Stan Kenton by Bill Gottlieb

Steven A. Cerra
Friday, March 4, 2016

Stan Kenton and Marion "Buddy" Childers photographed through a fractured mirror to suggest the shattering effect of the Kenton hand's loud, dissonant brass.

I have always found it fascinating to explore how those on the periphery of Jazz relate to it.

The manner in which authors write about the music, photographers take picture of the musicians performing it and artists and poets depict it in paintings and in verse can be as distinctive as the styles in which Jazz is played.

Take for example, photography.

Both Herman Leonard and Francis Wolff took primarily black-and-white photographs, but Herman used back lighting and smoke-filled “live” performances as his venue while Francis used high speed film and slow shutter speeds to photograph musicians in repose, concentrating on the written scores and playing their horns during the studio rehearsals for upcoming Blue Note recordings.

On the West Coast, Ray Avery was a photographic chronicler of The Stars of Jazz TV show which originated in Hollywood while William Claxton was extremely adept at posing many of the stars of West Coast Jazz either in his studio or on locations such as the mountains, deserts and canyons of sunny Southern California, many of which appeared as cover art for World Pacific and Contemporary Records LPs.

I posted recently about William Paul Gottlieb’s The Golden Age of Jazz, a compilation of his photographs and annotations from the “Hot Jazz Era” through to the beginnings of Bebop, circa 1935 - 1950.

What was unique about Gottlieb’s work in comparison to most other Jazz photographers was that Mr. Gottlieb took his photos largely in support of articles he was writing for the major Jazz magazine such as Down Beat and Metronome and for his work as the Jazz editor of The Washington Post newspaper.

Some of his photographs were posed; some were impromptu; some were thematic.

Take for example the lead-in photograph to this feature with its theme of the “glass-shattering effects of Kenton’s powerful brass” or the ones that follow his annotation about Kenton which appears in Mr. Gottlieb’s Golden Age of Jazz, some of which were intended to underscore the written description of life on the road with Stan’s orchestra, both in performance and at play.


I don’t recall viewing very many photographic retrospectives of life on the road with a big band so in this regard, Mr. Gottlieb’s approach to Jazz photography provides some very unique insights into the music and its makers.

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