The Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography

CONCLUSION: The Visual Image of Jazz

182 Conclusion the visual image of Jazz Music is always changing. it changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different , not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different. new instruments like synthesizers and all them other things people play make everything different. instruments used to be wood, then it was metal, and now it’s hard plastic. i don’t know what it’s going to be in the future but i know it’s going to be something else.1 With statements like this from his autobiography, Miles Davis hypothesizes that the jazz community—musicians, listeners, and critics—should embrace components of music that lie outside of traditional jazz composition, instrumentation, and style, even if the result does not sound like standardized jazz music. in some cases, the audience will not like the music, nor are they required to, as we determined in the last chapter. So how do members of the jazz community like Miles Davis justify developing new music knowing the public will not approve and album sales will suffer? How can new music be cultivated under constant pressure from traditionalists and the market to make jazz a marketable, and at the same time, vibrant item? this book argues that the answer is found with the image. Both the public and the jazz community are fixated on the image of the jazz musician itself ; the nostalgia, the art, and the class found within the idea of jazz is much too alluring to leave at this point. in particular, the image of mainstream jazz provides the viewer with a sense of class and style, and this association is often used to further market other styles of jazz. often the image of the jazz 183 ConCLuSIon: THE VISuAL IMAGE oF JAzz musician, once transferred onto an advertising product, creates the same prestige for that product—such as rolex watches, jazz documentaries like Ken Burns’s Jazz, or the cover of Time. Marsalis’s high-class visual image proved jazz could be marketed. the capital gain, however small, is a commodity , and the jazz community cannot afford to lose this association. Such publicity works both ways, for not only do those musicians who portray a successful musical style gain the greatest notoriety in the jazz community, but those who present a marketable visual image gain an introduction to a general public unfamiliar with jazz—who may not know what jazz sounds like, but through images of Marsalis and other visual stimuli, they know what jazz looks like. as a mnemonic device within the public sphere, the repeat occurrence of the image in society helps to support, market, teach, and even inspire future jazz musicians. Herman Leonard’s photographic depictions of african american jazz musicians created a visual image of black musicians of the 1950s, and became the standard by which the musical style of jazz from 1945 to 1959 would be represented. from the frozen faces of Dexter Gordon and ella fitzgerald to the still life of Lester young’s possessions, Leonard provides insight into the lifestyle of the professional jazz musician. through his use of smoke, black and white film, lighting, framing, and compositional arrangement, Leonard simultaneously exposes the rigorous professionalism, lighthearted humor, improvised musical style, and notorious lifestyle of the jazz artist. His photographs are the epitome of class, and demonstrate the artist in front of the lens as well as behind. as ernie Bastin said in an interview, “the music world is now in a tonal pocket; we favor what sounds good.”2 as jazz musicians know, a rhythmic “pocket” describes the groove of the band; the drummer and bass player usually lay down a strong pulse for the other musicians to fall into. So figuratively , musicians dig deep into the rhythmic pocket; the “swing” they put in their music is a major part of the sound of jazz. When applied to tonality, Bastin’s statement beautifully summarizes the taste of neoclassicists as preferring tonality to resound comfortably in our ears, much like the rest of the public and its taste for pretty-sounding music. again, it is the image of the jazz musician that anchors us to mainstream jazz and tonality. the classic photograph represents “classic...