Graeme Kirkland

Graeme Kirkland, Parkdale, March 1989

THE PHONE RANG EARLY AND I DIDN'T WANT TO ANSWER IT BUT I DID. It was Graeme Kirkland telling me he wanted to come over and do a photo shoot, right away. I tried to talk him out of it; it was early, I was tired, and I frankly wasn't feeling that inspired on that particular chilly morning caught between winter and spring.

"No, I just got out of the hospital," Graeme insisted. "I got beat up pretty bad at Sneaky Dee's last night by a bunch of skinheads. I want to get a photo of myself like this."

I don't think I thought about it much.

"Come right on over, Graeme."

Graeme Kirkland, Parkdale, March 1989

He was a mess. It's a shame I only shot these in black and white because Graeme's bruises were a really intriguing spectrum of purple and red and blue and yellow. (Colour film and processing cost money and I doubt if I had any sitting around the studio in those early, very penniless days.) I don't know how he saw through eyes that were swollen shut. He had a fat lip and stitches and tape holding his skin together and crusts of blood clinging to his face where the nurses in emergency hadn't cleaned it off.

I set up the light - my only light, probably - to give a stark effect, like a police evidence photo. We shot for two or three rolls - long enough to have Graeme shed his bloodstained jacket and shirt and finally wrap the shirt around his head like a turban. I can't remember whose idea that was. I asked him how it happened and he said that he was drunk and hitting on girls and he probably said the wrong thing to the wrong one and that the skinheads waiting for him by the bathroom at Sneaky Dee's were definitely not drunk and knew what they were doing.

Graeme Kirkland, "Clock Destruction," 1990

I photographed Graeme a lot back when he was the jazz drummer who knew how to get noticed in a city that didn't especially notice jazz musicians in general. He'd do shows like "Clock Destruction" - a performance piece as much as a show where he played in body paint and briefs and set about a big wooden clock with a chainsaw and a flame thrower. The inspiration, he recalls, was all the deadlines he had to deal with managing his own career. "What if I could be free of it?"

Looking back, it's a miracle he didn't burn down a club.

He also took to busking in a big way, and you'd find him out in the streets playing in all weather - like the snow storm where I photographed him in the shot below. Look closely and you'll see a copy of Sleep Alone, the record with a cover featuring my portraits of him after his skinhead encounter, taped to his tom. It wasn't the most audacious thing that Graeme did by a long shot, and those photos ended up being my own ticket to an encounter with the music industry legend that is Michael Alago, but that's a story for another day.

Graeme Kirkland plays in a snowstorm, Toronto, Winter 1992

Graeme Kirkland, Toronto, August 2018

By the late '90s Graeme felt that he was doing more work setting up shows - booking venues and getting grants and finding players and doing publicity - than actually playing music. "I didn't feel like a drummer any more," he told me. "This is marketing. I had become a businessman."

So if playing music had turned him into a businessman, Graeme quietly decided to pursue that path, and got himself an entry-level job at a securities trading firm. Nearly twenty years later he's a senior investment advisor who's been on teams that have managed over $850 million dollars at a variety of banks and firms. I visited him at his new office in a leafy and venerable west end neighbourhood and convinced him to sit for some new photos after over twenty-five years.

"That was always my deepest goal," he recalled. "I wanted to live something so intense that you wanted to die from it. I still have that in me very deeply."

"I had experiences nobody else has had," he told me. "Doing exactly what I wanted to do." The only thing he regretted, if only for a while, was that he'd never gotten an MBA like all the other struggling traders at that first securities job. He hasn't had a drum kit in years.

Graeme Kirkland, Toronto, August 2018

Jazz

Joe Bowie, Toronto, 1988

THE DEATH LAST WEEK OF PIANIST CECIL TAYLOR GOT ME THINKING ABOUT discovering jazz, back when artists like Taylor were still regulars at jazz festivals. Digging through my negative files, I found my shots of Taylor's solo concert at the DuMaurier Jazz Festival - just a few frames at the beginning of a roll, taken on a sweltering summer evening in an intimate, recently opened theatre built out of a former ice house by the lake.

The shutter on my Spotmatic rang out like a gun cocking in the darkened space, attracting dirty looks from audience members. I only barely knew what I was doing, so I'm still amazed my film caught Taylor's shirt sticking to his back in the heat, and the thumb of his outstretched hand targeting a single key of the piano. I had only just discovered the music after several false starts, and I could only barely understand what Taylor was doing, but I was enthralled with all these wild, unpredictable new sounds and intent on capturing as much as I could with my camera.

James Blood Ulmer, Toronto, 1986

Cecil Taylor, Toronto, 1987

I got into jazz in a roundabout way, starting with Charlie Christian's sessions with Benny Goodman's small groups as a teenager, and then the funk-influenced, punk-approved post-Ornette Coleman records of Joe Bowie's Defunkt and James Blood Ulmer. I photographed Ulmer at a mini festival held in a Queen West club like I was shooting a punk band, all harsh flash and kinetic blur slammed together.

Working from recommendations made by my friend Tim Powis and each month's new issue of The Wire, I began listening to a lot of the more challenging artists touring and recording at the time, veterans of R&B groups and free jazz and the New York loft scene. At the same time I tried to play catch up with all of the music that had come before that when artists like Jimmy Smith or Lee Konitz or Clifford Jordan or Dizzy Gillespie would pass through town. I almost always brought along my camera.

Hamiet Bluiett, World Saxophone Quartet, Toronto, 1987

Charlie Haden, Toronto, 1987

Jimmy Smith, Toronto, 1987

It's hard to believe, but the old arguments about "traditional versus avant garde" were still being fought over then, even while the veterans of the free improvisation movements of the '60s were becoming as established and venerable as the musicians who'd made their name playing bop after the collapse of the big bands in the '50s. Sometimes those arguments would be embodied in a single musician like Archie Shepp, who had traded in his dashiki for a tailored suit to play blues, spirituals, ballads and standards.

Archie Shepp & Horace Parlan, Toronto, 1988

Lee Konitz, Toronto, 1989

Abdullah Ibrahim, Toronto, 1990

Oliver Jones, Toronto, 1988

Miles Davis, Toronto, 1990

This was the last long moment when jazz musicians got signed to major labels and jazz concerts were reviewed in daily newspapers. It was serious music, taken seriously, and every major city worth its tourism bureau had a jazz festival sponsored by a major corporation, featuring actual jazz artists and not blues groups, aging pop singers or oddball rock acts. I might have missed the last tours by giants like Ellington and Basie, but there were still legends around, though they could be as inaccessible as rock stars.

I had my obligatory Miles Davis experience, on the trumpeter's last tour before his death. Waiting with the other photographers backstage at Massey Hall to be ushered out to shoot our half song, I heard Richard Flohill, the promoter, warn us that we'd better put on our long lens. I knew what he meant, and as soon as we were in front of the stage Miles retreated to the back, to hide behind the guitarist with his trumpet or stab at a rack of keyboards to puzzling effect. Miles hated the media, and hated making our jobs easier.

Joey Baron, Bill Frisell Quartet, Toronto, 1988

Bobby Previte, NYC, 1990

Ronald Shannon Jackson, Toronto, 1989

Shooting live jazz was never easy - the light was invariably dim, vantage points hard to find, and audience members predictably hostile to a photographer blocking their view or competing with the music with their shutter. (After the Ulmer experiments, I never shot with a flash, knowing how most musicians hated having their concentration shattered with the bursts of light.)

The biggest challenge of all was shooting a drummer - they were at the back of the stage, often in the poorest light, and moving constantly. With Claude Ranger, I worked around this by bringing my own lights and shooting him at a soundcheck. The rest of the time I had to work at the edge of acceptable film speeds and my own competence as a printer to get decent shots of drummers. Some of these shots have only become worth seeing today, with three decades of experience and the wizardry of Photoshop.

Sun Ra Arkestra, Toronto, 1987

Craig Harris, Toronto, 1989

Randy Weston, Toronto, 1989

David Murray, Toronto, 1988

I was on the steep side of a learning curve when I took these photos, both as a photographer and a jazz fan, and every new show was a challenge for my ears and my eyes. I like to think that some of that excitement and energy comes through in these photos, most shot thirty years ago or more, at the last moment when jazz had a place somewhere adjacent to the mainstream of the culture, where it could riff on what was happening there and have its running commentary heard.

Several of these photos ended up on the wall of a gallery - my first group show, organized by the late Paul Hoeffler for the 1988 jazz festival. It was an encouraging moment, and might have had something to do with my decision to pursue photography as a career. I gradually stopped shooting jazz shows, however, preferring to try and get portraits of musicians and not hunching around on the floor annoying other patrons instead of enjoying the show.

It was a long time ago, or at least it seems so today. Looking back, I caught many of these people either during their last stretch of robust personal and artistic health, or not long before they were gone. A deep breath, and here we go...

Cecil Taylor died in Brooklyn on April 5, 2018. Charlie Haden died in Los Angeles on July 11, 2014. Jimmy Smith died in Scottsdale, AZ on February 8, 2005. Horace Parlan died in Korsør, Denmark on February 23, 2017. Ronald Shannon Jackson died in Ft. Worth, TX on October 19, 2013. Miles Davis died in Santa Monica, CA on September 28, 1991. Sun Ra (aka Herman Blount) died in Birmingham, AL on May 30, 1993.

 

Pure/Love Bomber

Pure live, Toronto, 1990

THE MOST FRUSTRATING MOMENTS IN MY CAREER WEREN'T when I was looking for new clients, but when I couldn't get traction or recognition for work I knew was good. At the turn of the '90s live music photography was still a big part of what I did but, after climbing the steep technical learning curve, I realized that it was hard to do something original with concert shooting.

It was around this time that I ran into Kevin, who had been the guitarist in A Neon Rome, one of my favorite bands on the Queen West scene. He'd formed a new group, and told me I should come and check them out. I did, and at the end of the night I realized that I'd found the subject that would help me break my creative logjam with live music photography.

Pure, Parkdale, 1990

The band was called Pure - later re-named Love Bomber when another band of the same name, signed to a major label, got Kevin, Mike, Rob and Dave to give up the rights to the name for an undisclosed sum of money. They played what I can only describe as industrial metal, with drum loops and samples - handled by Dave from a keyboard - instead of a drummer.

What was really great about Pure/Love Bomber was how much work they put into their live shows. They had an unofficial fifth member who handled the lights, strobes and smoke machines that made every little club gig they did around town - I remember mostly seeing them at the Rivoli or Lee's Palace - look more like a stadium show. They also threw great shapes on stage - Kevin had always been good at this, right back to A Neon Rome - and I made an arrangement with them that I'd shoot as many of their gigs as I could.

Pure live, Toronto, 1990-91

The biggest problem with shooting live music is that, as soon as you reached a certain level of competence, it was almost impossible to do anything with a unique style. Which is to say that, if another photographer was standing beside you taking photos at the same time, it was likely that your shots would look pretty much the same. My way out of this was to ignore the technical conventions of shooting live music - 35mm SLRs loaded with fast film, often pushed a stop or two, using long lenses and fast shutter speeds to capture action.

Instead, I shot nearly every Pure gig I went to using my Rolleiflex, a camera designed for portrait or street photography. I shot with unpushed film at slow shutter speeds, knowing that I'd be getting huge blurs. I had two big inspirations: One was Neal Preston's book of Led Zeppelin photos, published a few years earlier and full of the mystery, drama and menace I loved to see in rock photography. The other was Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch's rare but influential book of ballet photography from 1945, which was full of expressively blurred shots of dancers shot candidly.

Pure live, Toronto, 1990-91

I photographed Pure/Love Bomber for nearly two years, refining the dramatic, expressionist look I got with my shots almost right from the start. Their smoke machines would helpfully fill in what were usually black voids around the performer while the strobes caught slivers of action in stuttering sequences, folded into the blurs. I even shot a few gigs with cross-processed colour film, breaking another rule for music photography that tried to reduce, not increase, contrast on film.

I was immensely pleased with the results of my work, and I think the band was, too. I made lots of prints and showed them around to everyone I could, to little or no interest. The band itself, who I thought should have been huge, struggled to get interest and, after some personnel changes when Kevin and Dave left, disappeared without a recorded trace. It was all very disappointing, and I resolved to pursue as little music photography - live or otherwise - as I could as the decade wore on.

Let me tell you a little secret about shooting music in Canada in the '80s and '90s. You could be relatively hip, and know who all the good bands are; you might even count them among your friends and neighbours. You might even get a big break early on, the sort of thing that might launch a young photographer's career in another country. Your reward for all this enthusiasm and creativity was that, one day, the industry would finally take notice and give you a big job.

They'd ask you to shoot Haywire.

At the end of 2001, I was invited to take part in a group show of concert photography at the Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Of all the live shoots I'd done, I chose to send them two photos from the Pure/Love Bomber series I'd done a decade earlier - the final two shots from the ones above, printed very dark and moody and small and surrounded in the frame with an expanse of white matte. No one had heard of the band and, in any case, their faces were hidden or obscured in the shots. I could have sent photos of Prince or Bowie or Neil Young, but I wanted to make a statement that this was the best live music photography I'd done. Needless to say they didn't sell, and they hang in my office today.

Those photos were the last entry I'd make in the Big Ledger, the record of prints made and sold I'd been keeping since the late '80s. Work had slowed down to a trickle by this point, and there didn't seem to be much point keeping track of what little I was getting any more. It seemed appropriate to stop with this gesture, underlining what I considered my best work and not the most commercial, and evidence - if it were needed - that I'm not a very good businessman.

Rolleiflex

THE THING YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER ABOUT FILM PHOTOGRAPHY IN ITS FINAL DECADE OR TWO was that it hadn't seen any really major technological change since the '50s or early '60s. Film emulsions had gotten faster and autofocus lenses would become standard on 35mm SLRs, but a working photographer could - and did - continue using cameras bought at the beginning of their careers or built before they were born without losing any competitive edge.

I don't know precisely when I bought my first Rolleiflex, but it was somewhere around the turn of the '90s, when I got tired of the limitations in the primitive parallax correction system in my Mamiya C330, the first medium format camera I owned. The Rollei was a more elegant, compact piece of equipment, and it was much used by everyone I admired, from Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn to Richard Avedon and David Bailey.

I was also a committed Luddite in that first real decade of digital technology, home computers and the early internet, holding back the tide of transformation as long as I could in my studio full of gramophones and old records, vintage tailored suits, antiques, rotary dial phones and cast iron typewriters. It was a lifestyle I could manage as long as Macintosh computer systems for digital imaging cost as much as a new car and the first really usable digital cameras were somewhere on the other side of 9/11.

Helena Bonham Carter, Toronto, Jan. 1996

Robert Altman, Toronto, Sept. 1990

I had three Rolleis briefly, but my mainstay portrait cameras for most of the '90s were a pair of 75mm/3.5 models - a Schneider-Kreuznach Xenotar and a Zeiss Planar. They made their home in a very sturdy Pelican case with their lens hoods and a collection of bayonet filters, a Sekonic light meter and a cable release. Along with a lightweight Manfrotto tripod, they went with me into nearly every hotel room portrait session during that decade.

Most of my best portraits were taken with the Rolleis, either locked off on the tripod with a cable release or held close to my subject in a patch of nice window light. Working with the waist-level finder, with its dark, vignetted focusing screen and left-to-right reversed image, became second nature. The Rolleis were my babies, my comfort zone, my weapon of choice.

Their one major flaw was a minimum focusing distance of around three and a half feet, but that could be overcome with a close-up set - a pair of bayonet mount lenses, one for the taking lens and one with parallax correction for the viewing lens. If Irving Penn didn't have a problem with the slight distortion they created (very visible in my portrait of Robert Altman, above) then I wasn't going to complain, and I made them part of my shooting style.

If my Bronica SQ studio camera was a precision instrument, the Rolleis were like paintbrushes, and I always felt much more creative with them. They inspired me to do outlandish things, like the year or two I spent shooting a favorite local band with them, eschewing the fast shutter speeds and telephoto lenses most concert photographers favour for wild blurs and multiple exposures on the big, square negative of the Rollei.

Pure, Toronto, Oct. 1990

Most of all, I adored the square format of the Rollei, and found composing in it intuitive and satisfying. I didn't really feel at home with digital cameras until very recently, when I switched to the Fuji X series, which allows me to frame and shoot in the 1:1 ratio of the Rollei. I'll even use the tilting rear LCD screen on my Fujis like a waist-level viewfinder, swinging them around like the Rollei when I'm doing candids and street photography.

When editorial portraiture hit the rocks at the end of the '90s, I turned to my Rolleis for comfort, taking them out into the parks and streets and in my luggage when I traveled. Without a studio or steady clients, I went back to groping for that elusive image of the world I'd had in my mind's eye ever since my mom bought me a Kodak Instamatic for Christmas, long before I ever imagined anyone made a living taking photos.

High Park, Toronto, 1999

Hotel Place Bonaventure, Montreal, 2000

It goes without saying that I could never part with my pair of Rolleis after all we've been through together, and they still reside in their Pelican case, as if waiting for me to take them along the next hotel room portrait session.

I did dust off my "A" Rollei - the Xenotar - last year and took it along to my portrait shoot with the legendary conga player Candido Camero. It seemed appropriate - this was the sort of camera you'd have used to take his portrait back when he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and Stan Kenton.

To my dismay, I found it awkward to use - dim and difficult to focus and even counterintuitive. I had, in the decade-plus since I last ran a roll of film through it, lost the knack of the camera. The shoot was a success, but I still felt depressed when I got home and unloaded the Rollei. I felt like I had somehow let an old friend down.

David Bowie/Two Years

David Bowie, Skydome, Toronto, March 7, 1990

TWO YEARS HAVE GONE BY LIKE WEEKS. As I wrote when David Bowie died, I never seriously imagined that there would be a time when he wasn't around, somewhere, doing something. He was there, doing something, in my earliest memories of the radio, years before I became a fan, and while it's hardly reasonable to rely on that presence, I had never seriously prepared myself for a post-Bowie world.

David Bowie, Skydome, Toronto, March 7, 1990

And so, on the anniversary, I have gone back to that 1990 show I forgot I ever shot to make one last trawl for photos. These are the odd frames - the moments in between and the almost-theres and the shots I never would have submitted to my editor at the end of the assignment. For someone who would forget he was at that show, I seem to have put a lot of effort into getting something in the moment. Or maybe David was simply good at delivering.

David Bowie, Skydome, Toronto, March 7, 1990

This last shot is something I'd only have looked at now - a brief, placid moment in the middle of a frantic performance. A glimpse of the man behind the show? Maybe. Maybe not. It probably didn't look elegiac then, but it does now.

We spent the last night of Christmas vacation last week in the kitchen, listening to the Bowie playlist on my older daughter's Apple Music. There are really few things more enjoyable than embarrassing your children by singing along loudly to the theme from Cat People while doing a jigsaw puzzle of TV dinners. One more thing for which I can thank him.

David Bowie (aka David Robert Jones) died in New York City of cancer on January 10, 2016.

Mark Eitzel & American Music Club

American Music Club, Toronto, May, 1993

IF YOU ASK MOST PEOPLE, THEY'LL PROBABLY TELL YOU THAT THEY LISTEN TO MUSIC TO FEEL GOOD. Most of those people might be telling the truth, but the rest are lying. In my experience, we listen to music to feel - not just for elation, but for an expression of our strongest feelings, and it's likely that there are long stretches of our lives where we've felt pretty bad.

I listened to Mark Eitzel and his band, American Music Club, an awful lot when I felt pretty bad. About my life, about myself, about my general prospects at a time in my life when it would have served me better to have had access to some conduit to optimism. I don't really regret it; the music Eitzel and AMC made over at least three records helped me explain - at least for myself, in my dark nights of the soul - the desperate emotions that often overwhelmed me in the aftermath of the first major romantic disappointment of my adult life. (And thankfully the only one.)

American Music Club, Toronto, May, 1993

The band were touring their Mercury record and I was assigned to do some live shots by NOW magazine when they were in town. Being a fan, I showed up at soundcheck and talked them into a brief portrait session in the alleyway behind the club. If I had any ambitions toward having the band act out the enormous emotional service they were performing for me at the time, it certainly doesn't show in these photos.

It would have been absurd to even ask. Mark Eitzel might have had his roots in punk rock, but AMC were a musically sophisticated group across all their lineups, up to the demands of Eitzel's melodramatic and often orchestral songs. I was a particular fan of guitarist Vudi and pedal steel player Bruce Kaphan, but I'm a big guitar geek. The second frame would be a merely serviceable promo handout; the one at the top is a more accurate snapshot of a band going about the wholly joyless ritual of having their photo taken by some local fanboy photog.

Mark Eitzel & American Music Club live, Toronto, May, 1993

Mark Eitzel is a riveting live performer, recklessly throwing himself into his songs, a "real showman," as he mockingly put the words into another singer's mouth in one of my favorite AMC songs, "Johnny Mathis' Feet." Most of my photos of the band playing that night are of him, and I could have scanned a lot more, not because they're so great, but because at least a hint of Eitzel's electric abandon is captured in them.

I still listen to Eitzel and AMC, but (thankfully) not with the same hungry need to hear someone reflect my emotional state back at me, lending some nobility to my despair. Thankfully I don't feel nearly so desperate any more - despair is a sin, as we Catholics say - and the characters in Eitzel's songs can be appreciated from more of a distance, like characters in a short story. Sometimes I miss having that heartfelt, urgent reaction to music, but I don't miss the lonely, angry person I was when I took these photos.

Drummer Tim Mooney died in 2012.