Capturing Jazz Legends on Black and White Prints

Herman Leonard has, through the years, made his bread and butter capturing the likenesses of such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Jane Russell, Norman Mailer, Christian Dior and Charles Aznavour--both in personal portraits and for such magazines as Life, Playboy and Cosmopolitan.

But photographing such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Nat (King) Cole and Dexter Gordon was the sweet jam atop the bread and butter.

From 1948-60, Leonard spent a good deal of his time in the jazz clubs of New York and Paris, shooting musicians in their milieu. The results were dramatic, mostly back-lit, black-and-white photos that captured not only the musicians but also the experience of being inside the smoky clubs. Leonard complemented the work done in the clubs by photographing musicians in his studios.

For many years, very few people saw Leonard’s black-and-white shots. True, some of them made it to album covers, magazines and books, but mainly they stayed out of sight.

“I stopped shooting jazz people about 1960 because I couldn’t make any money at it,” Leonard, 67, said from his home in San Francisco. “And as I moved around (Europe, where I moved in 1956), I kept schlepping a box full of these photographs with me.”

Now, for the first time in the United States, an exhibition of 40 of Leonard’s original photographs of jazz greats is traveling to 10 cities. The exhibition, “Images of Jazz,” sponsored by Gilbey’s Gin, debuted at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery on Melrose Avenue and runs through April 28. A different set of photographs is being shown simultaneously in galleries in Europe.

Leonard’s jazz photographs and his classic style of portraiture have made him one of the world’s top commercial photographers. His work has been utilized in magazines from Elle to Life to Paris Match. He is renowned for his crisp lines, his clarity of image and his meticulous printing, qualities that can be found in the work of the famed portraitist Yousuf Karsh, who became a major influence when Leonard served a one-year apprenticeship with him in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1947.

Jazz has been one of Leonard’s loves almost as long as photography, which he took up as a teen-ager in his hometown of Allentown, Pa. “I got a lot of happiness out of listening to people like Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Louis Armstrong,” he said.

He didn’t begin to photograph the players until the late ‘40s, after he’d completed a master’s degree in photography at Ohio University in Athens and had spent his year with Karsh.

His duties were to set up the equipment and handle all the lighting under Karsh’s direction. “I learned by watching him work with famous people and seeing how he handled them psychologically.”

Two renowned subjects that Karsh and Leonard photographed together were President Harry S. Truman and Albert Einstein, both in early 1948.

At the end of his year with Karsh, Leonard moved on to New York, where be-bop caught his ear. He frequented clubs like Minton’s and the Royal Roost, soaking up the new music.

“Be-bop was innovative, it was daring, and I wanted to photograph these guys simply because I liked their music, no other reason than that,” Leonard said.

Armed with his camera, chiefly a 4x5 Speed Graphix, and with help from club owners and entrepreneurs such as the late Monte Kaye and Pete Kameron (currently an Angeleno), Leonard was able to get into rooms before show time to set up his lights. His backlighting style came about accidentally. One night, an off-the-ceiling light functioned, but the flash on his camera didn’t.

“I liked (backlighting) because I was able to get a dark background, which was what the mood of the club was like,” he said. “(It also allowed me) to show the shape, the form without an excess of detail, so it’s easy to read, visually.”

Smoke is another element that is a hallmark of many a Leonard photograph, often because more than a few of the musicians--and club-goers--he shot, such as Parker or Dexter Gordon, were non-stop smokers. “The smoke was part of the atmosphere of those days, and it dramatized the photographs a lot, maybe over-stylized them a bit,” he said.

Among musicians he photographed during his New York years were Tatum, Parker, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Count Basie. In the early ‘50s, Leonard built the foundation of his commercial reputation by working for magazines such as Life and Cosmopolitan and photographing Lena Horne, Robert Wagner and Donald O’Connor for clients such as MCA.

Thinking Paris might prove a pleasant change of pace from the hustle of New York, Leonard moved there in 1956 after he had served as Brando’s personal photographer on a Far East tour. “He looked over my stuff on the jazz albums and hired me on the spot,” Leonard said.

For a while, Leonard thrived in Paris. He worked for the Barclay Record company, shooting album covers of Aznavour and Jacques Brel; he was Playboy’s chief European photographer, taking shots of Mailer and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as handling such projects as “The Prostitutes of Paris” and “Girls Behind the Iron Curtain;” and he entered the world of fashion, shooting designers Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent, initially for clients such as the International Wool Bureau and later for major magazines.

And though Leonard’s commercial work took priority, he still remained fascinated by jazz, shooting Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke at such rooms as the Club St. Germain.

After 20 years, Paris no longer dazzled Leonard. “I burned out and decided to move with my wife and two children to Ibiza, off the coast of Spain in 1980,” he said. “I wanted them to have some contact with earth and sky.” He stayed there seven years.

“We lived in a farmhouse that rented for 40 bucks a month and I didn’t work,” he said. “I took pictures of that life, spent a lot of time with the peasant people. It was paradise for a while until I got so bored, I nearly went crazy.”

Leonard moved to London in 1987. The year before, his jazz photos appeared in “L’oeil de Jazz” (Editions Filipacchi), issued by Daniel Filipacchi, a friend of Leonard’s who publishes Elle, Paris Match and other magazines. The book, available only in France, was “an expected success” and was released with English text by Viking Press as “The Eye of Jazz,” in January.

Due to response to the book, Leonard looked for a London gallery to show his jazz photos. Last spring his works were shown at the Special Photographer’s Company, and Gilbey’s decided to sponsor a European tour, with its American counterpart backing the U.S. leg.

Leonard figures he did all right when he chose photography as a profession.

“It’s the best, the best,” he said. “I’m not talking about being stuck in the studio, I’m talking about the people out in the streets, doing stories about people. It’s so enlightening.”