From “Money, Honey” to “God Bless The Child” to “Busted,” there are plenty of jazz songs about money.
Luckily for us, Herman Leonard didn’t have much of it in 1948. His love of jazz brought him to New York’s hottest clubs. His lack of dough meant his camera came too—unable to afford the cover fee, that’s how he got in.
His captivating portraits of jazz legends are on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Visitors will recognize Monk in his sunglasses, Duke at his piano, and Fats Navarro blowing his horn.
Ann Shumard curated this exhibit. But in a way, so did Leonard himself. The NPG’s senior curator of photographs, Shumard says these prints could have easily been lost in Hurricane Katrina along with the rest of Leonard’s collection, had he not pulled the portraits out a few years earlier.
“His negatives fortunately had been moved to higher ground, but all the prints that he had made up to that point in 2005—there were something like 8,000 of them—they were all ruined,” she says. “So we really are fortunate that this portfolio was created in 1998.”
Taken between 1948 and 1960, the images were largely unknown until Leonard revisited the negatives in the 1980s. He published his first book, The Eye of Jazz, in 1985. It was followed three years later by the first exhibit of his jazz photographs.
“That was when there was a lot of interest in that foundational period for modern jazz,” Shumard says. “These pictures just spoke to people.”
Walking through In the Groove: Jazz Portraits by Herman Leonard, it’s easy to see why. The images are transformative and captivating, especially for anyone who takes even a passive interest in jazz.
Take for example Leonard’s famous portrait of Lady Day.
“I think we’re often familiar with the images of a Billie Holiday where she sort of appears ravaged; she’s dealing with addiction and a lot of difficulty in her personal life,” Shumard says. “This captures her as healthy and glowing and the way that I think we would like to remember her. There isn’t any of that hard edge here. It’s very much a loving portrait.”
In this image, Holiday appears soft and youthful as she stands before the microphone, a spiral of whitish gray cigarette smoke curling above her head. That smoke—a constant in bebop clubs—is also a calling card of Leonard’s.
“[Leonard] realized that the swirls of smoke create these atmospheric effects,” Shumard says. “The positioning of his lights—he backlights very often—really makes that smoke sort of pop.”
The way Leonard plays with light and contrast creates drama and depth. These photos are in their essence documentation of music history, a visual clue as to what it was like to be there.
“These are dark and intimate spaces. They aren’t cavernous performance halls,” Shumard says. “I think you get the sense of that, of everything being sort of tight and crowded, and when you’re looking at the pictures, you almost feel as though you have a front row seat.”
It’s as though you’re sitting at the small round table that inevitably was right at the lip of the stage, inhaling Dexter Gordon’s second-hand smoke.
Leonard captured these musicians’ personalities and habits: the solemnity of Chet Baker, Buddy Rich’s intense drumming style, and the energetic warmth of Sarah Vaughn.
“He loved the music so passionately himself. This was not just someone who was assigned to go and take pictures,” Shumard says. “He became a friend of the subjects he photographed. Just as people refer to Dizzy and Billie, he was Herman. Everybody loved to be photographed by him because they knew that he ‘got’ the music, that he really understood them.”
That affected both his approach to his craft, and how the musicians responded to his presence. Leonard looked for the shot that would best convey the essence of each musician’s personality and performance style. He knew their quirks and obsessions, like Thelonious Monk’s love for headwear.
“Leonard said that Monk was a ‘hat addict,’ and so he’s just really glad when he can get him without the hat, because sometimes the hat can be a distraction,” Shumard says. In another image, the hat is present but the man is missing. It’s a still life portrait of Lester Young that Shumard calls “the odd image in the group.”
She stresses that Leonard didn’t compose this artful arrangement; he merely captured it.
“He was at a recording session with Lester Young and Young stepped away,” Shumard says. “He’d left his saxophone case. He’d hung his porkpie hat, which was his signature look, on the case. And he’d left his lighted cigarette balanced on top of his Coke bottle.”
The light drenches the hat, a sort of roof to Young’s open sheet music. Accented by curls of smoke and the illuminated glass soda bottle, the image is a perfect testament to the signature elements of Young.
Because he loved the music, Leonard was there, and he knew what to look for. That shared affinity for jazz may bring some visitors to this exhibit, but Shumard hopes the portraits will also introduce the uninitiated to the music. “Even if you don’t know the subjects, the photographs are so engaging that they pull you in and make you want to know more,” she says. “I’m sort of hoping that that’s what people will do, if they don’t know the music maybe they’ll be encouraged to check it out, see what bebop was all about.”
In the Groove runs through February 20th at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
