The Jazz Image

Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography

K. Heather Pinson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781604734942
• eBook ISBN: 9781604734959
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Typically, a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black-and-white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to his instrument. That's the jazz archetype that photography created. Author K. Heather Pinson discovers how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. Pinson evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard's photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music's neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, Pinson examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 The Formation of the Jazz Image in Visual Culture
• CHAPTER 2 The Construction of Signs in Jazz Photography
• CHAPTER 3 Ceci n’est pas jazz: The Battle for Ownership
• CHAPTER 4 A “Style Portrait” of the Avant-Garde
• CONCLUSION: The Visual Image of Jazz
• APPENDIX A: Herman Leonard Timeline 1923 to 2008
• APPENDIX B: List of Exhibitions for Herman Leonard’s Photography
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX