandchildren.
Mr. Donaldson was known for his old-fashioned musical tastes and his dismissive, even acerbic opinions of other musicians, including such acclaimed figures as saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz and John Coltrane, as well as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
He complained to the Winston-Salem Journal in 2001 that “there ain’t much of nothin’ happening there” with Marsalis, who has been a dominant force in jazz since the 1980s.
“One or two real notes, notes from the heart, that’s all he manages to play in a solo,” Mr. Donaldson said. “The rest of it, man, it ain’t nothing but a history lesson. So what do I need to hear that for? I was there. I am a history lesson.”