Photographer’s ‘Memories’ Illuminates a Sound

Many jazz fans experienced their first images of the art from the photographs of Herman Leonard. Shot in the jazz clubs of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, they captured the emergence of contemporary jazz in atmospheric black and white. Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday were only a few of the iconic figures preserved via the hungry lens of Leonard’s peripatetic camera.

More than 30 of those classic photographs have been gathered into an unusual blend of music and pictures: “Jazz Memories” (Universal Music), a book and two-CD package. Spun off from a larger picture-book collection of the same title, the images are matched to musical selections, many of them similarly classic, by each of the players. The result is a stunning audiovisual overview of a period--the late ‘40s to the late ‘50s--that is arguably one of the most creatively fruitful in the history of jazz.

Interestingly, many of the photographs nearly slipped away before they were seen by the public. When Leonard left the United States in the late ‘50s to work in Europe, primarily in fashion and advertising, the negatives from his jazz period were set aside, not to be rediscovered until the ‘80s. Since then, they’ve been seen in more than 100 exhibitions, his archives have been placed in the Smithsonian Institution, and a portfolio of his prints served as a gift from President Clinton to the king of Thailand, like Clinton a musician and a jazz fan.

Looking through the pictures in “Jazz Memories,” one can only marvel at the good fortune that allowed their preservation. One after another they flow--quick takes, captured in an instant but filled with revelatory perspectives. A placid-looking, pensive Louis Armstrong, seated magisterially backstage, his horn on a nearby chair; Monk, intently working on a manuscript page propped across the strings of a piano; Dexter Gordon, in an often reprinted image, tenor saxophone across one knee, hat brim turned up, cigarette smoke curling into the light; whimsical shots of Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley; a view of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn that instantly delineates their intimate, complex relationship.

“The things that interested me were not so much a picture of someone playing a horn,” says Leonard, 78, who has lived in New Orleans for the past decade. “I wanted to capture the private moments. I wanted to show the other side of these people, the side that the public didn’t always see.”

Which is precisely what he has done, especially in the glimpses of Armstrong and Parker, as well as similarly captivating photos of Art Tatum and Errol Garner. But Leonard is equally successful with his action shots. Like the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, he believes in the vital importance of capturing “the moment,” that precise point at which visual elements coalesce into their point of greatest impact.

“Ninety-nine percent of everything I shot was off the cuff,” he says. “Whatever happened in front of the camera was what I took. I almost never told a musician what to do. I didn’t want to alter or inject my feelings about things into the final result. I wanted to capture what was really there, untainted by anything I would do. My whole principle was to capture the mood and the atmosphere of that moment. Because for me, it was a visual memory of what I was hearing. That was the whole name of the game for me.”

There’s a lot in that description that could apply to the process of making jazz, as well. And it’s not surprising that other photographers--Bill Claxton, for one--have described the similarities between the two arts and their resulting compatibility. Leonard adds a further correspondence, one that is not unlike the selection process that takes place once a musician concludes a recording.

“A lot of people don’t realize--even photographers themselves--that you make choices,” he says. “Each of the photographs in the book represents one out of four or five or more that I shot in that sequence. I chose those pictures to show. Not the others. So you judge a photographer not just by what he shoots, but by what he chooses to print out of what he shoots. That is the reflection of his taste, that is the reflection of his talent.”

And also the reflection of an instinctive eye, one that homed in on its subject despite the relatively daunting problems of photographing jazz artists in dark and smoky night clubs. Working with only a pair of strobe lights (“I couldn’t afford anymore,” he says), Leonard came up with visual magic.

“That’s a pretty good example of where I was doing some improvising, too,” he says with a laugh. “I had to, if I was going to achieve any results, because most of the pictures were taken under very difficult lighting conditions. Simplicity was the answer. In the club situations, I always wanted to set the figure off from the background, not have them blend into it. So I would put a light behind them. But I had to calculate it in terms of where I would be when I shot, because in a club I couldn’t move around freely. Then, in the right situation, I’d pop it off, that gave me a back light, and there was the picture.”

Much of the same blend of planning and spontaneity is present in the music selected to accompany the book of photographs in “Jazz Memories.”

“We were always guided by the pictures first,” production supervisor and veteran jazz entrepreneur Alan Douglas says. “They determined what the music would be. Ross Firestone wrote some wonderful brief essays to go with each picture, and then we programmed them to go with the sequence of the music.”

Although the selections include a number of familiar classics--Parker’s “The Song Is You,” Clifford Brown and Max Roach with “Joy Spring,” Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas”--there are also more unexpected items.

“I loved the idea,” Douglas says, “of being able to include some unusual things like Errol Garner doing ‘Jitterbug Waltz,’ for example. It’s not something you expect from him.”

And there are others: Dinah Washington singing “Easy Living”; Oscar Peterson playing organ on “The Man I Love” with Roy Eldridge; Bud Powell’s intense rendering of the Vincent Youmans standard “Hallelujah”; the ballad side of Gordon on Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.” For Leonard, “Jazz Memories” is even more: the sight and sound manifestation of a powerful insight dating to his earliest days as a photographer.

“I was privileged to be an apprentice to Yousuf Karsh, the famous portrait photographer,” he recalls. “One day, we were photographing Albert Einstein, and knowing that Einstein was a violinist, I asked him what the connection was between a mathematician and a musician. And he said, ‘It’s the same thing--improvisation. No matter what you do, if you come up against a thing and you start to improvise, it opens up all the avenues for you. But if you don’t take chances, you never get anywhere.”’