Honor the Musicians : THE JAZZ PEOPLE OF NEW ORLEANS <i> By Lee Friedlander Afterword by Whitney Balliett (Pantheon: $50; 119 pp.) </i>

Lee Friedlander has traced his inspiration for taking up photography at age 16 to hearing a Charlie Parker record: “He made me understand that anything is possible.” Friedlander shot “The Jazz People of New Orleans” with the spirit of a documentarian, and the striking thing about his approach here is his humility before his subjects.

The pictures were made between 1957, when Friedlander first visited New Orleans, and 1974. By the end of that period, as Whitney Balliett points out in his fine accompanying essay (written in 1966, with an updated preface), “most of the musicians he had set out to photograph had died.”

These quickly aging men are for the most part black, and seen in diminished circumstances. They sit outside houses whose boards are often as beautifully weathered as they are. They perch in rooms whose stained walls bear crucifixes and mementos of better days. Though Balliett rightly speaks of these pictures’ “down-home ease and coolness,” taken in sum they become figures in a pantheon. To speak once more of how little America has honored our one indigenous art form is idle; to see it in these pictures is to feel pained by that lack.

The book may not tell us what credentials Punch Miller (he was a much-traveled trumpeter) and Emile Barnes (a clarinetist) possess, but their bearing is that of archbishops, and the cameraman clearly has genuflected to shoot them from below. Roosevelt Sykes, caught in a gesture--hat off, cigar ash just so, loud tie and watch gleaming--still carries the magnificence of the success he had in his prime. Friedlander puts him in the bright sun of a porch, framed by grids of shadows and sills; it’s a reminder that the photographer is one of our formal masters. In his prescient essay accompanying Friedlander’s 1987 collection, “Like a One-Eyed Cat,” Rod Siemmons sees the photographer “in the jazz tradition: gestural freedom of improvisation combined with highly complex--and cumulative--formal structures.”

In the greatest of Friedlander’s photographs, like his multilayered Paris street scene of 1978 or his 1983 picture of the Sphinx rendered puny amid a foreground pack of stray dogs, wit and poignancy intersect with his craft.

When he came from Washington State to New York City in the mid-1950s, he did commercial and editorial work and fell in with his two peers and friends, Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand. Siemmons traces their shared influences back to Walker Evans and Robert Frank. John Szarkowski grouped them for a landmark 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, and in 1970 Friedlander published his first solo book, “Self-Portrait.”

If his confreres turned their knife-edged pain outward, Friedlander worked more whimsically. He became the shadow looming--over fur coats and desert rocks--across an absurdist tableau. He turned the camera around to shoot himself cruelly, but shot others, as we see in his 1985 book, “Portraits,” kindly. In his 1963 photo, “Diane Arbus with daughter Amy,” the girl is playful and engaged while the woman’s sidelong glance hints embarrassment at her own (fleeting, we infer) happiness.

Friedlander’s reputation for snapping prolifically and selecting from contact sheets later doesn’t mean he lacks a great eye. Studies from 1981’s “Flowers and Trees” hark back to his 1969 “Work From the Same House” with painter Jim Dine. Even as he gathered the soulful portraits of friends and the documents of “Jazz People,” he often turned from man to his works. In “The American Monument” and “Factory Valleys,” the subject is time itself. Time mocks our pretense when he shows us the small bust of Kennedy on a drab street in Nashua, N.H.; and it can roar like a Beethoven symphony in the snowy silence around the Spirit of the American Doughboy statue in St. Albans, Vt.

It’s time passing that makes “Jazz People” so important. As R. B. Kitaj said of Jean Genet in Friedlander’s “Portraits,” “He’s looking at us from across the facing page, but he’ll always be doing that as long as these books don’t rot.” Thus the opening page of this collection, a photo of an old sepia print propped on a mantel: We’re looking at a shot of the epochal Piron-Williams band, taken by noted chronicler Arthur Bedou, circa 1914-18. The banjoist for this society band was Johnny St. Cyr, who sits at far right with a hundred-yard stare. We see him, reflective, magisterial, much older, on the following page. On the facing page is Bebe (not Baba, per the caption) Ridgley, the trombonist in Bedou’s picture and a founder of the Original Tuxedo Band, whose descendants figure later in the book.

The format insists that these faces, hands, stances speak for themselves. If Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau won his name for his pioneering “slap bass” technique (his rude home-built instrument is on display in New Orleans’ Old Mint Building), here he’s a man scratching his avid dog’s ear. Robert Pete Williams sits with two women, a bottle and guitar, playing slide. He did three years at Angola State Prison Farm in the late ‘50s for murder, and was later helped generously by Bonnie Raitt.

Dee Dee Pierce’s beautifully lit woodcut of a face is reason enough for a picture; does it help that much to know that his wife Billie is one of seven cherished Goodson sisters, and sang for bons vivants on the steamer Madison on Lake Ponchartrain? That Sweet Emma Barrett, as she played the piano, used to shake those jingle bells we glimpse on her legs? That “Mama Cookie” Cook was reputedly a working girl in the Storyville prostitution district before she cut the disc titled after her nickname?

The jazz people were (and to some extent remain) dynastic, mutable, itinerant and elusive. Yet you can tell the players without a scorecard. By the time we reach the last long sequence of marching performers, we have built to a crescendo in the same way Balliett’s graceful essay does. He depicts the “second-liners,” the marchers-along: “A fat man dressed in a tight blue suit and a small fedora threw back his head, switched his hips, and strutted through a crowd of leaping, delighted children.”

The vibrant scholars at Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive helped guide Balliett and Friedlander, and perhaps could supply a concordance to this book one day. Meanwhile, it’s a treasure of images and words, a tribute to a compact, dimming universe Friedlander memorializes with the empathetic eye of a fellow artist. In “Portraits,” the photographer quoted a Patrick White line--”The faces of the girls expressed a belief in continuity, at least up to the moment when the photographer had squeezed the bulb.”

We no longer see Friedlander’s shadow, but he’s in this collection, believing in the jazz people, and they return the compliment. We see in their faces that their artistry has made them indomitable. In this book, they get a measure of the honor a better world would grant them.