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.

 

Joe Flaherty

Joe Flaherty, Toronto, July 2004

JOE FLAHERTY WAS BORN IN PITTSBURGH AND BEGAN HIS COMEDY CAREER IN CHICAGO but he became famous on SCTV here in Canada, so we ritually expunge his American roots and claim him as one of our own. In our collective imagination, he was born in Scarborough and grew up watching Country Hoedown and Front Page Challenge and fiddling with the aerial to get the shows from Buffalo.

If you weren't there when it originally aired, it's hard to explain your reaction to SCTV when it began airing on the Global network in 1976. Canadian comedy shows tended to be gentle, even corny, but SCTV was sarcastic and cruel, a world of awkward hucksters and washed-up celebrities jammed together in the confined space of a crummy regional TV station. You suddenly sat up on the couch in the living room and realized that so much of the entertainment you'd been watching since TV went colour was so close to self-parody that it only took a nudge to push it over the line.

Joe Flaherty, Toronto, July 2004

I photographed Joe Flaherty at the Second City Theatre on John Street - now demolished, its facade incorporated into a luxury hotel and condo - for reasons now forgotten. I didn't care; he had been part of a group that had made Canada seem hip and edgy, even if only in fits and starts. (It took three years for SCTV to produce the first two seasons, and new seasons would appear haphazardly, with different names and formats, on different channels.) That's important to someone who grows up in a provincial culture like Canada.

The light was awful for the shoot, and I either couldn't find or didn't have the time to scout out a better location in the building, so I stuck to a tight head shot in what was the least flattering spot under the big window in the lobby. They're not great shots, and I wish I'd either had more time, better light or both. Considering how much I admired Flaherty, I'd even have contemplated trying to do something conceptual with him, using a costume or props - in an ideal world, and not one where I probably had five minutes and a deadline in three hours.

If my affection for Flaherty hadn't already been established with Sammy Maudlin and Count Floyd, he also played Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks, one of my role models as a father (alongside Robert Duvall in The Great Santini.) When my kids finally saw the show and heard one of Flaherty's dinner table rants in the first few episodes, they looked at me and said "Oh my God, dad, that's you."

Rachel McAdams

Rachel McAdams, Toronto, July 2004

ANY IDIOT CAN TAKE A DECENT PHOTO OF AN ATTRACTIVE PERSON. This is a reduction of what I call the "Michals Rule," inspired by photographer Duane Michals' dictum that there is no such thing as a bad picture of a famous person. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I always feel stupid taking credit or accepting compliments when someone likes any photo I've taken of anyone either famous, attractive or both.

My shoot with Rachel McAdams could not have been simpler. I had the usual scant handful of minutes with her in the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, where I found my favorite bit of light in their helpfully bright and minimal rooms. Normally this would have been enough for a serviceable photo or two, but McAdams was an unusually rewarding portrait subject, for reasons known only to her.

Rachel McAdams, Toronto, July 2004

I'd like to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I can. As I've said countless times, I don't give my subjects a lot of direction at first, preferring to simply see how they react to having a camera pointed at them. Additionally, since I tend to use wider lenses rather than long ones (the Exif data on these photos tells me I used my 50mm lens on the free daily's Canon digital camera; I usually used the 35mm lens, so I must have come over all Karsh that day) I rely on forcing the subject to react to me being closer to them than they might find comfortable.

McAdams either wasn't put off at all, or she was having a good day, because this is my second pass through this shoot for the purposes of this blog, and I still have a few good frames I have't posted yet. Considering that I only shot a total of 24 frames, I'd call this an unqualified success. (As a footnote, I'm still amazed at how, at least during my first year with a digital camera, I came away from jobs with frames numbering some multiple of 12, since that's how many shots you'd have on commercially available rolls of either 120 or 35mm film. But I digress.)

Rachel McAdams, Toronto, July 2004

McAdams is a Canadian, and despite still being a marquee name, apparently still lives here in Toronto rather than in Los Angeles or New York. I photographed her in the year when Mean Girls and The Notebook were released, just as her career was exploding, which was great timing for me, as I doubt that I'd have had this sort of access again.

There's a story about McAdams from a couple of years after this shoot, with her showing up at an Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shoot with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley and discovering that the trio of actresses were all supposed to be nude. She politely declined to take part, then fired the publicist who had neglected to tell her. If I wasn't already fond of McAdams after our brief but (to me) productive shoot, this only made me admire her more.

Kyle MacLachlan

Kyle MacLachlan, Toronto, June 2004

WHEN YOU'RE YOUNG, YOU DESPERATELY LOOK FOR YOUR OWN REFLECTION IN CULTURE. That isn't to say you want to find someone who looks just like you - there's a difference between self-involvement and narcissism - but rather a character or persona who might plausibly have been formed by circumstances similar to your own.

I can think of a few characters I found in books and movies who came tantalizingly close - Malcolm McDowell in If.... and O Lucky Man, Holden Caulfield, Harold Chasen in Harold & Maude, at least until he tells the story of his mother's fainting spell - but it was Kyle MacLachlan who, first and foremost, fit the role, at least for me.

Specifically, it was MacLachlan in his trio of roles in David Lynch projects - Paul Atreides in Dune, Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks - who embodied a mix of earnestness and irony, and a self-defining, even aggressive squareness formed in reaction to the enforced casualness of the Boomer generation that preceded us. MacLachlan was, in fact, five years older than me, but he had a youthfulness that telescoped that gap and persisted for many years.

Kyle MacLachlan, Toronto, June 2004

I photographed MacLachlan in a suite at the now-gone Sutton Place Hotel for the free daily. I haven't a clue what he was in town promoting - his filmography for 2004 includes an appearance on Law & Order: SVU, a TV movie unpromisingly titled The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, and a supporting role playing Cary Grant's spirit in something called Touch of Pink. Then, even more than now, I doubt if I cared much about any of that, excited as I was to be taking portraits of David Lynch's onscreen alter ego.

They're not riveting portraits. Six months after having been put back to work taking photos after a years-long layoff, I was already willing to fall back onto the mere technical consolation of "good enough," encouraged by the very brief window I'd be given to take my shots at the end of a fifteen minute interview slot.

I placed him in the dim threshold of "Anton light" toward the back of the room, but without any idea about what I wanted to get MacLachlan to do, apart from lean into an old school movie star pose. Years after the fact, I've brought that out in the black and white shot above, but if I'm honest I have to admit that it's a salvage job, and if I'm even more honest the reason I've avoided looking at these shots for nearly fifteen years is because they still smack of being a wasted opportunity.

Melissa Auf der Maur

Melissa Auf der Maur, Toronto, May 2004

WHAT IS A CANADIAN ROCK STAR? I suppose the Canadian rock star is the one who replaces the person who died of a heroin overdose in a big deal American band and stays clean, leaving to join another big deal American band, then refusing to rejoin either band for reunions that would have made them a lot of money. The Canadian rock star is also the person who quits touring and recording to go on maternity leave.

I started my career shooting and writing about music and musicians, so I think I can make jokes about Canadian rock stars and our apparent immunity to the usual pitfalls of stardom and success (which usually involve neglecting to reap the huge but potentially lethal benefits of stardom and success.)

I know this sounds like I'm mocking Melissa Auf der Maur, a Canadian rock star - which would, in itself, be a very Canadian thing to do - but the fact is that I admired her immensely, both before and after I photographed her in 2004, and especially when she opted out of the music industry for bohemian life in a small town, which once again seemed a very Canadian rock star thing to do.

Melissa Auf der Maur, Toronto, May 2004

Auf der Maur had made her name as the bassist in Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins when I photographed her for the free daily doing publicity for her first solo album. Her dad, the late Nick Auf der Maur, was a drinking buddy of my father-in-law in Montreal, and as a native of Montreal I had always suspected she was probably better suited for the role of rock star than if she was from any other Canadian city. (Which is exactly what someone from Toronto would say.)

I photographed her at the pool hall above the Rivoli on Queen West, in the booth where she was doing press interviews. I suppose I could have asked her to move, but it was actually the best bit of light in the room, and I figured she looked good enough that the background of the photo would probably be irrelevant.

Finally, it's important to add that the dullest portrait is improved if the subject has red hair.

Melissa Auf der Maur, Toronto, May 2004

Gary Busey

Gary Busey, Toronto, May 2004

THERE IS A MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TAKING PORTRAITS OF NORMAL PEOPLE AND CELEBRITY PORTRAITURE. Someone running a portrait business - doing head shots, wedding photos, portraits of families or children at their first communion and the like - are mainly in the business of making strangers look good for people who know them, in photos that are rarely seen outside of family and friends or some professional network. It's a straightforward task, and requires a roughly even mix of technical and personal skill.

Taking pictures of celebrities, however, demands that the photographer acquaint themselves with the public image of their subject - the persona that they've either cultivated themselves or had imposed upon them through fame or infamy (or some mix thereof.) I am very fond of a quote by the photographer Duane Michals, from the introduction to a book of his portraits: "There is no such thing as a bad celebrity portrait."

In the paragraph following this statement, Michals explains that people often mistake the beauty of the person in a photo with the photo itself. "Most often, it is an ordinary photograph of a beautiful person," Michals says. "If the same photo were of an ugly person, would it then be an ugly photograph?"

The enthusiastic response I got to the photos I posted last week of Anne Hathaway and Hilary Duff suggests that, by that logic the most beautiful photographs of all are of beautiful celebrities. Your feelings about a celebrity - and we all develop, if not feelings, then opinions about famous people - will go a long way to forming your response to a photo of them, regardless of its technical excellence or aesthetic qualities.

How then, do you respond to a photo of a famous person who might not be beautiful, but whose public image is known to you, perhaps in great detail? How much of what you know - and think and feel - will influence your response to any halfway competent photo of that person? How, for instance, do you respond to these portraits of Gary Busey, taken at the height of the strange, near-infamy that followed in the wake of his previous fame?

Gary Busey, Toronto, May 2004

Like most people, I became acquainted with Busey when he played Buddy Holly in the 1978 biopic about the early rock and roll star and his tragic death. He was an oversized actor who seemed to shoehorn himself into his character roles, and it was no surprise that his personal life turned out to be chaotic and out of control, and defined by a massive motorcycle accident he had in 1988 (no helmet; massive head trauma that lead to brain damage) and a cocaine overdose seven years later.

By the 2000s, reality TV and celebrity-obsessed media had produced a place where damaged celebrities, has-beens and the infamous could have new careers in a kind of anti-fame, fed by reality television and hundred of websites devoted to the full toxic flower of celebrity and pop culture. Busey had found a place in this, flaunting his outsized oddness as a mix of magus and holy fool. It was this Busey that I photographed for the free daily.

Busey was involved with seven films in 2004, the year after his reality TV show I'm With Busey had aired. I can't be sure just what he was publicizing when I took these photos, but he was mainly selling his public persona for my camera. The first half of the shoot involved some ferocious mugging for my camera, and some shots - not included here - where it was hard not to notice that his face had been put back together without quite achieving symmetry.

For the second half of our brief shoot, he called a halt to the proceedings to light up a cigar, moving the shoot to a spot by a window where a shaft of sunlight would fight with his cigar smoke. I can't be sure, even today, how much of this was an act, intended to sell this altered persona - a product of his troubled life history, to be sure, but at the same time an evolution from the public image that was part of his fame previous to any accidents or overdoses.

What I do know is that there's some qualitative, essential difference between a bunch of snapshots you might take of a wannabe badass, goofball buddy of yours, mugging and gurning for your phone and the 112 followers on your Instagram account, trying to project a devil-may-care fantasy of himself - and these shots of an actor who might do this several times a day, many times a year, for at least a decade or more.

One is a photo of someone trying to pretend he's someone he might not be, for friends who probably know better. The other is someone whose interest is in confirming to people who don't know him that he really is the person they imagine him to be. That is the difference between regular portraiture and celebrity portraiture.

 

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway, Toronto, March 2004

FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE FREE DAILY HAD PUT ME BACK TO WORK TAKING PORTRAITS, I began to suspect that things were going to be different to what I'd been doing for years. I suppose the light bulb went off with this shoot with Anne Hathaway, who was just ending her ingenue phase when I took these photos in the Spring of 2004.

Hathaway - an uncommonly pretty young woman - had made her name in Disney films like the Princess Diaries franchise, and was in Toronto promoting Ella Enchanted, a fairy tale film that was very much more of the same. Brokeback Mountain would come out a year later, and with it a series of mature roles that would lead to an Oscar in 2012. I caught her on the cusp, which was probably a good thing, since I doubt if I'd have had this sort of access again.

Anne Hathaway, Toronto, March 2004

The shoot wasn't what you'd call challenging. A photogenic subject meets you at least halfway; the biggest challenge is to catch them doing something that isn't merely beauty being witnessed and recorded. Sometimes that means pushing and prodding and creating scenarios that push the subject out of their comfort zone. Sometimes it just involves shooting a lot of photos and hoping for the frames between the winning smile and the coy glance. This shoot was definitely the latter, not the former. I never get much of the former.

Anne Hathaway, Toronto, March 2004

In just four months of shooting portraits for the free daily, I'd done shoots with just as many celebrities. At the beginning of my career, they'd have been rarities, captured by accident during the earliest moment of their rise to fame, and often because I found them interesting. During my decade at NOW magazine, an alternative weekly, I was assigned to shoot celebrities more often, but they were in the paper more out of critical interest than because their celebrity made whatever they were doing worth a feature or a cover story.

The free daily, however, was a mainstream publication, and our new editor had decided that we were going to use our growing national circulation to compete with other big dailies for the big names. I have to give that editor, Jodi Isenberg, credit for recognizing the opportunity and making me the paper's principal photographer, putting more celebrities in front of my camera over the next four years than I'd seen in nearly two decades of work.

About a year before I took these photos, and when Jodi was still just the paper's entertainment editor (taking over for my wife, who'd left the business) I had lunch with my old friend Chris Buck when he was passing through town. I was working as the paper's interim photo editor, processing other people's work and pretty sure that my shooting days were over.

As we said goodbye outside the doors to the building where the free daily had its offices, Chris actually pleaded with me to start shooting again. I was flattered, but didn't see how - or why - I'd find my way to shooting full time again. Within a few months, Jodi had given me the opportunity, and in time I'd rediscover the motivation to imagine myself as a working photographer. The five photos I've posted this week, taken in just four months, record one of the most pivotal moments in my career.