Hank O’Neal: Chasing Ghosts

Interview with author and photographer Hank O’Neal about his book The Ghosts of Harlem

By Lee Mergner

The term “Renaissance Man” hardly does justice to the life and work of Hank O’Neal. Born in Texas, O’Neal served in the U.S. Army, worked for the CIA, ran a record label with the legendary producer John Hammond and another on his own (Chiaroscuro), created and developed the jazz cruise concept, owned a recording studio, produced records, assisted noted artistic photographers, became a prolific photographer himself and finally wrote and compiled numerous books. We may have left something out, but O’Neal’s reputation as a creative polymath has been sufficiently buttressed.

His latest project in print is a massive volume called The Ghosts of Harlem (Vanderbilt University Press), in which O’Neal looks nostalgically at the Harlem jazz scene through the eyes of the musicians who created it. He spoke at length with JT about his life in and around the world of jazz and photography.
 
You’ve had such a multi-faceted career – as a photographer, record producer, recording engineer, cruise and festival promoter, and writer – I don’t even know where to begin and how to end. What do you say when people ask you what you do for a living?
A little bit of this and a little bit of that. I haven’t had a full-time job since 1976. It’s been everything. As it stands right now, the vast bulk of it is in photography and writing with an occasional musical sideline. I’m starting to post two complete books in a serialization of them on my web site. They’ve already been written. The idea behind that is to start getting it out there, seeing how many hits there are. And then saying to the podunk publisher, this is what you could have.

What was the first piece of jazz writing that you did?
I was a senior in high school. I wrote my senior paper on Dizzy Gillespie.

What grade did you get?
An A-minus or something like that. How lucky am I? Sometime in the late ‘80s, I got to show it to him [Dizzy]. He loved it. It had a picture or cartoon of him that I had clipped out of some magazine or newspaper.

How’s it read to you now?
It sucks. When you’re a senior in high school, it all sucks. I didn’t know anything. I don’t know much now, but I know a little more than I did then. When I was thrust into the CIA in 1963, I was supposed to be a regular CIA guy, but something funny happened. I was pulled out of training because somebody had quit in another division.
They wanted me to fill this person’s position even though I wasn’t a 45-year old PhD. I had taken African Studies in college and they put me in the office of National Estimates. As a result, that meant from that point on, most of the stuff that I was doing would have an ultimate end as something that was written. The reason I never finished my Master’s was because I was writing my Master’s thesis on South Africa and it turned out that I was sitting in an all-source office with every piece of information I ever could have possibly wanted to know about South Africa. I was writing national intelligence estimates on South Africa. So I never finished the thesis.

In terms of the first jazz stuff, the first thing that turned out to be a book was the Eddie Condon book. It was called the Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz. Eddie was one of the first people I got to know in New York City. His wife had kept all this stuff under the bed in shirtboxes. There were just thousands of pictures and photographs and articles and we turned it into a scrapbook. That was the first one.

From there I went on with the same publisher to my first big photography book, called A Vision Shared, also from St. Martin’s Press. It was a history of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and all the photographers who worked for that. It was Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange and all those people. It turned out very well because I got to work with all the photographers and/or their widows or widowers.
Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange were dead by then but I got to work with everyone else. Bernarda Bryson Shahn [Ben Shahn’s widow] wrote the introduction to my book and Paul Taylor, Dorothea Lange’s husband, wrote the conclusion. That started a precedent to always have an interesting person do the foreword if you possibly could. In the case of the Condon book, we used John Steinbeck, but he didn’t really do it for that book. It was a long letter that Steinbeck had written once. The most recent one has Charles Rangel doing it and it’s rather charming.
Complete on http://jazztimes.com/sections/author/articles/26209-hank-o-neal-chasing-ghosts