Rescuing Bearden from Hollywood
In 1961, jazz lovers couldn’t wait for the release of photographer Sam Shaw’s movie Paris Blues. With a score by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and co-starring Louis Armstrong, it sounded like a brilliant idea; a glorious celebration of the City of Lights’ devotion to jazz. Well, yes—until Hollywood got hold of it and the producer turned real events into clichéd fiction. The film eventually came with the message that jazz didn’t warrant a place beside Western classical music.
Twenty years later, artist Romare Bearden, writer and historian Albert Murray (a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center) and Shaw decided to set the record straight by creating a book together, which they titled Paris Blues Revisited. But though they got more than halfway through the project, finishing 19 spreads, it was never completed.
“No official title - work in progress,” Paris Blues Revisited, Duke Ellington and Billy Stayhorn in a cab in Paris. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s top-notch curatorial team, consisting of NYU lecturer Dan Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Bearden Foundation and Bearden’s niece, and Columbia University English and literature professor Robert G. O’Meally, wasn’t about to let those efforts go to waste. Last January, they met with the Shaws at their archive and saw the book for the first time.
“Once we’d seen it, the planning for the show began in earnest,” says O’Meally. The work will be on exhibit at Jazz at Lincoln Center through Feb. 28, 2012, a collaboration with the Romare Bearden Foundation on the centennial of Bearden’s birth.
Adrian Ellis, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, considers it a terrific show for the center’s exhibition space at its headquarters in the Time Warner Center. “It’s exciting to bring this unrealized project to the public,” he says. “It gives a whole new perspective on the period and shows another dimension of Shaw, Bearden and Murray’s talent.”
The Bearden Foundation leapt at the chance to show the contents of the long-lost book, which include the artist’s vibrant paintings and collages, Murray’s poetic writings and Shaw’s evocative photographs, all of them related to Ellington and Armstrong in Paris as well as to the jazz scene in New Orleans and New York. Using only the best reproductions of Bearden’s works, the curators and Linda Florio of Florio Design set up the show as a picture-and-word book on the walls, so viewers can experience it as they would a book.
“The works give a wonderful flavor of the time,” says Harris-Kelley. “These artists were all friends who had experienced that wonderful period in Paris, New Orleans and New York. They worked together like a jazz ensemble.”
In Paris Blues Revisited, Jazz at Lincoln Center puts on view five photographs by Shaw, 19 collages by Bearden—which include parts of Shaw’s photographs—and two books by Albert Murray with covers illustrated by Bearden. O’Meally explains why this is no ordinary art exhibit. “What you see here,” he says, “is the visual equivalent of music. These artists present Paris as a city as swinging as New Orleans and Harlem, with musicians like Django Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet making their homes there. Because some of Bearden’s works are unfinished, you get the feeling of a rehearsal and a sense of their improvisatory process. They did what the movie was supposed to do—but far better.”
Paris Blues Revisited
Through Feb. 28, 2012, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at W. 60th St., 212-875-5350,
www.jalc.org.
