On photographing music

To picture music you have to listen closely.

And the closer you are to the musician, the more you have to listen.

Just as removing any need to look at the musician - putting on a CD, for example, or simply closing your eyes at a concert - makes you listen more closely to the music, conversely, closely watching the musician also makes you listen, whatever truth there may be in the visual having no bearing on the aural.

Once, after a performance featuring percussionists Zakir Hussein and Vikku Vinayakram, I turned to another drummer standing alongside me in the wings: “Did you see that?” I asked. “See?” she said, “I heard it.”

Of course the drummer (Cheryl Alleyne, then with the Jazz Warriors) was the more linguistically exact – but I still felt I’d seen the performance and watched the music, followed hand movements and expressions and whatever I could pick up externally of the internal reasoning behind the rhythm. I began to wonder how differently the two of us might have experienced the music.

Though, perhaps, if at all, it was no more than through differing professional approaches, as much as emotional, to the same subject. There was one musician (I can’t remember whom but it may well have been pianist Keith Jarrett) who said that seeking to photograph music is an impossibility since nothing of the music is in the appearance of the performer. Of course this is true – and I remember sharing a puzzled expression with a musician to whom I was introduced as a “jazz photographer”. “What’s that?” he asked. After all, “jazz musicians” suffer enough from simplistic definitions, but “jazz photographers”? So while there may be no such things as music photography per se (as opposed to photography whose subject is music) nevertheless, some music photographs have attempted to relay something about the music.

Often, in the various live shots I’ve taken in the past I was trying to get at the way the music sounded to me – an attempt, you might say, to get the shading of the music in the rhythm of the photograph. My method was to try to get in to the form of the music. When this worked it meant pressing the shutter where it might have been written in to the score if the composition had included a camera.

ON BECOMING INVISIBLE
I’ve settled beside the piano and focused my camera on the musician’s hands only to see them move away to the other end of the keyboard. Rather than follow the hands indiscriminately – which you can’t do effectively with the long shutter speed necessary in the low light of a club or stage – you listen to the music and try to determine if the tune suggests that the hands will return to the place of focus. If there’s going to be, say, a bass note coming up, are you going to be in the right position and aware enough in advance to press the shutter as the note hits and before the hand moves away?

Sitting inches from the musician makes you good at being invisible. Both at a concert, so as not to interfere with the audience enjoyment, or at a rehearsal, so as not to interfere with the musician’s concentration.

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Being backstage sometimes meant getting see the process behind music. Watching the Gil Evans orchestra soundcheck and rehearse for his 75th birthday tour - and being, with camera, at the feet of Gil’s guest Van Morrison as he soundchecked Moondance (one of my favourite songs), or getting a picture of Hiram Bullock relaxing off stage in the stalls to go through some guitar practice. Another time, just watching pianist Geri Allen rehearse with her child on her back was a nice variation on just watching a performance. (She asked the photographers not to use the picture commercially, so it’s not been seen before.)

Also rewarding was watching composer György Ligeti – still most well-known for his contribution to the 2001: a space odyssey soundtrack – setting up his 100 metronomes and then my getting a shot of him in which he seems almost to be conducting them; or following B.B. King’s band on to the stage for soundchecking at the Royal Albert Hall and sharing their excitement at walking out in to such a venue.

Being in front of the stage and photographing while a concert is in progress is more stressful – not only for limited movement, but the spotlights creating pools of brightness surrounded by what the camera is reading as essentially pitch black. But the musician could be putting more of their heart and soul into a gig rather than a soundcheck. And sometimes, of course, capturing a live gig was really the only opportunity to take the pictures.

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Each gig increased my confidence in working in low light. Overcoming the problems were often stimulating, though the limits were often frustrating. Holding the camera steady enough during the time the shutter was open was often out-weighed (photographically) by the constant movement of the musician.

I spent a lot of gigs listening to the music and imagining if and when the bass player would pause in his bowing, when the saxophonist would look intent but stay still long enough for that quarter of a second the shutter would sometimes be open for, and, even then of course, they might move in and out of the spot I’d exposed for. (Most old photography guides used to advise that the longest hand held speed should be 1/60 second, so 1/4 second for a moving subject takes practice!) The under-sung photographer Roy de Carava talked of working in such low light that he went home without even knowing if anything had actually been recorded on his film at all.

THE MAKING OF AN ERA
When I took these pictures, in London and New York, jazz clubs were seemingly blossoming. In NY, not only the established ones like the Village Vanguard but the very happening Knitting Factory, for example, in whose narrow room I witnessed the likes of Geri Allen again, this time fronting an octet which filled the small stage to such a degree that sitting at a front table I literally had to dodge the trombonist’s slide until it knocked a music stand on top of me (but it did mean I could get a great close shot like the one of Rayse Biggs), Ronald Shannon Jackson’s band drum up a storm of ancestors as he dedicated a throbbing concert to the recently deceased Art Blakey, and John Zorn introduce not only his Naked City cohort Eye Yamantaka (then Yamatsuka) but Eye’s cohort Otomo Yoshihide.

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In Britain, where the great bulk of these pictures were taken, my interest in the music was piqued by one of the Jazz Warriors’ early gigs. A just-formed big band of both budding and long-time jazz players, the Warriors stormed over an early audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts with a mix of musical influences that marked the beginning of a boom in British jazz. At the call for an encore at that concert they had to admit that what they had played “was all we know” having saved nothing for the encore.

But, Courtney Pine, as a kind of leader, was only one of the band who then went on to carve out other solo endeavours.

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It was also the end of another era. Great Americans like Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Lester Bowie and others are all no longer with us. But the Marsalises, the funk inflected saxophonist Steve Coleman and associates, or the likes of pianist Marilyn Crispell (nigh on broke as she turned into her 40s when I first met her, renting a room in a friend’s house in Woodstock with space only for a small keyboard, now a respected name) were establishing or reinforcing their reputations. And others were leading us in further directions.

So, looking back, these pictures are definitely “of a time” to me.

- Andrew Pothecary

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This article is an adaptation from an article I originally wrote for Wire magazine