Jazz Prints by Tom Seltzer by Seltzer Studio Graphics

JA ZZ Prints by Thomas Seltzer

For InĂŠs.

For more artwork, and to visit the online store, go to www.seltzerstudio.com

Contents

5 INtroduction 6

Louis Armstrong

John Coltrane

10 Miles Davis 12 DUKE ELLINGTON 14 Ella Fitzgerald 16 Dizzy Gillespie 18

Billie Holiday

Charles Mingus

22 Thelonious Monk 24

Charlie Parker

26 Sonny Rollins 28 Afterward

INtroduction One of my standard lines is that I grew up in a town called University City, MO, which produced hundreds of talented professional musicians, and also me. It’s not really a joke. My high school jazz band won competitions, toured Paris and played the Montreux Jazz Festival. Its lead saxophonist snuck backstage with his horn at a Wynton Marsalis concert, and earned a spot in his band with five minutes of improv. My little sister Eve, herself an amazing jazz vocalist, had a Bat Mitzvah band made up of four 18-year olds jazz wunderkinder who all went on to tour the world, get recording contracts, etc. Me, I drew. I discovered that it wasn’t as glamorous as being a musician, but on the other hand, it was a lousy way to meet girls. Nevertheless, maybe because of where I grew up, music – especially jazz – remained an important part of my life. The prints in this collection are the result of my lifetime love of, and complete inability to play, jazz. Last year some time, in a moment of the inevitable frustration that comes with being an illustrator and graphic designer, I cast around to find a piece I could work on that felt truly personal. I somehow hit upon the idea of doing a print of Thelonious Monk. I wanted to capture both his likeness and come up with a visual equivalent for his chunky, angular music. It was so satisfying to do that I sought out other subjects – Mingus’s melodic abstractions, Duke Ellington’s modernist classicism, Charlie Parker’s whiplash virtuosity, Dizzy Gillespie’s whipsaw athleticism – and about a half dozen other favorites. I might not be able to play it, but by God I can draw it, and I hope that’s good enough.

Tom Seltzer

Tom Seltzer is an illustrator and designer who has been lucky enough to do work for guitar great David Gilmore, trumpet virtuoso Nicholas Payton, and singer/songwriter composer Jeremy Schonfeld. More work and more prints can be seen on his website, www.seltzerstudio.com.

Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong is, of course, a genius. I’m not the first to point it out, but I believe that I may be the most recent. I’m also not the first to say that popular music of the twentieth century all stems from Louis Armstrong, but it’s true, so why not say it again? Listen to jazz, Broadway show tunes, Brill Building pop, even early rock n’ roll and you can hear Satchmo’s influence. I don’t really hear his influence in country and western, but I consider that a point in his favor. Where to start with Pops? Everybody kvells about the Hot Fives and the Hot Sevens, which were undeniably revolutionary, but they sound like they were recording in the Holland Tunnel. Me, I think I listen to Louis Armstrong Plays WC Handy more than anything else. Great songs, including “St. Louis Blues,” and he tells the alligator story between tracks. There are a lot of photos of Louis Armstrong rolling his eyes, wiping his face with a white hankie, etc. It’s hard not to turn him into a caricature, and he’s better than that. I found one backstage snap of him joking around between sets, and wanted to capture that relaxed, unstaged feel with this very informal piece.

John Coltrane John Coltrane is amazing because there’s such a sense of risk about his playing. He always seems to be going just a little bit faster than he should, for a little bit longer than he should, reaching for something a little more ambitious than he should. I don’t know how he pulled it off. The biggest problem with jazz recordings is that they’re improvised, but with repeated listenings, each note sounds inevitable. The tension of live performance disappears. Coltrane avoids this. You always get the sense that the solos are so amazing because they could go wrong at any second, maybe on this playthrough. Want to be amazed by Coltrane? Get Giant Steps. Not every album by Coltrane is for everybody, but if you don’t like Giant Steps, none of them are for you. (A Love Supreme is his most famous album, but amazing as it is, it’s graduate-level Trane.) I tried to draw Coltrane with the sense of the anxiety I always hear in his playing. Amazing, pyrotechnic, unbelievable, but somehow never calmly self-assured.

Miles Davis Just about everybody’s first jazz CD is Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It’s the Klimpt poster of CDs – every dorm room has one. Not that I want to dismiss it. It’s one hell of an album. I love it, although not as much as I love Workin’ with The Miles Davis Quintet, Relaxin’ with The Miles Davis Quintet, Steamin’ with The Miles Davis Quintet and Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, five albums that I believe he cut over four days. Can’t pretend that he was a lovely personality. When I worked at WKCR, one of the DJs was running around the studio, thrilled that when he tried to shake hands with Miles on the street, Miles deigned to punch him in the stomach. I didn’t quite know what to say when I heard that the first time. “Yay?” I tried. My print of Miles has him as the beacon of mid-50s moderism, playing away in an Eames chair. I actually animated a version of this picture, which you can find if you poke around long enough on my website.

DUKE ELLINGTON I didn’t really start buying jazz until college. That’s when I realized that I had heard a lot of music, but had no idea who had recorded what or even who was who. If you’re in the same boat, do what I did: start with Duke Ellington. Even uncelebrated Ellington recordings are pretty amazing. He only worked with great musicians. He had incredible depth of material. His songbook – which includes the tunes that came from he pen of his soulmate Billy Strayhorn – is about the richest in jazz. And he cared about recording, which means the sound quality of almost all of his recordings are all as good as you could get for the era. The first album I bought of his was Blues in Orbit, which I’ve since learned, jazz snobs dismiss as middling mid-life material. They’re crazy. Play “C-Jam Blues” as loud as you can and annoy them. I shamelessly stole the idea from this picture from a Rembrandt etching. He stole it from Titian’s “Portrait of a Gentleman.” Steal from the best if you’re going to steal.

Ella Fitzgerald I love Ella. My wife loves Ella. We played “Our Love is Here to Stay” at our wedding and, kinehora, it’s worked. Lena Horne – whom I otherwise respect – once dismissed Ella’s voice as “a golden typewriter.” Great line, but completely unfair. I’m more more with Ira Gershwin, who said that he didn’t realize how many great songs he and his brother George had written until they heard Ella sing them. If you want to know where to start with Ella, you might as well dive in with her Song Books series on Verve. If you’re rich, buy the complete set. If you’re not, buy them one at a time. You’ll buy them all eventually anyway, but you’ll be able to defer the pleasure a while, and that’s worth something. Ella always said she was not a “glamour girl.” I didn’t want to flatter her beyond the point of recognition, but I wanted to make sure they joy of her voice came through.

Di zz y Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie invented Bebop with Charlie Parker, but unlike Bird, he never let himself be defined by it. He was always as proud of helping to popularize Afro-Cubano jazz as he was of his Bebop days. And why not? I love “Night in Tunisia” but “Manteca” is maybe the most ridiculously great tune in his repertiore. The Complete RCA Victor Recordings is a terrific double album, because you can hear how Bebop led him to Afro-Cubano. I remember seeing Dizzy the first time on The Muppet Show, when he said to Kermit, “I admire frogs, because you can do this!” and then popped out his cheeks till they seemed to cover his eyes. (Kermit yelled, “I can’t do that!!”) That show weirded me out. It was important to me not to do a drawing of a freak of nature but of a high-flying virtoso. The composition of this print is freely adopted from “Icarus” from Henri Matisse’s Jazz series. The beret is a nod to a famous photo of Dizzy from his Bebop days, although by the time he had bent his horn he no longer wore it.

Billie Holiday Is there anybody out there who doesn’t love Billie Holiday? Ok, there’s me. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nobody who can sing a sad song like Billie Holiday. For that reason, there’s nobody better to listen to when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. At one point, I listened to a lot of Billie Holiday, and then I got sick of feeling sorry for myself, and I stopped listening to Billie Holiday. That’s not her fault. Lady Day is an amazing artist. I don’t know what to recommend to the first-time listener though. I loved listening to Lady in Autumn over and over again, but based on my experience, I’m not sure that’s the best place to start. I started listening to her again when I started this piece, and was surprised to realize how much emotional range she had. “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)” is raucous and hilarious. She remains a much better artist than I am a listener.

Charles Mingus Mingus was about as pugnacious a character as jazz ever saw. But foul tempered or not, the man could write music. I know he was a great bass player, but I think of him first and foremost as a composer. My first exposure to him was on his CD Mingus Ah -Um, which has the best leadoff track of any jazz album, “Better Git it in Your Soul.” A lot of his best albums aren’t available for download, which makes me feel even sadder that you can hardly buy music in stores anywhere. This was the second print I did for this series, and I designed it to run big: 20” x 30”. I think the smaller image is fine, but the proportions are a little different, and I think it loses some of its impact. Mingus would have hated that. He craved impact.

Thelonious Monk Like I said, I started off this project by drawing Thelonious Monk. He remains one of my favorite jazz composers. I’ve heard his music described as “challenging,” but that makes it sound as though listening to him is like eating your vegetables. It isn’t. It’s ridiculously, hummably, fun. It might be hell to play, but it’s pure pleasure to hear. They called it “Bop” for a reason. Also, Monk has really great albums, not just great collections of tunes. Monk’s Music and Brilliant Corners are perfect from start to finish. Incidentally, the first series of jazz prints – which focused on Bop artists – were in this monochrome blue for a reason. James Thurber once described The Great Gatsby as “a perfect one-color novel.” That’s how I feel about Bop. It’s great not just because of what the artists put in, but what they leave out.

Charlie Parker Bird inspires fanaticism like no other jazz artist. Every solo he every recorded has been collected like a holy relic. This drives me crazy, because the first time I heard “Bird Gets the Worm” on the radio, I thought my head was going to blow off, but after hearing six alternate takes in a row, with lengthy analyses in between, I wanted to help it along. If you want to start with Charlie Parker, there is a set called The Complete Savoy and Dial Master Takes, which is staggering from start to finish and doesn’t repeat a song. Amazing. Drawing him was a challenge. Bird – a heroin addict – aged terribly over the course of his very short life. He put on and lost 50 pounds over the course of just a couple of years, and as a result he looks completely different in almost every picture. There are about three iconographic photos of him, which are used over and over again on his album covers, and I couldn’t redraw them without looking cliché. In the end, I had to find a relatively unfamiliar photo of him I liked and stick with it as reference. The drawing looks like the photo, but Bird didn’t stay looking like that for long. I tried to capture the energy of his performance by referencing the abstactions of one of my favorite American artists, the woefully underappreciated Stuart Davis.

Sonny Rollins I love Sonny Rollins. He brings me joy. And I don’t know how to explain this, but he’s my artist. My friends in college loved Duke and Monk and everybody else I’ve drawn here – they introduced me to some of them – but none of us knew from Sonny when I decided to add a copy of Saxophone Collosus to the stack of CDs I’d actually come to the store to buy. I don’t remember what else I bought that day, but I remember playing Saxophone Collosus for a week straight afterwards. So even though it defies logic, the experiences of millions of other fans and the chronology of the mid to late twentieth century, I think of Sonny Rollins as my discovery. I don’t know what to say about this drawing of Sonny. I wanted to draw him happy because he makes me happy. I hope this print makes someone else happy.

Afterward Since I started this series, I’ve had a opportunity to work with one of America’s leading jazz artists, Nicholas Payton. Turns out he hates, hates the term “jazz.” You can – and should – read the essay on his website on why he so loathes it, but to quickly paraphrase, he says that “jazz” is a name with disgusting origins (swap the “a’ with an “i” for its original meaning). Many of the pioneering artist thought the term was demeaning and confining (Duke hated it, Mingus hated it, etc.). The only conceivable argument for the name would be if its familiarity helped market the music, but since there hasn’t been a million-selling jazz album since 1959, he contends that’s not much of an argument. He prefers the name Black American Music (#BAM). I can’t argue with his facts, but I don’t love his new title. For one thing, BAM means something different in Brooklyn. BAM was where I saw Derek Jacobi in “King Lear” and a couple of foreign movies I couldn’t wheedle my way out of (but I liked them, Inés, I liked them!) And I think the name “Black American Music” is too broad. In one way or another, almost all American music is Black American Music (except maybe country and western, and come to think of it, Ray Charles cut some pretty fine country songs). I think the reason that jazz hasn’t had a hit since 1959 is that 1959 was the last time anyone released an jazz album with songs you can dance to. Not everybody likes to sit down when they listen to music. So even though Mr. Payton is unquestionably right on the merits, for now I think I’ll stick with “jazz.” Incidentally, all these prints are made using the giclée process. What does “giclée” mean? Apparently it’s a French word that means...well, exactly what “jazz” used to mean. Works for me.

ISBN 978-1-304-00466-6

90000

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