Overview

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.

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9781604734942

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Reviews

"Pinson has demonstrated the importance of photography in both defining a musical genre and interesting the public in it, as well as showing how essential ambience, atmosphere, context, and 'the scene' are to a musical style.--Michael Broyles ""Journal of the Society of American Music (2016) """

Pinson has demonstrated the importance of photography in both defining a musical genre and interesting the public in it, as well as showing how essential ambience, atmosphere, context, and 'the scene' are to a musical style.--Michael Broyles Journal of the Society of American Music (2016)

Pinson has demonstrated the importance of photography in both defining a musical genre and interesting the public in it, as well as showing how essential ambience, atmosphere, context, and 'the scene' are to a musical style.--Michael Broyles ""Journal of the Society of American Music (2016) ""

Author Information

K. Heather Pinson, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is Department Head of Communication and Coordinator of Humanities at Robert Morris University. She has contributed to the Encyclopedia of African American Music, the Encyclopedia of the Blues, and Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture.

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