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Posts from the ‘Art’ Category

Apr 3

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A portrait of Bud

There’s this portrait that I bought about 30 years ago from an English artist called Johnny Bull. At the time, he was concentrating on jazz musicians: Miles, Coltrane, Monk. I liked his work, so I invested a couple of hundred quid in one of the less obvious subjects, a large pastel portrait of the bebop piano master Bud Powell. It hung on a wall in the house for a while but then I got uncomfortable with it and put it away. It emerged recently and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Bud was one of jazz’s great tragedies as well as one of its great masters. He was a classically trained prodigy from a highly musical family. But in 1945, aged 20, after being arrested while drunk on the streets of Philadelphia one night after a gig with the trumpeter Cootie Williams’s big band, he was beaten on the head. The effect was to change his personality, putting him in and out of mental institutions, where he was subjected to electro-convulsive therapy.

Some of those who heard him in his teens said his playing was never quite the same after the beating. But still it was good enough to make him the leader among modern jazz pianists in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the only one who could take the stage with Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Max Roach and exist absolutely on their level, matching their creativity. At his best — in his 1947 trio session released as a 10-inch LP on the Roost label, for example — he was incomparable, although drugs prescribed for what was then known as manic depression sometimes dulled his mind and his edge. But he remained capable of composing, alongside bop standards like “Wail” and “Bouncing with Bud”, such extraordinary pieces as “Parisian Thoroughfare” and “Glass Enclosure”.

After several years in Paris, where he had a trio with the great Kenny Clarke on drums and the French bassist Pierre Michelot and was looked after for a while by the writer, commercial artist and amateur pianist Francis Paudras, he returned to New York in 1964. He died there two years later, aged 41, of the effects of tuberculosis, exacerbated by alcoholism and general neglect.

If you want to know about Bud, there are several good biographies, including Paudras’s Dance of the Infidels (Da Capo, 1998) and Peter Pullman’s exhaustively researched Wail (available on Kindle). And I recommend an hour-long documentary called Inner Exile, made for French television in 1999 and now on YouTube, directed by Robert Mugnerot and featuring marvellous performance footage as well as interviews with those close to him. (The great René Urtreger, who made an album of Powell’s compositions in Paris in 1955, says of his hero: “He was not made to live in this society.”)

I contacted Johnny Bull via email a few days ago, wanting to talk about his portrait. As you can see, it shows Bud wearing a fez and what looks like some kind of hospital uniform. When I first saw it, it seemed a powerful way of dramatising the pathos of his story. So, after we’d become reacquainted, I told Johnny about my dilemma. It’s a very fine piece of art, and quite beautiful, but it brings too much sadness to a domestic setting. Exhibiting it in a public environment, like a gallery or museum, might not be the right way to introduce Bud to people who don’t know anything about him. It illustrates one aspect of his life with great sensitivity but gives no indication of what he brought to the world, which is why it wouldn’t really work on the wall of a jazz club, either.

The artist agreed. “It’s a distressing picture,” he said. “He looks such a lost soul. I made a painting of Lester Young once, towards the end of his life, and it was too disturbing to keep looking at, so I quite understand your feeling.”

Johnny Bull loves and understands the music. His intentions when he made the portrait were beyond reproach, his response to the subject was anything but superficial, and his execution was impeccable. I bought it because it moved me. But I have no clear idea of what its fate should be now. It seems wrong for it to spend any more years stacked away in my house. Maybe I’m writing this in the hope that someone will propose a solution. Failing a better idea, I’ll probably just give it back to the artist, who can put it in his archive. Then, one day, someone else will have to make the decision.

Mar 7

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Picasso & Monk in Paris

In a room devoted to Pablo Picasso in the 1950s, there’s something unexpected: the sound of Thelonious Monk, alone at the piano, ruminating on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”. The rest of Thelonious Himself, the 1957 album consisting of seven solo tracks plus “Monk’s Mood” with John Coltrane and Wilbur Ware, is playing on a continuous loop, quietly and unobtrusively, conditioning the mood in which a handful of masterpieces, including Jacqueline aux mains croisées (1954), can be examined as part of a new exhibition in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

It’s one of several surprises introduced by the British designer Paul Smith, invited by the museum’s director to create a show commemoraing the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death. His brief was to bring a fresh eye to bear on the selection and presentation of items from the 5,000 assorted artworks in the permanent collection, most of them acquired by the nation as part of an inheritance-tax settlement with the artist’s family.

I first met Paul in 1965, when we were still in our teens and he’d just begun managing the menswear department on the upper floor of a boutique in Nottingham. Called Birdcage, it was a minute’s walk away from the tiny premises in which, five years later, he would open the first shop bearing his own name. Now there are more than 120 Paul Smith shops in 60 countries around the world. Back then he was full of imagination, enthusiasm and a love of silly humour, all qualities that time, a knighthood and membership of the Légion d’honneur have done nothing to erode.

His instinctive response to the museum’s invitation was to emphasise the role of colour in the artist’s career, from the pink period of 1904-1906 to the blue and white stripes of the Breton sailors’ shirt Picasso was wearing when the photographer Robert Doisneau turned up to capture some famous images at his house in Vallauris in Provence in 1952, including the shot where sausage-shaped bread rolls — petits pains — take the place of his fingers.

Mounted with wit and zest, avoiding the reverence with which such retrospectives are traditionally mounted, some of the show is eye-popping. In one of the 24 themed rooms, originals are mounted on walls papered with posters from Picasso exhibitions around the world. His variations on Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe are ranged in the greenest green room you’ve ever seen. A wall of pale blue and yellow lozenges echoes the harlequin costume worn by the painter’s three-year-old son Paul as he posed for his father in 1924. The abundance of floral and striped wallpaper makes the rooms in which a more sober approach is appropriate — the Blue and Rose periods, or the poignantly understated finale of Le Jeune peintre, from Picasso’s last year on earth, in a room washed in pale sunlight — even more effective.

Not just paintings, either. A dozen of Picasso’s one-off decorated dinner plates are mounted in the middle of a wall of plain white plates, which seem to be waiting for him to get up in the morning, grab his paints and start daubing fishbones or minotaur’s heads. The famous bull’s head fashioned in 1942 from a discarded pair of dropped handlebars and a bicycle saddle is hung high on one wall of the very first room, confronting a herd of cows on the opposite wall assembled from their modern equivalents, with the bars turned downwards, presumably to signify bovine submission in the face of taurean power. There’s a sense of semi-surrealistic comedy at work here that mirrors Picasso’s own sense of humour but also offers a quiet comment.

Perhaps purists will be relieved to have their Picassos restored to more neutral surroundings after the exhibition in the beautiful hôtel particulier in the Marais ends in August, but Paul’s inclusion of the sound of Monk’s piano — apart from giving me an excuse to devote a piece to the show in a blog about music — seemed to symbolise the benign and sympathetic creativity at work in the exhibition as a whole.

* Célébration Picasso: Le collection prend ses couleurs! is at the Musée Picasso, 5 Rue de Thorigny, Paris 75003, from 7 March to 27 August 2023.

Apr 5

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The arts of Bob Crewe

Perhaps the greatest week of Bob Crewe’s life was the one in 1975 when Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You”, which he had produced and co-composed with Kenny Nolan, fell from the No 1 position in the Billboard Hot 100 and was immediately replaced by Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade”, which he and Nolan had also written together.

Or perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe it was the one in 1994 when the first retrospective show of his paintings and mixed-media artworks opened at a gallery in West Hollywood, after he had left the music business behind and climbed out of the valley into which his addictions had led him.

Crewe must have had a lot of great weeks in his life, as the man whose credits as a co-writer and/or producer, running all the way from doo-wop to disco, included the Rays’ “Silhouettes”, Diane Renay’s “Navy Blue”, Freddy Cannon’s “Tallahassie Lassie”, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ “Jenny Take a Ride/See See Rider”, Norma Tanega’s “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” and Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes’ “I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo”. And, of course, towering above everything, that fabulous string of hits he produced and co-wrote with Bob Gaudio for the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli, including “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “Walk Like a Man”, “Rag Doll”, “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Any More)”, “You’re Ready Now”, “The Proud One” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”.

Born in 1930 in Newark, New Jersey, Crewe was a blond Adonis in the Tab Hunter mould. He looked like a star, custom-built for American Bandstand, and he had a decent voice, as Jerry Wexler recognised when he persuaded him to record a solo album in Muscle Shoals in 1977. But the studio was where he expressed himself. He couldn’t read a note of music but he had well tuned ears and an instinct for a great hook, musical or lyrical, and he knew how to hire the best arrangers, men like Charlie Calello and Hutch Davie. The idiom didn’t matter. As Andrew Loog Oldham put it: “No one spoke more dialects of ‘hit’ than Bob Crewe.”

But there was another side to his talent, and it was one he seemed to have abandoned after ending his studies at the Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village after only a year. Mentored by two older gay men, Austin Avery Mitchell, who showed him the art galleries of New York, Paris and Rome, and the photographer Otto Fenn, an early Warhol collaborator, he had begun painting and had his first show in 1950. Soon, however, music took over and ruled his life for the next quarter of a century, first as a crooner and then as a writer-producer. But a love of the visual media was merely dormant, and after being knocked over by a car in Los Angeles in 1977 he began to rededicate himself to art.

Influenced by Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he made abstract pieces out of a variety of materials, characterised by a love of texture acquired from Dubuffet and a feeling for outline and repetition that may have come from Johns. Leafing through Bob Crewe: Sight and Sound, a new book about his artworks, it’s easy to respond to his instinct for shape and surface. Here’s one of his pieces, Excavation 8/3/96, juxtaposed with one of the hit singles for which he’s remembered:

I chose that painting because, like many of his pieces, it contains the motif of a perfect circle — in this case three of them, half-hidden within the complex surface markings inscribed on three wooden panels, 7ft tall by 9ft wide. Whether those circles reminded him of all the hits he’d helped to make, I have no idea. I’m not a psychologist. And I am not, of course, an art critic; that side of things is explored by the painter Peter Plagens in one of the book’s three essays. But I do like much of what I see here, and it would be interesting to be able to examine it in a gallery one day.

Crewe’s role in the Four Seasons story was brought back to public attention in Jersey Boys, the musical that opened its run on Broadway in 2005 before enjoying success around the world. He died in 2014, in the retirement home where he had lived after receiving serious injuries from a fall down a flight of stairs in the home of his younger brother Dan, who had been his business partner in the 1960s.

In the first of the book’s essays, Andrew Loog Oldham locates Crewe within the rapid evolution of post-war American popular culture, alongside such figures as Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce and James Dean. Oldham knew him in the hit-making days and watched him at work, making and selling his music in the days when he could start a song with lines like “Loneliness is the cloak you wear / A deep shade of blue is always there.” And, linking Crewe’s two artistic preoccupations, he observes: “He liked to think of music in terms of colour and challenged his musicians to think that way along with him.” Alone with his paints and his brushes and his palette knives, he challenged himself.

* Bob Crewe: Sight and Sound: Compositions in Art and Music, edited by Dan Crewe, is published in the US by Rizzoli Electa ($55). The photograph of Crewe in the studio in 1966 is from the book. The 45 is “Music to Watch Girls By” by the Bob Crewe Generation (DynoVoice, 1967).

Dec 3

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Fantoni’s Sixties

Fantoni Beatles

It’s fair to say that Barry Fantoni had a good Sixties. Now we can read all about it in A Whole Scene Going On, his memoir of the time when he wrote gags for Private Eye, appalled the Royal Academy with a pop-art painting of a Pope, a judge and a general, created the visual backdrops for Ready, Steady, Go!, had a girlfriend who shared a flat with Jane Asher, presented a TV youth programme of his own (from which his book adapts its title), had an abortive stab at becoming a pop star, became a brilliant cartoonist, and did all the other things that people did in that blessed time. He mentions finding an address book from 1966 that begins with Annie (Nightingale) and ends with Zoot (Money).

Others who passed through his life during that period, with varying degrees of intimacy, include Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Ray Davies, Ralph Steadman, Peter Osgood, John Mayall, Terence Donovan, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page (and his mum), and Felicity Innes, who wore a mini-skirt before Mary Quant. There are great stories about all of them, and about the early Private Eye gang: Ingrams, Booker, Rushton, Cook, Wells and so on. I loved the affectionate evocations of the brilliant designer Robert Brownjohn, the journalist Penny Valentine, the Nova art director Harri Peccinotti, a bloke called Bob who invented Gonks, the art critic John Russell, and Keith Goodwin, Fantoni’s press agent.

Goodwin also looked after Paul and Barry Ryan, Donovan, Cat Stevens, the Temperance Seven and Dusty Springfield, the subject of a chilling vignette: “You needed to know Dusty offstage to get the real picture. To see the face beneath the heavy makeup, back-combed hair and black eyeliner. What I saw was a rather frightened and plain-looking girl from the London suburbs with a bad temper and a desperate need to be loved.” Among those also sideswiped along the way are Tariq Ali, Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser, Jeff Beck and Gerald Scarfe. The grudges, as is usually the case, add significant value: his resentment of David Hockney’s success is nothing short of epic.

I met him at the very end of this period, when he was contributing cartoons to accompany the wonderful Melody Maker column in which Chris Welch chronicled the adventures of an imaginary pop star called Jiving K. Boots, who was usually either getting banned from the Speakeasy or getting it together in the country: it was Spinal Tap avant la lettre, with a dash of Beachcomber’s random whimsy. I remember greatly coveting the Fantoni portrait of Denis Law that another friend, Geoffrey Cannon, had on the wall of his house in Notting Dale. Apparently that’s now lost, like the large quantity of Barry’s early paintings — including the famously scandalous “The Duke of Edinburgh in His Underpants” — taken off in 1963 to be shown in Los Angeles and never returned. “I have no idea where my work is now,” Fantoni writes of that episode. “Covered in goose shit, I expect.”

This was the Sixties, so not all the detail of Fantoni’s recollections is 100 per cent accurate. But that doesn’t matter. He brings alive a world in which dinner would be at a King’s Road trattoria one night and the all-night Golden Egg on Oxford Street the next, and when making art and having fun seemed to be all that mattered.

* Barry Fantoni’s A Whole Scene Going On: My Inside Story of Private Eye, the Pop Revolution and Swinging Sixties London is published by Polygon. His painting of the Beatles, first exhibited in January 1963 and reproduced above from the book, is now owned by Paul McCartney.

Oct 9

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Another me, another way

Another me 3

The self-portrait above was painted by an inmate of Vinney Green Secure Unit, a young offenders’ facility in Bristol. It’s part of “Another Me”, an exhibition of artworks by people incarcerated within the criminal justice system, currently on show in the Spirit Level rooms at the South Bank centre, below the Festival Hall. It caught my attention when I noticed that it had been curated for the Koestler Arts foundation by Soweto Kinch, the brilliant composer, saxophonist and bandleader. Anything Kinch is involved in tends to be worth your time, and “Another Me” is no exception.

At Koestler Arts’ building in Wormwood Scrubs, he went through 7,610 entries submitted in 52 categories from UK prisons and British prisoners abroad. His selection spans a range of media, from conventional painting and photography to wall-poetry, music of various genres (which you can hear through headphones), all ranging from the sombre to the defiantly whimsical. There’s a particularly extraordinary piece made from used nitrous oxide canisters found in various London locations — outside a school, an off-licence, a night club, a hospital — and labelled and framed in the style of Victorian museum objects under the title “Nitrouonites: Future Fossils”. As you walk around, you’ll hear the sound of drifting saxophones and electronics: a non-invasive but gently atmospheric sound installation specially devised by the curator.

Many of the works display great technical skill, but I was struck by the one at the top of this piece, a particularly eloquent and moving articulation of the exhibition’s theme. As another of the artists writes in a commentary on his own self-portrait, the title of show “suggest(s) so many possibilities, reflecting on past actions or future selves. It speaks of the masks we all use in our day-to-day lives. Our best selves, our worst. Perhaps most powerfully it suggests change is possible — there can always be another me, another way.”

* Another Me is at the Spirit Level exhibition space of the Royal Festival Hall until November 3. Soweto Kinch performs his new work The Black Peril at Hackney EartH on November 22 with an ensemble including the drummer Makaya McCraven, the bassist Junius Paul and members of the LSO, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Nov 28

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Bob Dylan in his own write

Mondo Scripto 1

I chuckled when I saw these bookshelves, installed on the stairwell of the Halcyon Gallery on Bond Street, accompanying an exhibition called Mondo Scripto: Lyrics and Drawings by Bob Dylan. Here is what appears to be just about every book ever written in English about Dylan, including my own extremely modest and inessential effort. The realisation of how many of these volumes are on my shelves made me pause for a moment to think about life’s priorities.

Anyway, the exhibition’s raison d’être is a new series of 52 handwritten lyrics, each framed with an accompanying pencil drawing. I happen to have a fondness for Dylan’s oil paintings, without feeling the need to make any great claims for them, but these sketches are extremely rudimentary. It’s the juxtapositions that make them interesting to a fan. Sometimes they’re surprisingly literal: a young woman behind bars with “I Shall Be Released”, a tank with “Masters of War”, a man alone high on a ridge with “One Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)”. Elsewhere any hint of shared meaning is, shall we say, elusive: a collapsed building with “Forever Young”, a sketch of a Chicago Cubs pitcher with “Hurricane” (which is, of course, about a boxer), a portrait of Jack Nicholson as the Joker with “All Along the Watchtower”.

A photograph on a wall shows Dylan, pen in hand, writing out one of the lyrics (they’re all inscribed on headed notepaper from something called the Black Buffalo on State Street in Dayton, Ohio, which — like the Abernathy Building, where he made his Theme Time Radio programmes — turns out not to exist). So I guess he did write them all himself, the calligraphy varying in a way that, like the occasional crossing-out, would probably be beyond currently available algorithms.

Personally, I’m moved by the sight of the words to “It’s Alright Ma” written out by their author. Or the third-person version of the “Tangled Up In Blue” lyric. The songs from Blood on the Tracks, in fact, are all treated to some fairly radical revision: apart from the first seven words and the title, this written version of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” contains nothing from the original recording.

 

Mondo Scripto 2

No doubt somebody will tell me that it’s from one of the outtakes on More Blood, More Tracks, the latest volume in the Bootleg Series, in which I have yet to invest — partly because the terrible early version of “Your Gonna Make Me Lonesome” that I heard during a playback session a few months ago came close to destroying what is probably my favourite of all Dylan’s songs and put me off the idea of buying the £100 deluxe edition altogether. But it was enjoyable to read these verses to myself, with the melody and Dylan’s voice in my head.

The exhibition also features some of his iron sculptures, created by welding together old farmyard tools and bits of tractors (or possibly new ones: it’s hard to tell, since they’re all dipped in a thick paint). I got a lot of fun out of overhearing a member of the gallery’s staff, a smart young man in a suit and tie, trying to explain them to a potential buyer. Not a job I’d want to have.

* Mondo Scripto is at the Halcyon Gallery at 144-146 Bond Street, London W1S 2PF, until December 23. For those who might be interested, 10 of the lyrics/sketches are available as individual prints in editions of 495 at £1,500 unframed and £1,895 framed. Originals apparently start at close to £100K. Black Buffalo Ironworks seems to be the name of his metal sculpture project, but it’s not based in Dayton, Ohio, as far as I can tell. About the books, the gallery will tell me only that they are the property of a collector.

Nov 13

4 Comments

Sinatra for sale

An American Classic (Frank Sinatra)

Norman Rockwell’s “An American Classic (Portrait of Frank Sinatra)” is among the headline items in a series of sales in New York next month, at which Sotheby’s will auction off the possessions of Sinatra and his fourth wife, Barbara Marx, who died last year. Commissioned by Frank in 1973, the painting hung on the wall of Barbara’s Los Angeles apartment after his death and has an estimate of $80-120,000. Rockwell, who created so many memorable magazine covers for the Saturday Evening Post, was in his 80th year when he painted a work that, for all its superficial suburban blandness, catches an interesting light in the eye and turn of the mouth.

Other objects for sale, besides a great quantity of the last Mrs Sinatra’s jewellery, include some of Frank’s own modernist abstract paintings; a leather-bound final script of From Here to Eternity, in which Sinatra used the part of Private Angelo Maggio to turn his career around; a pair of AKG microphones that he carried on the road; a monogrammed orange jacket that he wore on his private jet; a personalised yarmulke; and letters from every US president from Truman to Clinton.

There is also a poster from his two-week run at the London Palladium in July 1950, his first dates outside America, in which he shared the bill with Max Wall, the Skyrockets Orchestra, the Tiller Girls, Krista & Kristel, Pierre Bel (“continental juggler”), and Wilson, Keppel & Betty. The Daily Graphic talked to him in the aftermath of the opening night, from which he was lucky to escape with his clothes on. “Two tall redheaded girls nearly got my tie,” he told the paper. “One was actually pulling it off my neck. I pulled back.” Ava Gardner, with whom he was in the middle of a torrid affair, was in the audience as he opened with “Bewitched”, “Embraceable You” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily”, during which the pandemonium in the stalls began.

* You can find details of the auction here: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2018/lady-blue-eyes-property-barbara-frank-sinatra-n09963.html?locale=en

Mar 2

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‘Rhythm & Reaction’

Rhythm and Reaction 3

William Waldorf Astor, the richest man in America, had made a new home in England by the time he bought the late-Victorian Gothic mansion known as Two Temple Place in 1895. Set on the north bank of the Thames between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges, it became the headquarters for his various business and philanthropic interests. At a cost of $1.5m — imagine how much that would represent in today’s money — he turned the interior into a riot of mahogany staircases, ebony pillars, marble floors, cedar panelling and staggering stained glass. He was 71 when he died in his bath at home in Brighton in October 1919, six months after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had arrived in London to play at the Palladium, the Hippodrome and Hammersmith Palais and, astonishingly, at Buckingham Palace for King George V.

A century later, there’s a less tenuous connection between the building and the band. Rhythm & Reaction: The Age of Jazz in Britain is an exhibition illustrating aspects of Britain’s embrace of the music in its early decades, from minstrel shows to the end of the inter-war period. Curated by Professor Catherine Tackley, head of music at Liverpool University, it does a pretty good job of conjuring the atmosphere of Britain in the Jazz Age, via ancient banjos and drum kits, 78rpm discs, books (including Al Bowlly’s guide to crooning), blown-up photographs (Ellington arriving at Southampton docks in 1933, for example), early copies of publications such as the Melody Maker and Rhythm, paintings (including William Patrick Roberts’s “The Dance Club” of 1923, above), fabrics and ceramics, bakelite wirelesses, and Wyndham Lewis’s 1912 design for the programme and menu at the Golden Calf, a West End cabaret club.

Rhythm and reaction 4

Perhaps the most haunting exhibit is a pastel study for a work called “The Breakdown”, painted in 1926 by the Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter for the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. At least one of the layered meanings of this study of a formally dressed black saxophonist sitting on a broken piece of classical statuary as a naked white woman dances to his music was provocative enough to upset the Colonial Office, which complained that it was “obnoxious to British subjects living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population.”

The Melody Maker had already joined in with an extraordinary editorial which, after admiring the artist’s technique, inveighed on behalf of dance-band musicians against “the habit of associating our music with the primitive and barbarous negro derivation…” The painting, it claimed, was “not only a picture entirely nude of the respect due to the chastity and morality of the greater part of the young generation but in the degradation it implies to modern white women there is the perverse anger to the community and the best thing that could happen to it is to have it… burnt!”

Forced to withdraw his painting, Souter destroyed it, leaving only the pastel study (above) and a version he recreated in oils in 1962, which is also on show.

Almost every aspect of Rhythm & Reaction deserves study in greater depth — e.g. minstrelsy, “jazz” motifs in the decorative arts, the “rhythm clubs” formed by the music’s early adherents — but as it stands the exhibition does an effective job of prompting reflection on an important phenomenon. It would be of particular interest, I think, to young members of the newest and highly multicultural generation of British jazz musicians, who might find it enlightening and (despite the fate of “The Breakdown”) even inspiring.

* Rhythm & Reaction is on show at Two Temple Place until April 22, daily except Tuesdays (information on opening hours and special events: https://twotempleplace.org). “The Dance Party” is on loan from Leeds Museum and Art Gallery. The pastel study of “The Breakdown” is from a private collection. Those who want to know more about the subject should read the late Jim Godbolt’s A History of Jazz in Britain 1919-1950, republished in 2010 by Northway Books.

Jan 19

8 Comments

Bebop and Basquiat

Basquiat Bird 3

There’s only another week in which to see Boom for Real, the big Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Barbican, before it closes on January 28. I left it until last week to pay my first visit and I’m going to try to go again. There’s a lot to see and I want to spend a bit more time thinking about his relationship with modern jazz in general and Charlie Parker in particular, which is what struck me most of all as I was going around the show.

Basquiat, who came to fame as a teenage graffiti artist on the streets of New York and died in 1988 at the age of 27, must have really loved Parker’s music. It can’t have been a pose. The names and phrases scrawled in many of the paintings show an intimate knowledge of Bird’s work. Crispus Attucks High School was the one Parker attended in Kansas City. Buster Smith was the alto saxophonist he admired in his apprentice years. Doris Sydnor was his third wife. Joe Albany was one of his pianists. Dial and Savoy were two of the labels for which he made his finest recordings. “Half Nelson”, “KoKo”, “Now’s the Time” and “Warming Up a Riff” were some of the tunes he cut. The Stanhope Hotel was where he died.

There’s a real feeling for jazz here. Not just Parker but Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie are referenced in the works included in Boom for Real. Basquiat’s blend of the heroic and the grotesque seems to me a fair representation of an art form that had to fight its way first into existence and then towards acknowledgement. The harshness and challenges of a jazz musician’s life are as present in the paintings as the aesthetic value of what they produce. There’s a title of a Monk tune that sums it up: “Ugly Beauty”.

“Jean-Michel says his paintings are jazz on canvas,” Jennifer Clement writes in Widow Basquiat, a portrait of the painter’s relationship with his girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk, first published in 2002. There’s a passage in which, having discovered that Billie Holiday’s grave has no headstone, he spends a weekend designing one with the help of his friend, the art curator Diego Cortez, while Suzanne makes trips to get them cocaine.

There are people who don’t appreciate the way Basquiat turned street art into something for which collectors now pay vast sums. To them, the $110.5m paid for one of his canvases last May, setting a record for a painting by any American artist sold at auction, represents an insult to the history of art. But I think he did something important in getting the spirit of the music on to canvas. I wish he could have done it without feeling the need to copy Parker’s heroin habit, but I’ve felt that about a lot of people and there’s really no point. Just go and look.

* Untitled (Charlie Parker) was painted in 1983 and is in the Barbican exhibition, on loan from the Schorr Family Collection.

Nov 11

7 Comments

Jazz Abstraction

evan-parker-at-raAs I was on the way to see the blockbuster Abstract Expressionism show at the Royal Academy the other day, it was pointed out that jazz and AbEx seem to share a special relationship. I suppose that has something to do with synchronicity. Franz Kline and Mark Rothko were creating their revolutionary canvases at the same time as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were making the music that changed everything, and the two developments seemed to share a sensibility. It’s easy to imagine Kline or Rothko playing “Ornithology” or “Well, You Needn’t” while working on a canvas in a Greenwich Village studio.

Easy, but probably misleading. I seem to remember reading that Jackson Pollock listened to Brahms while working on his drip paintings. Yet when Nesuhi Ertegun, the producer of Ornette Coleman’s Atlantic recordings, asked the collector and gallerist Sidney Janis for permission to reproduce Pollock’s “White Light” on the cover of Free Jazz in 1961, he was establishing a link that seemed to contain an emotional truth, if not a literal one. And Coleman’s double-quartet recording was by no means the only modern jazz album to make use of abstract expressionism on its cover: see the art of Martin Craig on the pianist Herbie Nichols’ two 10-inch LPs for Blue Note in 1955, The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Vols 1 & 2, for example.

At the RA, the breathtaking Pollock rooms are the strongest part of an exhibition that also gave me a greater appreciation of Robert Motherwell and Sam Francis. The much-vaunted assembly of giant Clifford Still canvases left me curiously unmoved, and the round space devoted to Rothko resembles an oligarch’s car-boot sale. The final couple of rooms are curiously incoherent. But of course it has to be seen.

The link with jazz was reaffirmed last night when, as one of the opening events in this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, Evan Parker gave a short solo concert and a conversation with David Ryan under the heading “Jazz Abstraction”– a title adapted from that of a 1961 Atlantic album by Coleman, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and others (and which, come to think of it, also has an abstract expressionist painting by John Jagel on the cover).

Parker’s improvisations were as astounding as ever in their combination of fine detail and hurtling momentum. Later he remarked, non-judgmentally, that one difference between the AbEx painter and the free improviser is that in the case of the music, the process is the work.

The conversation also produced a couple of self-deprecatory gems. If La Monte Young, while still playing sopranino saxophone, had discovered circular breathing as a means of tying together the repeated motifs with which he was working, the world might never have heard of Evan Parker (who then gave us a demonstration of practising the breathing technique). And had the artist Alfreda Benge not introduced Evan to John Stevens one night in 1966, he might, as he put it, “still have had my nose pressed against the window”. Or so he claimed.

What the painters and the jazz musicians of Parker’s generation and slightly earlier had in common was not just the reassurance of an environment in which they could afford to live cheaply but a powerful belief in the value of their work, whatever valuation the world initially placed upon it. It’s just a pity that today’s commercial market doesn’t view them in the same light.

* Abstract Expressionism is on at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1 until January 2. Evan Parker’s latest album is As the Wind, with Mark Nauseef (percussion) and Toma Gouband (lithophones), released on the Psi label. The photograph is of Parker (right) and David Ryan at the RA.

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