Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills, and Frames: The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson

The jazz greats, as photographed on stage and behind the scenes Thirty-nine jazz luminaries are captured in this book, including Julian Cannonball Adderley, Louis Bellson, Ray Brown, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges, Carmen McRae, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, and Anita O Day. Poet Laureate of California Al Young riffs, scats, and bebops his way across the page, providing poetry, anecdotes, and insight into the players and the moments in question. Photographer Charles L. Robinson was a friend to many of the musicians photographed and, as a result, often caught them in moments of candor and intimacy. For a time, he was the official staff photographer of the Monterey Jazz Festival, and while the majority of the shots in this book are from the festival, a number of them are from Bay Area jazz venues. In Robinson s photographs, we see artists rehearsing before a set: Charlie Mingus, goateed and pensive, hunched over a Steinway, phrases dancing in his head. Or the legendary Earl Fatha Hines at the Monterey Jazz Festival, in the groove, the original cool cat in sunglasses (back before Ray Charles was even born) and famous for breaking the bass strings of a piano. We see Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rushing backstage, talking about some time back in the day. We see Milt Jackson and Dizzy Gillespie sharing a joke. When the last blue note of a performance is but a memory, and the smoke cascades up to the beams of a club at two in the morning, Robinson is there.