JaZzArt en València

This has been the most popular image (this past week) in my Fine Art America gallery. The above is the framed print, but there are more, like the canvas print, the acrylic print, the wood, the metal and the poster print. They are all high quality. Fine Art America handles the transaction and ships to you quickly. Check out the gallery as I change it quite often.

Cheers…

Shorty Rogers…

His name was Milton Rajonsky and he was born in 1924. He was a trumpeter and an arranger and one of the main, perhaps the principal, founder of West Coast Jazz… He worked with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton during the 1950’s… Shorty Rogers died of melanoma at the age of 70 in California…

Here is one of his recordings from 1958 with a Cuban flavour to it… Well, I guess you would call it Jazz with a strong rhythm section. Whatever you call it, if it has a Cuban flavour it has to be good…

And this is how we close up a day full of extremely bang on Jazz!

CHEERS…

Duke Ellington is considered America’s greatest composer. By America, I mean only the US in this case. He was born in 1899 in Washington, D.C. but from the mid 1920s, his base was New York City. In the 1930s, he started a long and fruitful collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, pianist, arranger, and composer of «Take the A Train» and others that are now standards.

Ellington is one of my favourite composers and pianists. Besides his music, and he composed thousands of pieces, I really admired his thoughts, his philosophy. Ellington supported the idea that one had to go beyond the limitations of the «classification» one is placed in. One had to go beyond the category. So he considered his music to be, generally speaking, American music.

Duke Ellington died in 1974 in New York City and was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Award for music in 1999.

There is much, much more to this great man of Jazz, well of music in general, America’s classical music, and I urge you to search further. You can search in books and videos, but most importantly, search with your ears…

Here’s classic Duke Ellington:

Cheers…

Dixieland was a style of Jazz created in New Orleans at the start of the XX Century…

The Original Dixieland Jass Band arrived in New York City to play in Vaudeville shows. But they were offered an audition by the Columbia Gramophone Company, via a letter they received dated 29 JAN 1917. The recording session was on 31 JAN 1917, but no recording was issued.

Then the band went to the Victor Talking Machine Company and on 26 FEB 1917 recorded «Livery Stable Blues» and «Dixieland Jass Band One Step.» The songs were released in May 1917 making it the first Jazz record ever issued.

Although many were surprised, the recordings became a smash hit across the United States. The band became an instant success. They were led by Nick La Rocca, who played the cornet and stated that they were musical anarchists. He also said that «Jazz is the assassination of the melody…the slaying of syncopation.»

The song «Livery Stable Blues» was possibly written by Ray López and Alcides Nuñez in 1917, at least they owned the copyright.

* Before they settled on the current spelling Jazz.

Cheers…

He came to bring joy! His playing was a divine gift, as no one else has done what he did…

Cheers…

One of the masters of West Coast Jazz, or «Cool Jazz» is Gerry Mulligan, North American saxophonist. This New Yorker born in 1927 was also a clarinettist, a composer and an arranger. But he shines predominantly with his baritone sax. He worked wit Stan Kenton and Miles Davis, among others. He played with Chet Baker in a piano-less group considered one of the coolest of the «cool» groups. Mulligan died in 1996 from complications from knee surgery. He was 68 years old.

This time the song becomes many as I truly believe that to get to feel the soul of Gerry Mulligan you have to hear more than just one song. So here are many for you to delight in. And then you tell me what you think.

Cheers…

A esta cita no hay que agregarle ni una sola palabra…

Pero creo que reconocer nuestras derrotas, asimilarlas y aprender de ellas, nos valdría mucho y nos ayudaría a triunfar en el futuro…

Oi, so today I am going to stray a little bit from my usual path, but not so much, because if music is poetry and they say that so is art, then I am speaking of the same thing. I do believe art, music and poetry are sewn together with the Golden Fleece that Jason searched for with his Argonauts…

What? Ok, I’ll get to the point…

Art Pepper was an incredible musician. He was born on September 1, 1925 in California and passed away 56 years later. His musical career was quite short because it was interrupted multiple times. First, he spent time in prison which took away several years of his career, and then he had to undergo rehabilitation for his heroin addiction. However, despite these obstacles, Pepper was able to establish himself as one of the greats, alongside the key players who pioneered «Cool Jazz» or «West Coast Jazz.» One of those significant figures was Gerry Mulligan, who collaborated with Miles Davis on the influential recording called «Birth of the Cool.»

But I’m talking about Art Pepper, and as I said earlier, the guy was amazing. He himself claimed to be a genius and said he didn’t know anyone else who played the saxophone like he did. Who does this remind me of? Dalí? No… Pepper was a real genius…

Pepper was a true paradox of a guy, I mean to the nth degree. He could compose a ballad for you, sweet, smooth, and sensual, and at the same time, he would tell you that being a great jazz musician is similar to being a great criminal, and that he was willing to do anything, for example, to kill anyone who messed with his woman. I don’t criticize him, I admire him, and he is right, a man should defend his woman and his home…

One of Art Pepper’s most famous themes is the ballad «Patricia,» which he composed in 1978 for his daughter. It so happened that while he was in prison, his ex-wife brought Patricia, who was about twelve years old at the time, with the intention of showing the girl that her father was nothing more than a caged monster among all the others there. In other words, her father lives locked up, alongside the dregs of society, because he deserves it, because he is like that too. When Pepper encountered Patricia again, she was in her thirties and he called her to wish her a Happy Christmas, and she responded by saying that she knew he was nothing more than a criminal and a rapist, that she had read the book.*

When Pepper was discharged from the methadone clinic, where he had overcome his heroin addiction, he resumed playing and composing music. He formed a band with talented musicians and embarked on a tour of Europe and Japan. He recorded multiple albums for Galaxy Records, the subsidiary of Fantasy Records. His latest albums were Living Legend, Art Pepper Today, Among Friends, and Live in Japan.

Art Pepper died from a stroke. He abused his body heavily throughout his life, and although he had recovered from drug addiction, his body remained weakened and couldn’t survive the stroke. He passed away in 1982 in Los Angeles and is buried in the Abbey of the Psalms mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

I am not interested in the bad things he might have done. I don’t judge. To me, he is a genius of Jazz and one of my favourite musicians and composers. I admire him as a jazz player, period…

* In 1980, Art Pepper and Laurie Pepper, his third wife, published their autobiography titled «Straight Life.» The book spoke about the criminal underworld where Pepper lived during the 1940s and 1950s. Among the anecdotes was one in which Pepper boasts of having raped a woman in London during World War II, because in his mind she deserved it. Due to the publication of the book, director Don McGlynn made the documentary titled «Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor.» The documentary features direct interviews with Pepper and Laurie, and includes a recording of a concert at the Malibu Jazz Club. I highly recommend it.

Cheers…

Expressionism is one of the art vanguards of the XX Century. It started as a movement with artists from Germany, Austria, France and Russia in the years before WWI. But it did spread across Europe and to the Americas. The early ones are Munch, Van Gogh and James Ensor, the Belgian printmaker.

In Expressionism, you use colors to make the composition more dramatic and dynamic. It’s not about making things look natural, but about delving deep into the inner feelings and thoughts of the subjects and conveying their psychological state, intentions, and emotions. The artist has the freedom to alter, modify, amplify, or even recreate certain aspects of the subject’s appearance or body. The focus in Expressionism is not on representing reality accurately, but on exploring the subjective experience.

Needless to say it is my preferred style of artistic expression. Here are some of my expressionist paintings done digitally as Art Digital. I have used an original Surreal-Expressionist (to be explained on a future post) self-portrait to create these alternate self-portraits.

Here is a video I have made of Edvard Munch, whom I consider to be the «Father of Expressionism» with some of my «expressionist» music…

Cheers…