Exciting Event with Black Man and Blue Paint

by Alastair Johnston

Bill Traylor, Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Delmonico Books / Prestel, 2012, 112 pp., cloth in d.j.)

A new book about Bill Traylor is cause for celebration, just as seeing any new work from this artist is a marvel. Back in the middle of the last century the big dogs of French art, Picasso, Dubuffet and co, were trying hard to forget their art school training and paint like children. The new appreciation for self-taught artists didn't catch on in the USA, however.

In the 1940s, Charles Shannon, the man who rescued Traylor's work from oblivion, took it to New York but was rebuffed by the museums and galleries there. In the intervening decades the art has not changed, while the American art world's attitude to outsider artists, like Ramirez, Darger and Traylor, definitely has.

"Would the Modern have been a different place if it had had 16 Traylors in its collection for the last 60 years? It's impossible to know, but one likes to think that they would have worked their magic on some of its curators." — Roberta Smith, "Altered Views in the House of Modernism," The New York Times, 29 April 2005 (quoted on p. 11)

But then curators and critics have always followed rather than led the art market, so folks who make millions selling real estate or faded denim pants can amass boring collections of "blue-chip art" (usually a euphemism for gilded equine ordure), then have a museum wing dedicated to their efforts and foist it off on the undiscerning public. 

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, pencil & colored pencil on cardboard, 22 x 14 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Wait, how did I get here? Let's go back to the artist at hand. Bill Traylor was born a slave. Yes, such people still existed in relatively modern times. After "emancipation" he continued to work as a stable hand for his former owner until old age crept up on him. He moved to the city, and ended up on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1929, during the Depression, when he was in his mid-70s. Like Oliver Twist, he slept in a funeral parlor. He spent his days on the street, drawing and painting on scraps of scavenged cardboard. By chance, Charles Shannon (not the Charles Shannon who was Charles Ricketts' boyfriend and whose bulldog crapped behind Gertrude Stein's couch), a young white artist (himself an outsider in the black community), saw Traylor at work and started buying his paintings, giving him poster paints and supplies.

By 1939 Traylor had rheumatic pains in his hands, but still managed to create at least 1200 art works in the next 4 years. When Shannon gave him new poster board, Traylor set it aside for a spell to "cure," so that it would acquire rips and stains like the old discarded poster backs he liked to use, responding to the "smudges, cracks, stains and the irregular shapes" they contained in his drawing (p. 32). Despite their broad appeal his images are not cute and delightful in a decorative way, but rather uneasy and show a lot of fearfulness. A bird (chicken?) eyes a giant bug; men party and drink but they are standing on a very precipitous roof. He portrayed his own world, but parallels can be seen to the work of Chagall early or Matisse late.

Bill Traylor, "Figures, Construction" ca. 1940-2, watercolor & graphite on cardboard, 13 x 7 ins. (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts)

Then in 1942 Shannon was drafted into the army. Traylor visited his family in Detroit but lost a leg to gangrene. Any further work he did in the remaining 7 years of his life has been lost. He died in a nursing home.

Some of his surviving work, which Shannon took to New York, was even offered to the major dealers in Outsider art. Frank Maresca & Roger Ricco hesitated and missed the boat, as they ruefully noted in Bill Traylor: his art, his life (Knopf, 1991), which includes a long interview with Shannon. Fortunately, two collections of Traylor's surviving art ended up being donated to two museums: the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (35 drawings) and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (31 drawings) who sponsored this joint exhibition and catalogue of their holdings.

Since the outlines of Traylor's life have been given in earlier monographs, this catalogue focuses on the condition and conservation of the surviving work, mostly done in fugitive media such as wax crayon or poster paint on acidic recycled cardboard, all of which are archivally problematic.

The soundtrack to Traylor's life would have been Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, Duke Ellington, Erskine Hawkins, and the rural blues of Alabama and the Mississippi delta, as Phil Patton pointed out in his catalogue essay "High Singing Blue" (New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern, 1997, which was reprinted in the essential Deep Blues catalogue, Yale University Press, 1999). The blues are deep and moody, but Traylor opted for a bright cobalt blue that truly electrifies some of his paintings. 

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, poster paint & pencil on cardboard, 13.25 x 7.25 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Many commentators and curators have tried to explain the symbolism of Traylor's work through references to Voudou ("Dancing man in top hat" as Baron Samedi?), African cosmology, the plantation, jazz & blues improvisation, and so forth. This new book suggests in a more down-to-earth way, that many of the abstract shapes can be explained by the environment of downtown Montgomery. Fred Baron and Jeffrey Wolf (in the key essay here) explain the allusions to a monumental fountain, a large 4-faced clock, and the capitol building that recur as abstract motifs in Traylor's work. In one image (shown in Deep Blues, cat no 37) a man is seen toting the "fountain" on his back, to remind us that so much was constructed "off the backs of blacks," as Linton Kwesi Johnson put it.

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, poster paint & pencil on cardboard, 13 x 11.25 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Traylor's paintings are narratives, but they also enact rituals, like the cave painters in the Dordogne Valley who visualized the aurochs getting speared before they went out to hunt it. Snakes, owls, dogs, men with sticks, thieves, cripples, attack dogs, smokers & drinkers, populate his imagery. His work is untitled (mainly because he could barely write) but Shannon added titles, calling quite a few of them "Exciting event." (Exciting event with keg," "Exciting event with animals," "Brown house with exciting event," "Exciting event: blue man, snake.") This new book is another "Exciting event" — with visionary black man and blue paint.

The production of the hardback catalogue is exemplary, from the design by Zach Hooker to the typesetting, to the printing by Shenzhen in China.
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When Kerouac Met Dostoyevsky

by Stephen J. Gertz

Jack Kerouac's "Dostoyevsky Mad-Face" by Allen Ginsberg, 1953.

Sometime during March-April, 1949, John-not-yet-Jack Kerouac, 27 years old and living with his parents as "The Wizard of Ozone Park" (Queens, NYC), as his Beat friends referred to him, bought a cheap reprint edition of short stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He annotated the book, and entered his ownership signature.

Dostoyevsky was an important influence on Kerouac; his novel, The Subterraneans, was consciously modeled on Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, one of his favorite books, and there are many references to the Russian author in Kerouac's novels and letters.

Dostoyevsky was something of a guiding literary and philosophical spirit to the Beats (and buddy - Kerouac affectionately called him "Dusty"), and Notes From the Underground, which Sartre considered to be a major forerunner of existentialism, a  handbook of sorts for the Western Man isolated, apart from, and at odds with the culture in which he lives, alienated from the mainstream, an outsider creating and living life on his own terms. Notes from the Underground is the companion piece to Mezz Mezzrow's Really The Blues (1946), the  gospel of hipster-jazz subculture that the Beats adopted as their book of revelations. The two books serve as the liturgy to Beat theology.

In 1949, the year that Kerouac bought this book, he had just completed the legendary road trips with Neal Cassady that began in July, 1947, wrote The Town and the City, was working on Dr. Sax,  and crafting the first draft of On the Road (in its essential religiosity a sort of Brothers Karamazov in a car; Kerouac, a devout, though lapsed Catholic;  a lonely, fallen altar-boy on an odyssey seeking enlightenment, redemption and communion with the Godhead, Brother Cassady his co-pilot and navigator riding shotgun no matter where he sat. On the Road is not about getting kicks on Route 66. Kerouac is an Irish-Catholic Siddartha). 1949 was a key year in Kerouac's journey, and Dostoyevsky was heavily on his mind.

In a letter written to his friend Alan Harrington on April 23, 1949 Kerouac wrote: "I've just read 'An Unfortunate [sic] Predicament,' a long story by Dusty-what's-his-name. I studied it carefully and found that he begins with 'ideas' and then demolishes them in the fury of what actually becomes the story. This letter is a similar venture. However, nothing detracts from the fact that this is a mad letter. 'So be it! So be it!'"

And boy, did he so be it. The first two pages of An Unpleasant Predicament (1861), one of the stories in the collection, are  annotated by Kerouac, who has written six remarks in the margins commenting on Dostoyevsky's usage and writing.

For example, next to the sentence that begins: "The fact..." Kerouac writes: "Truly 'the fact.' Always fluffs the rest, & gets to the 'fact.'"

Next to the word "fond" Kerouac writes: "fond always gives a batty tone -- just right."

About Dostoyevsky's use of the word "actual" he writes "Dusty's way of being a card."

Commenting on the sentence, "He was a bachelor because he was an egoist," Kerouac writes "A Family man's reflection."

Inappropriate behavior, scandalous activity, moral experimentation, ambiguity, and socio-political and literary polemic set within a mocking, carnivalistic atmosphere characterize this story of three generals' argument of ideas that degenerates when one of them, wishing to test his liberal-humanistic thinking, leaves, crashes the wedding of a subordinate, and gets drunk to satirically disastrous result. This was the Beat's bread and butter at its merriest, stepping on sacred cultural cow-pies, enjoying the squish, and hoping the scent offends bourgeois nostrils.

This copy of Dostoyevsky's short stories is a wonderful personal artifact from Kerouac's developing years as a writer, demonstrating his early literary thinking and roots. The year he bought and read it, the author, the subject - here dawn energetically breaks on the Beats and especially on Jack Kerouac.

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(KEROUAC, Jack). DOSTOIEVSKI, Fiodor [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]. Short Stories. New York and Boston: Books, Inc., n.d. [c. 1940s]. Reprint edition. Octavo. 248 pp. Signed and dated by Kerouac, with his holograph margin annotations in pencil.

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Images from book courtesy of Between the Covers, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.

Photo of Kerouac ©Allen Ginsberg LLC 2010, from Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art.

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Listen to Jack Kerouac recite a three-minute excerpt from The Subterraneans here.

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Sun Ra Rises In Chicago Exhibit

By Nancy Mattoon

Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra,
Fate in a Pleasant Mood,
Saturn SR9956-2-B, 33 1/3 rpm, 1965.
(All Images Courtesy Of Joseph Regenstein Library.)

He's been called the most controversial and unorthodox of all jazz musicians. A tall order, considering those who choose to play America's most innovative form of popular music tend to be anything but shrinking violets or Average Joes. But a new online exhibit from The University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library makes it clear that the man born Herman Poole Blount--but who rechristened himself Sun Ra--chose to spend his life and career far beyond even the outer limits of the jazz universe. Sounds from Tomorrow’s World explores Sun Ra’s time in Chicago, and is based on just a small portion of the Alton Abraham Papers of Sun Ra, located in the Special Collections Research Center of the university library. These papers are part of that institution's larger Chicago Jazz Archive.

Portrait of Herman Sonny Blount, undated.

Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount settled on Chicago’s South Side in 1946, after dropping out of college, and doing a stretch in an Alabama jail for registering as a conscientious objector during World War II. Quiet, intellectual and intelligent, he was always a bit eccentric, but there was little to suggest that over the next two decades, Blount would become Sun Ra, a jazz renegade who claimed to be a member of the "Angel Race" from Saturn. (When asked about his previous life as "Herman Blount," Sun Ra declared, "That's an imaginary person, never existed … Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym.")

Portrait of Sun Ra, undated.

Sun Ra's work in Chicago is less well known and documented than his later, higher profile career in New York and Philadelphia. But many jazz historians and critics believe that some of his best music--and certainly his most accessible recordings--were produced early on in the Windy City. His music during this time was much more conventionally arranged than his later work, and was heavily influenced by the swing jazz of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. There were already hints, however, of the more exotic, eccentric, and experimental work that was to follow.

Sun Ra and His Arkestra,
Jazz in Silhouette,
Saturn LP 5786, 33 1/3 rpm, 1959.

According to the exhibit, "Sonny Blount first worked as an arranger, writing for swing band leaders like Red Saunders and Fletcher Henderson, and sometimes sitting in on piano at club gigs. In 1952 he began billing himself as Sun Ra, and by 1954 he had begun rehearsing with his own big band, an eight man group that would become his Arkestra. Sun Ra and His Arkestra began playing at Chicago clubs such as Kirk’s Grand Terrace, the Vincennes Lounge, Parkway Ballroom and Budland. By 1956, the Arkestra had released its first LP." From the mid-1950s to his death, Sun Ra led "The Arkestra." A deliberate riff on orchestra, the ensemble had both an ever-changing lineup, and an ever-changing name. It was by turns called "The Solar Myth Arkestra", "His Cosmo Discipline Arkestra", the "Blue Universe Arkestra", "The Jet Set Omniverse Arkestra", and on and on. Sun Ra believed that as his music always changed, so should his musicians, and the name they worked under.

Sun Ra and his Arkestra, c.1960.
Photo by Charles Shabacon.

As the exhibit points out, Sun Ra was a writer as well as a musician. "As he was writing and performing his music, Sun Ra was also writing poetry and prose, exploring the occult, producing music for vocal and doo-wop groups, and founding a secret society and a record label—all the while preaching sermons to passersby in Washington Park." In later years, Ra and the Arkestra traveled several times to California. In 1971, Ra taught a course at Berkeley called "The Black Man in the Cosmos." The reading list included the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and books on hieroglyphics. The exhibit includes scores and poetry written by Sun Ra, as well as some of his highly controversial political and philosophical broadsides.

Sun Ra, Space Harp, wood, metal and wire, undated.

One thing is certain: nothing about Sun Ra or his career could be considered "normal," even by the traditionally unconventional standards of jazz. He recorded an astounding number of albums -- some sources put the number at nearly 200. As early as the '50s, Ra was adding odd, often self-made instruments into the Arkestra's sound, like zithers, bells, gongs, chimes, and claves along with new creations he dubbed "the solar drum," "the space harp," and "the boom bam." He also had the Arkestra wearing outlandish costumes, including helmets with flashing lights and propellers. Some of these early costumes were cast-offs from a Chicago opera company.

Claude Dangerfield, album artwork for
Rocket Number Nine, 1959.

Jerry Gordon, who co-owns Evidence Music, which has re-issued twenty early Sun Ra albums on CD, remembers being overwhelmed by the first Sun Ra show he saw in the early 70s. "It was an incredible concert," he says. "It was music like I had never heard before. Ra and the dancers were wearing capes. Fans on the floor blew the capes so they looked like multicolored wings. They had a spiral light on [tenor saxophonist] John Gilmore during his solos that created a tunnel effect. Ra was also using lights to make it look like he was sticking his head in a black hole in space. It was just unbelievable. I considered it holy music, music people should hear."

Claude Dangerfield, album artwork for
A Tonal View of Times Tomorrow, 1960[?].

Sounds from Tomorrow’s World notes that by the time he left Chicago in 1961, "Sun Ra was well on his way in a career as and a composer and arranger of some of the most avant-garde jazz of all time. He was also the architect of a philosophy that informed his music, his life, and the lives of those around him: a synthesis of Black Nationalism, Egyptology, futurism, occultism and Southern Baptist preaching." Jerry Gordon sums it up this way, "People loved to question Sun Ra about being born on Saturn, but these things were said to bring people out of their normal, humdrum, everyday reality. It's not about whether he's telling the truth. He tried to express his vision and get people out of the shadow world with his music. He was an educator and philosopher who tried to enlighten people."

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A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player (and Everyone Else): The Visual Poetry of Kenneth Patchen

by Stephen J. Gertz

Cover to A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

Dadaist, Surrealist, Jazz poet, Beat poet, visual poet - Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) - hellraiser and "naturalist of the public nightmare" - was all of those things, and none of them. He was, resolutely, Kenneth Patchen, that's all; that was that, and that was plenty: forty books of poetry, prose and drama  published during a career that began in Greenwich Village and ended in Palo Alto, California.

"The poet should resist all efforts to categorize him as a painted monkey on a stick, not for personal reasons alone, but because it does damage to poetry itself" (Patchen, letter to a friend).

An early example of Patchen's experiments with visual poetry - his charming and eloquent painted and silkscreened poems - A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player (1955) is a distinctive, joyful melange of text, drawings and decorations that furthered the explorations of Apollonaire with his  calligrams, and the Dadaists and Lettrists from earlier in the twentieth century.

The great fly fleet
From A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

Silkscreened from Patchen's original painted manuscript on handmade Japanese paper by fine printer Frank Bacher, many hand-colored by Patchen, A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player is rarely found complete with all eighteen broadsides. Copies, have, alas (but with grudging understanding) been broken up to sell the broadsides individually, each a stunning work of art.

Eureka! A complete copy has now come to market. ABPC records only three copies at auction in the last thirty-five years, one of which was, unsurprisingly, incomplete. This is likely the only complete copy we'll be seeing for quite some time.

Patchen influenced  Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dick McBride. In 1942 he collaborated with modernist composer John Cage on a radio play, The City Wears a Slouch Hat. During the 1950s Patchen collaborated with Jazz bassist and composer, Charles Mingus, reading his poetry to the Mingus group's accompaniment.

"...I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing his scarlet jacket and sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre you walk upstairs to down on fourteenth street.

"We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time. 'It's dark out, Jack' - this was one of his poems - 'It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all.' Patchen's a real artist, you'd dig him, doctor. 'I believe in truth' he said, 'I believe that every good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape of everything has been prepared'" (Mingus, Charles. Beneath the Underdog, p. 330).

Tiger contemplating a cake
From A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

Let us have madness openly.
0 men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear –
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell & fog Upon the earth,
& within the head
A rotting bog of lean huge graves.

      – Kenneth Patchen, "Let Us Have Madness"

That was written in 1936, nineteen years before Ginsberg's Howl (1955).

Binding the quiet into chalky sheaves
From A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

 

"His voice is the voice of a conscience which is forgotten. He speaks from the moral viewpoint of the new century, the century of assured hope, before the dawn of the world-in-concentration-camp. But he speaks of the world as it is.

"Imagine if suddenly the men of 1900 — H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Peter Kropotkin, Romain Rolland, Martin Nexo, Maxim Gorky, Jack London — had been caught up, unprepared & uncompromised, fifty years into the terrible future.

"Patchen speaks as they would have spoken, in terms of unqualified horror & rejection. He speaks as Émile Zola spoke once — “A moment in the conscience of mankind.” (Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Naturalist of the Public Nightmare. From Bird in the Bush (New Directions, 1959).

In Back Of
From A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

 I am the world crier, 

& this is my dangerous career.
I am the one to call your bluff,
& this is my climate.

- Kenneth Patchen

I am the joy of the desiring
flesh
The days of my living
are summer days
The nights of my glory
outshine the blazing
wavecaps of the heavens
at their floodtide
Mine is the confident hand shaping this
world.
- Kenneth Patchen

What Indeed!
From A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player.

PATCHEN, Kenneth. A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player. [Palo Alto]: [Printed for the Author by Frank Bacher], 1955. First edition, limited to 200 copies. Folio. Eighteen poems as eighteen silkscreened broadsides, 39 x 30 cm each, printed on handmade Japanese paper, loose, as issued, in screen-printed card portfolio. The copy of acclaimed painter and graphic artist, Ben Shahn, with his bookplate.

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Other examples of Patchen's painted/silkscreened  poems can be viewed here.

A complete check-list of the works of Kenneth Patchen is available for reference.

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Images from A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, which is jointly offering this splendid copy with Between the Covers, with our thanks. Please contact for details.

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The Library Of Congress And All That Jazz

Portrait Of Billie Holiday,

For DownBeat Magazine, ca. 1947.

(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Call it chance, fate, destiny, or kismet. Often sheer luck--good or bad--determines the shape of our lives. Eighteenth century poet and philosopher Johann Friedrich Von Schiller believed that "what seems to us mere accident springs from the deepest source of destiny." He never met 20th century photographer William P. Gottlieb, but if he had, Schiller would have marked him as "Exhibit A" in the perpetual philosophical trial of free will vs. determinism.

Portrait of William P. Gottlieb, ca. 1940.
(Photo by Delia Potosky Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

William Gottlieb planned to become an economist, but instead of spending his life devising dry theories on the workings of capitalism, he became a capital photographer. Gottlieb spent his life creating some of the best pictures ever snapped of great musicians. The Library of Congress (LC) recently digitized and posted over 200 of Gottlieb's portraits of jazz giants--with hundreds more to come--on one of its Flickr sites. But a biography of Gottlieb in the Library's Performing Arts Encyclopedia, reveals that these fabulous photos would never have been taken without a case of food poisoning, a rained-out tennis match, and a cash-strapped newspaper.

Jo Stafford Backstage, ca. 1946

(Photo By William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

William P. Gottlieb was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 28, 1917. Gottlieb was orphaned in his early teens, a sad fact that nevertheless may have encouraged him to take risks and follow his heart. After high school graduation, he pursued a degree in economics from Lehigh University. Gottlieb's membership in a fraternity led, in a somewhat convoluted manner, to his interest in jazz. The day before the end of his sophomore year, the cook at Gottlieb's frat house dished up a meal featuring underdone pork. For Gottlieb, and several of his "brothers," this resulted in a severe case of trichinosis and a summer's worth of bed rest.

Duke Ellington In His Dressing Room
at the Paramount Theater, ca. 1946.
(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Gottlieb's sickbed boredom was frequently eased by a high school friend, "Doc" Bartle. Bartle was a sometime classical pianist, but his music of choice offstage was jazz. He often brought along the latest jazz records, by artists like Duke Ellington and Louie Armstrong, when he visited his convalescing pal. Gottlieb's casual listening to jazz soon became a habit, and a genuine jazz buff was born.

Glen Gray In His Dressing Room
at the Paramount Theater, ca. 1946.
(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Upon returning to Lehigh, Gottlieb became the editor of the school's monthly magazine, The Lehigh Review. As editor, Gottlieb ran articles on live jazz performances in Philadelphia and New York City in every issue, along with monthly reviews of jazz records. He also began to have an interest in photojournalism, which was on the rise due to the popularity of Life and Look magazines. The multi-talented Gottlieb was also on Lehigh's varsity tennis team, which led to the second happy accident that changed his life. And once again a friendship was instrumental in maintaining William Gottlieb's connection with the world of jazz.

Buddy Childers and Stan Kenton, ca. 1946-47.
(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

A college buddy of Gottlieb's was the nephew of the business manager of the Washington Post, Don Bernard. When the friend learned that Gottlieb would be playing in a tennis tournament in Washington, D.C., he encouraged his pal to call his uncle. Gottlieb listened politely but thought it unlikely he'd have time to chat with Bernard, since the tennis team would only be in town for a day. But he did bring some writing samples with him--just in case. When the tennis matches were rained-out, Gottlieb called Bernard's office at the paper. Bernard just happened to be in on that particular Saturday, and told Gottlieb to come on over. Despite the fact that the college kid was still in his tennis whites, Bernard was impressed enough with the writing samples to recommend Gottlieb for a job in the advertising department of the Post. Upon graduation from Lehigh in 1938, Gottlieb became an ad salesman for the paper.

Billie Holiday and Her Boxer, Ca. 1947

(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

After a few months on the job, Gottlieb offered to write a weekly column on jazz for the Sunday edition. The Arts Editor agreed, and his pay jumped from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a week. But more importantly, he became the writer of the first jazz column to appear in a daily newspaper. At first a Post photographer was assigned to illustrate Gottlieb's column. But soon the management of the paper decided the arrangement was too costly, and the lensman was reassigned. Unwilling to publish the column without photos, Gottlieb sold his prized record collection and used the proceeds to buy a camera. With a lot of help from the Post's staff photographers, and a tremendous amount of practice, William Gottlieb taught himself how to take photos that were not only good enough for publication, but were works of art in their own right.

Django Reinhardt, ca. 1947.
(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

By age twenty-two, Gottlieb was known in the Washington, D.C. area as "Mr. Jazz." But Mr. Jazz had a growing family, so he left the advertising arm of the paper in 1941 to earn a graduate degree in economics at the University of Maryland. However, he never gave up writing and illustrating his Sunday jazz column. After serving as an Army photographer in World War II, Gottlieb once again followed his heart, and in 1945 he moved to New York City, determined to become a full-time jazz writer and photographer. He stopped in at the New York office of DownBeat magazine, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the staff was not only familiar with his work for the Post, they downright admired it. Gottlieb was hired on the spot as an assistant editor.

Mary Lou Williams, ca.1946.

(Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Soon, Gottlieb's photographs became even more popular with DownBeat's readers than his writing, and several of his shots even made the magazine's cover. For five years he documented the New York jazz scene, photographing and writing about many of popular music's greatest artists. But, by the end of the decade, the jazz scene was changing, and Gottlieb was worn out. Feeling out of touch with the newest music, and wanting to spend more time with his family, Gottlieb left DownBeat. As he put it, "I was really something of a square; I had a wife and children, and the joys of staying out until four a.m. with musicians, even those who were my idols, had evaporated, especially since I was often the only sober one there."

U.S. Postal Service Stamps
Based On Gottlieb's Photos, Issued in 1994.
(Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

But even after his "retirement" from the jazz scene, William Gottlieb's photos lived on. His photos from 1938 to 1948 are among the most frequently reproduced jazz images in the world, so iconic they were even used as the basis for a series of United States postage stamps in 1994. More than 200 of his photos were collected in a 1979 book, The Golden Age of Jazz. In 1997, Gottlieb became the first photographer ever honored with DownBeat's Lifetime Achievement Award. He remains a member of good standing in the Jazz Photographers Association, still takes on the occasional assignment. Not bad for a guy whose career in jazz journalism began with bellyful of roundworms.

Thanks to the Resource Shelf for the lead.

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