Posts from the “Music” Category

Guns, Drugs and Rock & Roll: The Tumultuous Life of Jim Marshall

Posted on October 29, 2021

*John Coltrane, in his backyard in Queens New York at sunset, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

American photographer Jim Marshall died peacefully in his sleep in 2010 at the age of 74 — probably the least likely end to a tumultuous life fueled by guns, drugs, and rock & roll. A natural born provocateur, Marshall understood the power of art to transform our lives. In his hands, the camera became a tool for activism, a recorder of history, and a means to salvation.

Whether photographing Johnny Cash during his historic San Quentin and Folsom prison concerts during the 1960s or traveling with Joan Baez on voter registration drives through the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Marshall was anchored in his work. Photography gave him purpose, put him in community, and was a way to show love — things that sometimes slipped away when he found himself alone.

In those moments, Marshall looked for ways to escape, his efforts to self-medicate often snowballing into catastrophic acts of self-harm. “A lot of creative people get really stuck in addiction because they are so sensitive,” says photographer Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and sole beneficiary of Marshall’s estate. “They connect with people on such a human level that they want to numb themselves out because it is overwhelming, especially when you are doing it 24/7 like Jim. Photography was his life so when there was downtime, he started feeling all these things and it was too much for him.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Jimi Hendrix filming Janis Joplin backstage, Winterland San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

*Monk Family, NYC, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

Posted on October 21, 2021

*wame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models at the Merton Simpson Gallery, New York, ca. 1967.*

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolence to push for Civil Rights and Malcolm X embraced the ethos of Black Nationalism to fight injustice in the United States, Brooklyn-born photographer Kwame Brathwaite turned to the teachings ofPan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey to introduce the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in the 1960s.

Rejecting the standards imposed by Western cultural hegemony, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath embraced African aesthetics, creating Grandassa Models in Harlem and Naturally 62, a fashion show that set the groundwork for a global revolution in fashion and beauty. With the introduction of “Black Is Beautiful,” the brothers helped to popularize natural hair, a full range of skin tones, and African styles across the diaspora.

“I have been called ‘The Keeper of Images,’” Brathwaite writes in Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, selections from which are currently on view in a major museum tour across the United States. “My task has been to document creative powers throughout the diaspora—not only in our Black artists musicians, athletes, dancers, models, and designers, but in all of us….I have often been asked how I was granted so much access as a photographer. It was the fact that people trusted me to get it right, to tell the truth in my work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Kwame Brathwaite, Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, ca. 1967*

*Man smoking in a ballroom, Harlem, ca. 1962.*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Janette Beckman: Leaders of the New School

Posted on September 20, 2021

*Leaders of the New School, 1991 © Janette Beckman*

British photographer Janette Beckman arrived in New York City in December 1982 to spend the Christmas holiday with some friends. But after a couple of weeks in town, she was hooked — and never left. Beckman remembers staying in a loft of Franklin Street in Tribeca just opposite the Mudd Club when the neighborhood was still an artist’s outpost.

“I didn’t mind the sketchy industrial neighborhood. I had been living in an unheated squat in rainy London and there was heat!” Beckman revels in the memory of the steam heaters designed after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that made rooms so hot, people were forced to throw open their windows in the dead of winter. “There were artists living in the building and I was in the thick of it. We’d go out to clubs and then meet up afterwards at Dave’s Corner Luncheonette, which was open 24 hours on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street. It was a very exciting time.”

Armed with her portfolio of photographs documenting London’s famed punk scene, Beckman went around to the record labels to see art directors in the hopes of shooting for them. But her photographs of the punk icons including Sex Pistols, Clash, and Siouxsie Sioux were too gritty for the high glossy aesthetics of 1980’s American pop. “They just looked at me and said, ‘We can’t really use you because the people in these pictures, their hair isn’t combed,’” Beckman remembers. “I was disappointed because I came from the music scene in England and thought I was going to get work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Music, Photography

Joe Conzo: The Elements

Posted on September 8, 2021

*Sal & Mickey Abbatiello, The Fever: 365 Nights of Hip Hop*

“Never in my wildest dreams as a kid from the South Bronx did I think that photography would bring me around the world,” says photographer, author, and activist Joe Conzo.

Coming of age in 1970s New York, Conzo’s worldview was shaped by his grandmother, Dr. Evelina Antonetty, who was fondly known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” for the work she did on behalf of the Puerto Rican community; his mother, community Lorraine Montenegro; and his father, Joe Conzo Sr., legendary bandleader Tito Puente’s personal manager and confidante.

Conzo witnessed the city’s infrastructure collapse under the weight of “benign neglect”, which denied basic government services to Black and brown communities across the United States, while landlord-sponsored arson reduced city blocks to rubble. He quickly learned the best way to create change was through collective action.

Read the Full Story a Huck

*Biggie Rolling Dice by Manuel Acevedo, 1994*

*Japanese Print by Manuel Acevedo, 1986*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Cey Adams: Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap

Posted on August 20, 2021

*Photograph by Jamel Shabazz. Four young men posing. This image was made on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the famous Delancey Street & Orchard Street in 1980, a major shopping hub.*

“Like a kid that’s always dreaming about going to the NBA and then you get the call, I was dreaming of this project even before I knew I was going to work on it,” says artist Cey Adams, the founding creative director of Def Jam. Adams art directed the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, which is released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings today (20 August 2021).

Tracing hip hop’s evolution from 1979 to 2013, the anthology brings together nine CDs with 129 tracks and a 300-page illustrated book published to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Featuring photographs by Janette Beckman, Charlie Ahearn, Anthony Barboza, Adrian Boot, Jamel Shabazz, and Glen E. Friedman, it offers a panoramic history of a culture born on the streets of the Bronx, that has since become a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon.

The anthology’s creators eschew the notion of a canon and instead envision the project as a foundation upon which to build. “I was on a call with LL Cool J and Chuck D, and we talked about not only making this book, but our journey as a people,” says Adams, who got his start as a graffiti writer in the 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*MC Sha-Rock, The Valley, NYC, June 1980, photo by Charlie Ahearn*

*Female Rappers, Class of ’88, 1988, photo by Janette Beckman*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Graffiti, Huck, Music, Photography

Two Fingas & James T Kirk: The Junglist

Posted on August 11, 2021

Picture it: South London, 1994. Local writer Andrew Green and photographer Eddie Otchere adopt the pseudonyms Two Fingas and James T Kirk, respectively, and use their lived experiences as the departure point for Junglist, a fictional coming-of-age tale that follows the exploits of Meth, Biggie, Q, and Craig over a weekend set in the city’s burgeoning jungle scene. Moving at the speed of sound, the 20 year-olds completed the book in just two months, crafting a mesmerising pulp fiction novel that is equal parts music, poetry, and film.

As the lovechild of UK rave and sound system culture, jungle was the sound of the world at the edge of a new era about to reveal itself. Driven by breakbeats – the rhythms that Jamaican DJs like Kool Herc used when he invented hip hop in the early 1970s – microengineered to twist time into a sonic blaze, jungle drew from and remade techno, rave, electro, dancehall, dub, hip hop, and house into an Afrofuturistic sound. The burgeoning culture quickly took the city by storm, maintaining its own DIY feel via an interconnected web of nightclubs, white label pressings, and pirate radio shows.

“Jungle burst out of the underground and for a brief period (it) was everywhere – you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio without hearing elements of it,” says Green. “Jungle was the first electronic music I connected with; it felt like it was just for me, my crew, and my peers. We were making the scene appear out of nowhere. At the time, there were no clubs in the centre of London that played music for Black audiences so you had to be on the outskirts to find clubs. It was a mission to go out.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Music

David Hurn: Isle of Wight Festival 1969

Posted on August 11, 2021

Now age 87, Magnum Photos member David Hurn remembers the fateful day in February 1954 that first brought photography into his life. While on break, the young army cadet training at Sandhurst Military Academy was paging a copy of Picture Post magazine and stumbled upon a photograph of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a Moscow department store.

“I started to cry – not something one normally did in the officers mess,” says Hurn, who describes how the picture triggered a memory of his father who he hardly saw during World War II. “One of the first acts he did at the war’s end was to take my mother, me in tow, to Howells, a department store in Cardiff, to buy her a hat: my first recollection of their love for each other.”

Suddenly understanding the power of the photography, Hurn decided in that moment to become a photographer despite knowing nothing about the medium. “Thinking back, I have no recollection of ever having taken any pictures,” he says. “To give up a firm profession for a total abstract one was reckless.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

Remembering Prince Through the Stories of Those Who Knew Him

Posted on August 3, 2021

*Prince – Welcome to America. Photography by Kevin Mazur, © The Prince Estate*

While watching YouTube videos of his friend Dr Cornel West, Prince heard the famed American academic and activist say, “I love my brother Prince, but he’s no Curtis Mayfield.”

The gauntlet had been thrown, and Prince took charge, writing the song Born 2 Die and later recording it in March 2010. Although President Barack Obama was in power, the issues affecting the Black community remained the same. Years before pop culture and the mainstream media would centre social justice, Prince crafted Welcome 2 America, a profoundly prescient statement about what he saw about the state of the nation at the dawn of the new millennium. Recorded in just a week, the record was ultimately shelved, with the artist choosing not to release it.

However, soon after completing the album, Prince embarked on a world tour bearing its name, capping it with the historic 21 Nite Stand show at The Forum in Inglewood, California on April 28, 2011 – which is available as a live concert video in the deluxe edition. Backed by the New Power Generation (NPG), Prince performed classics likePurple Rain and Kiss as well as covers of Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done for Me Lately and India.Arie’s Brown Skin.

“It’s extremely satisfying to know that people are going to hear Prince’s words because they are so important, and need to be heard over and over again,” says bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, who played on Welcome 2 America. “Prince wanted to help people and you can hear it in the music.”

In conjunction with the new, posthumous release of Welcome 2 America (Sony Legacy), we look at the man behind the myth through the stories of NPG keyboardist Renato Neto and bassist Ida Nielsen, who played The Forum show, along with sound engineer Jason Agel and Wilkenfeld, who worked on Welcome 2 America.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Prince – Welcome to America. Photography by Mike Ruiz, © The Prince Estate*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Music

Chris Miles: Notting Hill Carnival 1974

Posted on July 28, 2021

By 2019, the last year it was held before the Covid-19 pandemic,Notting Hill Carnival brought an estimated 2.5 million people to the streets of Ladbroke Grove, London, to celebrate Caribbean culture and community. Held over two days in August, the extraordinary event stands as a testament to the vision of Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones, who brought Carnival to London in 1959, following the Notting Hill race riots the previous year.

Televised by the BBC, the first edition was held indoors and featured live music, dance, and a beauty contest. In 1966, the Notting Hill Carnival moved outdoors, reclaiming the neighborhood formerly the stronghold of fascist Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and neo-Nazi Colin Jordan’s White Defence League. In 1973, Carnival director Leslie Palmer introduced costume bands, steel bands, and stationary sound systems to draw the new generation coming up on reggae music.

That same year, British photographer Chris Miles moved to London to study at the London School of Economics. “The social and physical challenges of the inner cities were major issues of concern at the time and I helped run a youth project in a deprived area near Waterloo,” he says.

By the mid ‘70s, the UK was struggling with widespread unrest in the face of inflation, lost wages, frequent power outages, and increasingly overt racism with the growth of the National Front. Groups began to organize against fascism and for equal rights.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Vaginal Davis and Joan Jett Blakk at SPEW 2. Photo by Mark Freitas*

From the very start, queer identity has been a central proponent of punk culture, starting with the name itself being jailhouse slang to describe the man on the receiving end of anal sex. By the time punk culture was named in the mid to late 1970s, it was an amorphous space of freedom, where gender and sexuality were fluid.

“In the beginning, punk rock was exceptionally gender diverse,” says Walter Crasshole, who edited the recent book, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History (PM Press) along with Liam Warfield and Yony Leyser. “There were a number of LGBTQ+ protagonists in the punk scene, some who made that very clear and it was part of their identities, like Jayne County.”

But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that queercore emerged as a potent force, rising from the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the reactionary, hyper-masculine orthodoxy of the hardcore scene.

Recognizing the community no longer provided the support they needed to survive, a group of disaffected queer punks, artists, and musicians, including G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, began to develop their own scene, laying the groundwork for what would become first known as ‘homocore’, then take on the more inclusive name ‘queercore’ in the early ‘90s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Deke Nihilson at Homocore Chicago. Photo by Mark Freitas*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Leni Sinclair. Black Panthers Meeting, Year Unknown.*

Born Magdalene Arndt in 1940, Leni Sinclair grew up in East Germany listening to jazz artists like Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg. At age 19, Sinclair moved to Detroit to study at Wayne State University. She quickly became involved with the radical political and cultural scene, becoming one of the two members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the city.

In 1964, she met poet John Sinclair, and married him the following year. Together they set up the Detroit Artists Workshop, a network of communal houses, performance space, and print shop that became the center for the Detroit music scene, attracting the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, all of whom Sinclair photographed.

Police began targeting the Detroit Artists Workshop, raiding it in 1965 and 1967, and arresting John Sinclair on marijuana charges. Undeterred, the Sinclairs soldiered on, practicing the peace, love, and free vibes of hippie culture before such a thing existed. Throughout it all, they remained dedicated to art, music, and activism, going so far as to establish the White Panther Party to support the work of the Black Panther Party before the term “ally” gained clout.

With the publication of Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973 (MOCAD and Foggy Notion Books), Sinclair looks back at her extraordinary work documenting the art, music and political scenes of late 1960s Detroit. The book opens at the March on Washington of 1963 and chronicles performances and artists’ events at the Detroit Artists Workshop, early concerts with the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges in the Grande Ballroom, anti-war protests, the Detroit Uprising and the Black Panthers, and Sinclair’s ongoing documentation of Sun Ra, and other luminaries in jazz, blues and rock and roll.

Here Sinclair looks back at a life on the edge, when radical culture transformed the face of the mainstream forevermore.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Music, Photography