John Gennari | author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics
“Benjamin Cawthra, writing with grace and a formidable command of jazz history and American culture, makes us see the sounds, the social relations, and the myths of jazz as he ably uncovers the personal and institutional networks of musicians, writers, magazines, and record companies in which jazz photography developed. Even as Blue Notes in Black and White casts a sharp eye on photographic aesthetics—its pages brim with bracing insights into Gjon Mili’s informal but magisterial style, Francis Wolff’s use of chiaroscuro, and Herman Leonard’s concept of the sculpted face—it also works as a groundbreaking history of jazz criticism. At its best, this excellent book serves as a model for a multisensory music criticism: while reading it, I often felt I was hearing the music more deeply.”
Waldo E. Martin, Jr. | author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America
“This is a highly engaging and deeply engaged meditation on the development of the modern jazz photography tradition. Cawthra’s probing analysis of how ‘the photographic culture of jazz’ helped make jazz visible perceptively illuminates and contributes significantly to the fascinating, revealing, and ongoing debate surrounding not just the jazz image, notably the African American jazz image, but also jazz history, the meanings of jazz, and indeed the role of jazz in the making of modern American culture.”
Dan Morgenstern | author of Living with Jazz
“This first in-depth history of jazz photography provides the reader with a three-dimensional view of its fascinating subject, illuminating the music, the media, and the makers—the foreground and the background.”
Colin Fleming | MOJO Music Magazine
“Bold, ruminative and personal, jazz music poses a challenge to the ace lensman that is answered repeatedly in these pages. Namely, how to capture the elusive internal make-up of any given jazz musician in a two-dimensional image that acts as a portal to the artist’s soul . . . Ideal reading while spinning Monk or Kind of Blue. Four stars.”
Booklist
“Cawthra brings a deep appreciation for jazz and the photography that captured the ecstasy of the music and performing and the disappointments felt by black musicians subject to race discrimination and personal demons.”
Ben Ratliff | New York Times
“In Blue Notes in Black and White you sense an author consumed and excited by his subject. He’s synthesized loads of the literature and argument around jazz, and he builds particularly on recent works of historiography.”
Zócalo Public Square
“Cawthra traces the history of jazz photography from the 1930s to the 1960s through the stories of prominent, mainly African-American musicians (Miles Davis, John Coltrane) and the white men who photographed them for magazines and album covers.. . Analyzing photographs can get tedious quickly, but Cawthra wisely contextualizes them with anecdotes and stories that place the reader in the moment.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Life Goes to a Jazz Party: Photography and the Politics of Swing
Setting the Stage: A Tale of Two Parties
“Swing,” Segregations, and Peterson’s Satchelmouth
Jammin’ at Gjon’s: Mili’s Trio of Jazz Photo-Essays
2 Picturing Bebop: Dizzy Gillespie and the Postwar Jazz Image
Dizzy Gillespie, the Bebop Image, and Life
Jazz Seen and Unseen: William Gottlieb, Bebop, and Down Beat
Herman Leonard, Metronome, and the Iconography of Jazz
3 Jazz Man/Pop Star: The LP, Miles Davis, and the 1950s
Columbia, the LP, and Jazz
Miles Davis and the Art of the Album Cover
The Package Evolves: Porgy and Bess to Someday My Prince Will Come
4 Sonny Rollins and the Art of the Independent Record Labels
Jazz West Coast: William Claxton and the California Image
Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West
Selling Hard Bop: Prestige, Blue Note, and Riverside
5 Roy DeCarava’s Jazz: Fine Art, Black Art, and the 1960s
Edna Smith, The Family of Man, and The Sweet Flypaper of Life
A Photographer’s Gallery, Kamoinge Workshop, and Race in Jazz
The Jazz Photographs: John Coltrane and The Sound I Saw
Coda: Dark Rooms, Open Spaces
Notes
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
