The Many Shadings of AIDS and Jazz

Even if you don’t know Coltrane from Miles, William Claxton’s photographs of jazz musicians are likely to be irresistible. They not only preserve moments from a long-gone cultural era (the 1950s and early ‘60s) but they all but get under the skin of musicians at work.

To look at these images--shot in places as diverse as a Memphis train depot and a Hollywood studio--is to grasp something about pursuing a celestial sound in your head by blowing into a piece of metal with valves or hitting a bunch of ivory keys.

A generous sampler of Claxton’s photographs of famous and unknown musicians is at the City of Brea Gallery through Aug. 9, along with a well-meaning but uneven group show about AIDS.

Concentration is a key motif in Claxton’s images, and it has many guises. Roosevelt Sykes scowls with eyes closed as he hits a piano key backhanded with his right pinky, ready for a glissando. Pianist Horace Silver hunches his skinny shoulders and lets his mouth fly open, bird-like.

Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks puff out so far they look about to burst. Paul Desmond grins like a fool, his head turned away from the keyboard as if pulled into another world by sheer musical rapture. Donald Byrd communes with his horn in a subway car, oblivious to the sour faces of fellow riders.

Other photographs show musicians hanging out, posing nattily with their instruments or carrying them around with the casual aplomb of a god bearing a powerful trident.

A stringed tub player named Will Shade soberly invites us into his one-room apartment, where laundry hangs on a line. Elegant in a dark suit, Coltrane walks up a flight of stairs at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, the picture of cool, with his sax exactly parallel to the railing.

In these photographs, smoke spirals sexily from cigarettes, button-down shirts strain against ample bellies, pompadours jut from youthful faces. Women singers wear chiffon and rhinestones, though they may have kicked off their spike heels. Guys sprawl together in mellow camaraderie.

Signs of rapture and casual pleasure way outnumber signs of poverty. Among the few dark notes is a scene outside Birdland, the Manhattan nightclub, in which a white horn player with a glassy stare and wasted physique droops near the curb, seemingly oblivious to a greeting from a smartly dressed black patron.

With the exception of a few “arty” silhouette shots, Claxton deftly handled such behind-the-scenes matters as light, timing and composition with the easy, invisible control of a great soloist.

*

It’s never too late to call attention to AIDS, and many fine works of art have been made about it, but AIDS exhibitions--particularly those in less exigent venues--too often confuse sentiment with quality.

“A Promise to Remember: A Community Responds to AIDS” contains such a miscellany of pieces, few of them particularly compelling or innovative, that--in aesthetic terms, at least--it comes off as a lame attempt at catch-up.

Kim Abeles’ “Collective Drawing” from 1989-93 is a huge grid of small photographs of often insignificant objects belonging to people with AIDS. It is one of many works artists have based on memorabilia of the dead, a tactic that has become rather stale and predictable in recent years. Unlike Abeles’ more subtle pieces, the “drawing” sounds only a single note, of poignancy.

Karen Atkinson’s handkerchief-and-ribbon piece from 1994-96, “Fenestrae Reliquian (in memory),” also seems little more than a spin-off of Karen Finley’s participatory AIDS works. The idea here is to write a message on a ribbon and attach it to one of the colored handkerchiefs hanging on the center’s windows and walls. Even the handkerchief motif seems unnecessarily hackneyed as a symbol of grief.

At best a therapeutic experience for those who have lost a loved one to AIDS, the piece carries brief phrases from many grieving people. One ribbon says, “Ken--Sorry I wasn’t there at the end”; another reads simply, “Walter.”

But the most awkward thing about this showcase of both living and deceased artists is that the works by those who died of AIDS are less than satisfying. The exception is Mark Niblock-Smith, the Los Angeles artist who died in 1993 at the age of 35, who is given a shrine-like little gallery to himself. Even here, a stronger curatorial hand would have rooted out several pieces.

But Niblock-Smith’s Cal Arts-honed wit comes through in one-liners such as “Paired/Impaired” (two crutch-like tree branches) and the over-the-top effusion of “Silent Tear” (strands of metal and glass beads gushing from a plastic chandelier onto the carpet).

The artist’s artful orchestration of kitsch, sentiment and a genuine, autumnal sense of loss illuminates “Memory Deer,” a pair of deer hooves holding a faded photograph of a grove of bare trees.

A somewhat different blend of pathos, wry nostalgia and bitterness hangs over “Science Fair,” a puff of white fur in a cage on a table mounted on casters. The obvious reference to a rabbit sacrificed to hopes of winning a school science fair mingles with a covert reference to AIDS patients as pawns in a high-stakes medical sweepstakes.

More work of this caliber would have made the exhibition a better reflection of the way art can illuminate even the most grievous tragedies of our time.

* “Jazz: William Claxton” and “A Promise to Remember: A Community Responds to AIDS,” both through Aug. 9 at the City of Brea Gallery, Brea Civic and Cultural Center, 1 Civic Center Circle. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission: $1, children free. (714) 990-7730.