Jazz Score: Friday the Thirteenth

Artist Ray Johnson died on Friday the thirteenth, drowned in the waters of Sag Harbor. Numerologists will take note: he was checked into room 247 of a local hotel, numbers which director John Walter’s documentary How to Draw a Bunny points out, add up to thirteen. In addition to displaying a shrewd sense of humor, Walter’s film also makes keen use of solo drum improvisations by the great Max Roach, making it a welcome, if somewhat idiosyncratic addition to MoMA’s Jazz Score series.

Well regarded by colleagues like Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Chuck Close, and Christo & Jean-Claude, all heard in interview segments, the renown of his contemporaries eluded Johnson. He probably was not helped by his eccentric approach to business dealings, which the film interprets as an extension of his performance art pieces, dubbed “nothings” by Johnson in the pre-Seinfeldian era. Introducing the film Wednesday, Walter explained the initial uncertainty surrounding Johnson’s death—murder, accident or “performance art gone wrong?”

Watching Bunny, so named for the rabbit figures which often adorned Johnson’s graphic work, one is easily convinced the artist was a mad genius. While the film unquestionably accepts Johnson’s artist merits, some of the work shown makes one wonder if he were truly a fine artist or a con artist, pulling an elaborate gag on the art world. Some of his portraits and collages are indeed fascinating, but other smaller works using Lucky Strike packages kind of make one wonder. Indeed, much of his work comes across as an extended joke for his own amusement, like a nothing in which he whipped a cardboard box with his belt while hopping on one foot before a stunned hipster audience.

Regardless of one’s take on Johnson’s art, Bunny is a surprisingly entertaining film. Roach’s solos swing hard, accentuating Walter’s strong visuals. The decision to incorporate footage of Roach’s hands in performance, described by Walter as an “analog” to the creative work Johnson shaped with his own hands, gives a mysterious, almost spiritual dimension to film.

Ultimately, Johnson’s death was ruled a suicide—essentially a performance art piece gone tragically right. Given the artist’s subversive methods used to get his work into the MoMA collection so it could be included in an exhibition curated by Close, the film seems like a particularly apt choice for their Jazz Score series. Documentaries have also been relatively under-represented thus far, so Bunny is a nice change of pace. It is a fascinating story briskly propelled by Roach’s brushes. It screens today at 2:30.

Gott Paint

I'm still out and computer problems may further delay a resumption of regular blogging. However, for those planning a Czech excursion, here is a quick review of the Gott Gallery Restaurant.

Karel Gott began his career as a jazz vocalist, performing with the likes of the Gustav Brom Orchestra, but eventually drifted into more pop vocal terrain. While he had the popularity of a Czech Sinatra, it would probably be more stylistically accurate accurate to describe him as a Czech Vic Damone. Popular he was though, and popular he remains with a segment of the population. Some however, judge him harshly for accepting the favors of the Communist regime. For a time in the early 1970's Gott refused to return from an international engagement, but Husak himself made a personal appeal. You might notice wiki and other online bios are strangely silent about the period from 1968-1977.

Gott is sort of like the Communist era Kofola soda, dividing Czechs. Some can enjoy them with a sense of nostalgia, whereas for others they simply leave a bad taste in their mouths. For expats though, he has high kitsch appeal, so the Gott Gallery Restaurant was a natural stop when BC set out to show me around the city again.

The deserts are rich—KG's personal recipes I'm sure, but the art was the main attraction. Gott seems to have a very healthy appreciation of the nude female form, with a bit of Sapphic eroticism thrown in for good measure. Yet, the middle-aged Czech women did not seem did not seem anymore scandalized than we were. His Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec influences are immediately obvious. They seem to be the expression of a man accustomed to enjoying life. As a painter, I would say he is no Tony Bennett. I certainly would not make it a priority for those on their first trip to Prague, but it is not over-run by foreign tourists, and for expats and regular visitors it has a bizarre fascination.

Action/Abstraction and All that Jazz

In the trenchantly written The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe argued that art criticism’s theories had eclipsed actual works of art in terms of importance for the art world. Given the disparagement heaped on Wolfe’s book by art’s intelligentsia, probably nobody will be more amused than he to see it under glass in a new art exhibit. Yet there it is on the second floor of the Jewish Museum, as part of Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, an exhibit putting Abstract Expressionism in a full cultural context and directly addressing the theories of critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, both of whom figure prominently in Word.

Both Greenberg and Rosenberg were advocates of Abstract Expressionism, but employed very different theories and semantics in their writings. Greenberg represents the “abstract,” a formal art for art’s sake ethos, articulated with terms like “flatness” and “purity.” Rosenberg corresponds to the “action,” valuing art as a creative process, expressed through the language of “liberation” and “gesture.” Yet both were able to trumpet artists like Pollock and de Kooning as exemplars of their aesthetic concepts.

Pollock and de Kooning are indeed the exhibit’s marquee artists, but twenty-nine other figures in some way associated with the movement are also represented. In an explicit criticism of Greenberg and Rosenberg, a section labeled “Blind Spots” highlights women and African-American artists unfairly ignored by the critical establishment, despite producing work comparable to their more famous peers. Norman Lewis is a particularly interesting inclusion since he had come to distance his work from racially specific conceptions. As the accompanying text explains:

“Lewis turned away from African and African American imagery, as well as his earlier convictions about the social relevance of art, to focus on pure abstraction. By doing so, Lewis and other African American artists felt they might escape associations with the ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic.’”

Lewis still produced work inspired by the sounds of jazz, like Twilight Sounds (1947), included in Action/Abstraction. While essentially consisting of lines, its composition more than suggests the form of a jazz combo.

Jazz also figures in the “context rooms” which explore the cultural, political, and historical factors influencing and reacting to the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism (which is also where you will find Wolfe’s Painted Word). Pollock was well known as a jazz enthusiast, asserting the music’s claim as the one “really creative thing” America had to offer. While recent revelations suggest his record collection was not as hip as we might like to think, he did have some classic swing and New Orleans jazz, including Coleman Hawkins’ “My Ideal,” heard on a loop with Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus” and John Cage. (Hawkins’ gorgeous tone is immediately recognizable. Though unexpected in such a shrine to modernism, it is not completely out of place, considering Hawk’s openness to modern bebop developments.)

Opening to the general public May 4th, Action/Abstraction is a well conceived and assembled examination of Abstract Expressionism and the intellectual milieu which shaped it—an intriguing blend of art and cultural history. It runs through September 21st before moving on to St. Louis.

Hanging Jazz

As its name implies, the Jazz Gallery makes an explicit connection between jazz music and the visual arts. Probably best known as a performance space, it is also the City’s premiere exhibitor of jazz themed or inspired art. Last night, it was music serving art in the Gallery, as Jaleel Shaw, Boris Kozlov, and Johnathan Blake played for the opening of Takao Fujioka’s new exhibit “A Jazz Perspective.”

Fujioka, of “Jazgra Graphic Design for Jazz” has a distinctive style. While it does perhaps sometimes bring to mind David Stone Martin (both have a graphic design background), Fujioka’s work has a look all its own. His use of bold color in otherwise black and white portraits is striking. His musicians have comparatively small heads, but large, abstract bodies, which imply power and motion. Fujioka often shows a clever compositional sense, as with his portrait of Joe Zawinul, framed by a Z-shaped bank of keyboards. There are in fact, plenty of familiar jazz legends for patrons to identify in the exhibit, like Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins.

Fujioka’s bright colors look great displayed together on the Gallery’s walls. Jazz Gallery director/curator Dale Fitzgerald introduced the show with the revelation that Fujioka’s prints, encased in acrylic, are actually child-proof. Evidently, Fujioka was quite a good sport when Fitzgerald’s young son assisted the hanging process. Good for him. After all, the Jazz Gallery is a great venue for a jazz-inspired artist to show.

As for their part, Shaw, Kozlov, and Blake played a very impressive set, given that they were performing under unusually difficult circumstances for the Gallery. It was a party. People talk, what can you do? Fujioka’s work graces the Gallery walls until August 31st. There will be plenty of opportunity to see his work and hear a good show before then.

Bennett/Benedetto in the Studio

Tony Bennett in the Studio
By Tony Bennett with Robert Sullivan
Sterling Publishing

There is actually quite a body of museum quality fine art produced by jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Pee Wee Russell. Perhaps the best known jazz artist-visual artist double threat is the unflaggingly popular vocalist Tony Bennett. His second collection of drawings and paintings, Tony Bennett in the Studio, has been recently published in time for the Christmas shopping hordes.

For an art book, Studio has a surprising amount of text, mostly written by Robert Sullivan giving the highlights of Bennett’s career. Many of these episodes will be familiar to the legions of Bennett’s fans. However, his early 1970’s years in London are rightly identified as an underappreciated point in his career. His Verve/MGM records from this period, working with the likes of Robert Farnon and Don Costa, are some of the finest of his career and ought to be available alongside the better known Columbia releases. Also, Sullivan quotes Bennett remembering this as the period he took his natural talent for painting to a higher level:

“I’d been painting whenever I could, but it was this year in London that I really started to get serious about it. I found a wonderful professor of art, John Barnicoat, who gave me private instruction. . . I became more serious about painting than I’d ever been, and I’ve never looked back.” (p. 120)

While Bennett might be a pop-jazz crossover artist, his affection for jazz is well established, and can be seen in the pages of Studio. In addition to the illustrious figures of jazz history, like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, Bennett also depicts some of the musicians’ musicians of jazz, like Scott Hamilton, Ted Curson, and his longtime musical director Ralph Sharon. You can also hear some of Bennett’s favorite jazz artists on the sampler disk packaged with Studio. “The Very Thought of You” features lovely trumpet obbligatos from Bobby Hackett and “But Beautiful” is one of his sublime duets with Bill Evans. (A Bennett portrait of Evans used as the cover of the pianist’s Blue in Green record is also included in Studio.)

While Sullivan’s text is informative, its hero-worshipping tone can be a bit distracting, repeatedly telling us that despite his undeniable talent, Bennett is just plain folk around his adoring public. Fortunately, this is not the sort of book you get for the text, but for the art, which is quite good, much of it reflecting an acknowledged influence from the Impressionists. It is interesting to note Bennett sings under his stage name, but signs his work by his given name Bennedetto (this observation from someone who blogs under his initials).

For those who own Bennett’s previous mid-1990’s collection, What My Heart Has Seen, there is some overlap in the painting each volume collects. In general, Studio includes many more sketches and drawings, as well as more subject matter drawn from music and from European trips. Logically, it also includes newer works, like Christo’s Gates in Central Park and Bill Charlap with the Washingtons at Jazz Standard.

Heart is shorter and is more New York City centered, but its introduction by Ralph Sharon is actually preferable to the celebrity prefaces to Studio from the likes of Mitch Albom and Mario Cuomo (I’m sure they really are famous friends of his, but would you turn to either for insight into art or music?). In Studio, Bennett explains to Sullivan how Sharon’s advice to the young newly signed singer was crucial helping him find his identity:

“‘[Columbia Record’s Mitch] Miller wanted me to do one ballad after another,’ he say. ‘Ralph Sharon said, ‘Make sure you do some jazz.’ Ralph knew how much I loved jazz. He knew that, really, I’m a jazz singer. In this commercial world they put me in the traditional pop category, because, well, I’m white and Italian.” (p. 45)

Studio also lists the various recordings Bennett cut and the awards and honors he has received, including the 2006 NEA Jazz Master title. Recently, he won another coveted jazz prize, well after Studio would have gone to press—the Downbeat Readers Poll for best male vocalist. Packaged with a short sampler CD and priced at $29.95, it really is a decent value as a Christmas gift item, handsomely presenting Bennett’s art for his loyal fans.

Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora

Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora
By Irwin Chusid & Barbara Economon
Fantagraphics Books tradepaper
978-1-56097-805-3

Alex Kallao’s An Evening At the Embers LP is just okay (it is one of the thousands of sessions recorded by the beloved bassist Milt “the Judge” Hinton), but it is eagerly sought after by record collectors for its distinctive cover art by Jim Flora (website here), renown for his long stints with the Columbia and RCA record labels. While Chusid & Economon’s second collection of Flora’s work has far fewer LP covers than the first, it includes many images that will be of interest to jazz collectors in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

Baroque and subversive, Flora’s art has attracted a cult following. JD King’s forward recaps elements of Flora’s style: “At times we see the cubism of Picasso peeking out, Dali’s dreaminess drifting in, Klee’s linear quality, Miro’s absurdity, and Stuart Davis’s graphic color and shapes.” (p. 31) Chusid trenchantly writes:

“He didn’t simply paint the human face; he admitted to ‘tearing it apart, making it into something grotesque, or something sweet.’ He dismembered bodies, then rewired them like Calder sculptures.” (p. 13)

While there is only a smattering of LP covers included, Sinister has a large section devoted to Flora’s commercial art for Columbia Records that have been almost untirely unseen for years. There are banners, brochures, and point-of-sale materials featuring images of Gene Krupa, Harry James, Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman. Of particular historical interest are the promotional booklets Flora mocked-up and sent to Columbia to encourage more promotional efforts for their jazz reissues, which ultimately led to his employment with the label.

Flora had a clear affinity for jazz. Apart from his Columbia and RCA years, he produced images of Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson and a Mardi Gras inspired series. Illustrations like that for Marguerite Young’s short story “The Great Juke,” published in the October 1947 issue of Mademoiselle makes one curious to read the accompanying prose. There are even images of political interest, like those for “The Welfare State is Here to Stay” from Look magazine and “The FCC’s Expanding, Demanding Universe” for Fortune, which illustrate the growth of the government leviathan.

Chusid, the “public editor” of Donald Luskin’s Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid blog, writes with wit and authority. Together with Economon, he has assembled a striking collection of Flora’s art that most record collectors will flip over. They also maintain a Jim Flora blog, where you can find regularly updated Flora images and commentary.

Alessandro Bazan: Jazz Paintings

Alessandro Bazan Jazz Paintings
Charta
88-8158-547-2

Many fine artists’ work has graced the covers of jazz albums. Andy Warhol for instance, created covers for Kenny Burrell’s Blue Lights and Johnny Griffin’s The Congregation. Other artists, like Romare Bearden and Jackson Pollock have taken direct inspiration from jazz. Italian Alessandro Bazan also finds his inspiration from American jazz, as his new collection Jazz Paintings demonstrates, even while being identified as a leader of a new generation of Palermo based artists.

Bazan explains: “When I begin a new work, the first thing I do is put on a record and it is almost always a jazz record.” (p. 26) It is a music Bazan says he always identified with because “my generation (those born in 1966) didn’t have their own music, something that could give them a sense of belonging. I couldn’t get with Duran Duran and when I was about fifteen I began to listen to jazz music.” (p.17)

Bazan’s work often depicts nightclub scenes, like Blues for Torin (2005), pictured as the wrap-around cover, and reproduced without type within. Other paintings, like Orange Blues (2002) depict jazz combos against almost surreal backdrops. Frequent subjects include Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus, as well as Chet Baker and John Coltrane, both pictured in Impossible Quartet (2005).

As the companion book for a Bazan exhibition presented in conjunction with the Umbria Jazz Festival, Jazz Paintings should bring the artist to the attention of the wider jazz community. It is a beautiful book with many color reproductions of his paintings, as well as some black and white drawings accompanying the brief introductory material.

Bazan’s work with its strong colors and clear jazz aesthetic should earn him a place in jazz enthusiasts’ art pantheon along with Bearden and Francis Wolff. That an Italian painter can draw such inspiration from this music, once again demonstrates the vitality and universality of America’s true original music, jazz.