Jazz Magazine – « Jazz to Remember »

Jazz and photography are old friends. As the visual memory of jazz, photography has, since its origins, left documentary traces that play an active part in the popular imagery and artistic recognition of this music. Let's remember the legendary trumpeter Buddy Bolden. We have no recordings of him, only a yellowed, blurred photo that contributes to his legend.

Jazz is an art of the instant, flowing over the duration of a chorus or concert. Photography is also an art of the instant, but one that is inscribed in space and plays with the dimension of surprise, where no repetition is possible. The "instantaneous photographic act" does not aim to freeze reality, but to render the movement of life in a still image, i.e. to surprise the emotion, anticipate the gesture, fix the ephemeral, tame the silence, arouse the unforeseeable. To do this, the photographer must become the subjective of the lens, the soloist of chance, the eye always on the alert, on the lookout for the "decisive moment" (as Cartier-Bresson spoke of), the "living moment" (Guy Le Querrec), the "desired moment" as Francis Marmande wrote.

"There is no love, only proof of love" wrote the poet Pierre Reverdy. We could paraphrase this adage by saying: "There is no jazz, there is only proof of jazz", the proof that each musician gives at every concert, in the risk of the moment. It's fun to extend the aphorism: "There is no such thing as a jazz photo, there are only jazz prints", black-and-white prints on paper that act as "revelators" of a truly photogenic musical world. Jazz is a music that can be seen and read in the musicians' bodies, their gestures, their hands, their postures, their gait, their gaze, their intimate relationship with the instrument, and so on.
All the photographs in this exhibition are proof of this: Monk's profile against the light of Charlie Rouse's tenor (a masterpiece by Guiseppe Pino); Keith Jarrett with his head buried in the bowels of his piano; Ben Webster's solitude in his dressing room before a concert; Stan Getz resting on a hotel room bed with his saxophone on his stomach; Dizzy Gillespie blasting away like a glass-blower on his bent trumpet, his toad-buff cheeks puffed out like balloons, etc.
As we look through this gallery of portraits, let's not forget William Claxton's sage advice: "Listen to my photos with your eyes."

Pascal Anquetil

Created by Nicole and Eddie Barclay with former Jazz Hot administrator Jacques Souplet, the first issue of Jazz Magazine hit newsstands in December 1954. Lionel Hampton is on the cover. Putting an African-American on the cover was revolutionary in the French press of the time.
In 1955, Frank Ténot inaugurated a jazz program on a new radio station, Europe n° 1. He presented Pour ceux qui aiment le jazz live in tandem with a young photographer from Paris-Match and Marie-Claire, Daniel Filipacchi. The duo soon joined the Jazz Magazine team, inventing new forms of journalistic writing, emphasizing photography, layout and typographic innovation. The monthly was inspired by the American weeklies Life and Time, pioneers of photojournalism and news magazines. Eager to embrace the American counter-culture, the young public embraced this concept, which brought the jazzman closer to the jazzfan. By calling on the best photographers of the moment, in Europe as well as in the United States, Jazz Magazine fulfilled the reader's desires: reports from recording studios, images from concerts, snapshots from dressing rooms and tours, photo shoots in everyday circumstances... Over the pages and issues, jazz is thus legitimized as a cultural practice and way of life, right down to its aesthetic and political dimensions.
In 2014, Edouard Rencker became the owner of Jazz Magazine. The adventure continues, always under the sign of independence and passion.