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Time capsule in jazz WHETHER YOU KNOW HIM AS DR. MARTINEZ OR MARTY MOST, YOU KNOW THE BIG EASY IS ALIVE IN HIS HEART AND HIS PHOTOS. by Wiley Cash • photographs by Mallory Cash
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estled in a patch of pine woods just south of Wilmington, Maurice Martinez, New Orleans’ first beat poet, is sitting in a favorite chair in his sunlight-flooded living room. At his feet are several crates of black-and-white photographs, carefully encased in plastic sleeves. He bends down to pick up an image, staring at it for a moment before gesturing toward the subject — a Black man in a suit playing a soprano saxophone. The man’s eyes are closed in concentration. “John Coltrane was the most serious musician I’ve ever met,” Martinez says. He looks down at the photograph with such intensity it’s as if he’s traveling back in time, peeling back the years and the stories that led him from a childhood in New Orleans to the halls of American academia by way of a barnstorming concert tour across Brazil. Photograph in hand, Martinez’s mind and memory are focused on the string of shows Coltrane played when he came to New Orleans in 1963. Martinez and his camera were there to capture it. He presented a composite of several of the photos he took to the jazz musician. “When he saw it, he got warm and opened up,” Martinez says. “He could see that I was serious about music, too.” Maurice Martinez has been serious about many things over the course of his life — music, education, social justice, documentary filmmaking, plus Creole heritage and history — but jazz and photography have been lifelong staples. His two passions have recently come together in A Time Capsule in Jazz, an exhibit on display at the Genesis Block Gallery in downtown Wilmington until October 20. Martinez was a college student at Xavier University of Louisiana when he began to take photography seriously. His early steps were tentative, but experimental. “It was a little black box, and it only had one speed on the shutter,” he says, describing the camera. “But it also had a way that you could do a time exposure by disengaging the automatic shutter.” So, he did just that, then put the camera on the desk. “It came out like a Rembrandt.” He soon moved on to Instamatics and 35mm cameras, experimenting with various lenses before graduating to better and more advanced equipment. After starting a wedding photography business with a buddy, he soon learned the best photographs came at what he calls “the peak moment of joy,” such as when the newlyweds are seated in the limousine, and the wedding and all its fuss is behind them. Only then do you see the couple relax, he says. Martinez saw that those moments of joy were also evident in the jazz musicians who brought their soulful music to New Orleans in the 60
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