With Herman Leonard, photographer; Kellie Jones, Professor of Art History, Columbia University; and Leonard exhibition co-curators C. Daniel Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley and Garnette Cadogan.
Introduced and Moderated by Robert G. O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Founder, The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University
The jazz photographs of Herman Leonard comprise an indispensible historical record—particularly of the late Forties moment when the new music called bebop was crystallizing. How, without Leonard’s photographs, could we know how rehearsals at a 52nd Street club looked? How else to get a view from the stage of mid-career Ella Fitzgerald in full performance flow? To see Thelonious Monk, hatless, revising a score between sets at Minton’s in Harlem? Or Louis Armstrong, not mugging for the crowd, but in a reflective moment behind the scenes?
But Leonard was more than a faithful recorder of deeds: he was an artist. Whether illuminating a dark club’s smoke to suggest mystery and possibility; setting lights behind musicians to create a sense of sculptural depth; or making a gentle still-life of a musician's shoes or hat—Leonard was revealing beauty in the moment. Consider his portraits of Miles Davis, whom Leonard calls his best subject: how light traces the angular facial structure and catches in the fiery eyes. “Photography is painting with light,” said Leonard, and in its glow, Davis’s skin looks, as Leonard saw it, “like black satin.”
As New Orleans trumpeter Kermit Ruffins enthused, Leonard’s photographs of these central figures in jazz history “makes me feel I can walk over and shake their hands.” For Leonard himself, “I want to show jazz artists in the best possible light--to tell their truth, but to tell it in terms of beauty.”
Location: 301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus Free and open to the public
For more information contact All About Jazz.
