15 DOUBEK, Frantisek Bohumil. Female jazz trio. [?Munich: c.1923]
Robert Irving doing their thing on the synthesizer, and me and Kenny Garrett (sometimes Gary Thomas on tenor) weaving our voices through all of that, and Foley, who was my new guitar player, playing that funky blues-rock-funk, almost Jimi Hendrix- like music he plays. They were great and I truly had finally found the guitar player that I had been looking for. Everybody in that band could dialogue with each other from the beginning and that was good. My band was right and my health was good and so was everything else in my life.” Cook and Morton remark memorably that at this time Davis’s “horn sounds as deceptively fragile as ever, but it’s made to dance in front of shifting sonic backdrops”. Poster (835 × 585 mm), printed white on red on rather flimsy paper stock, incorporating half-tone image of Miles. Light lateral crease where once folded, a few other light creases. In excellent, unfaded, condition. ¶ Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings , ninth edition, 2008; Miles Davis & Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 1990. £1,750 [149200]
the jazz age arrives in the parlours of mitteleuropa
Wonderfully spirited portrayal of an enthusiastic jazz band comprised of three modern young women, bobbed and in flapper dresses, playing the “signature” instruments of the “jass” revolution – drums, sax, and banjo. Frantisek Doubek (1865–1952) was born in Ceské Budejovice, his father a shoemaker and his mother the daughter of a blacksmith. In 1879 he moved to Prague where he began his artistic education, enrolling at the Academy of Fine Art where he became a pupil of the then rector, history painter Antonín Lhota, also studying under the Czech Nazarene painters Frantisek Sequens and Frantisek Cermák, one of the founders of the Umelecká beseda – Artistic Discussion – movement. He left Prague for Munich in 1885, joining the classes of genre painter Otto Seitz, and studying composition with Hungarian history painter and illustrator Sandor Liezen-Mayer. During the Great War, Doubek enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army, remaining in Bavaria for five years after the war ended, only returning to Ceské Budejovice in 1924. There he established himself as a portraitist and genre painter, being commissioned to produce the main altar and Stations of the Cross for St. Nicholas’s cathedral. In 1933 he settled in Prague, where he exhibited his work, and produced numerous illustrations for magazines. He was a member of the JUV – Czech Artists’ Association – and the influential SUV Mánes – Union of Fine Artists Mánes. He died in 1952. Most of Doubek’s work consists of portraiture and genre paintings; a good number of the latter are of a slightly risqué, sub-William Russell Flint nature. The subject matter of the present work is certainly unusual and would seem to derive from his time in Munich. In the early 1920s jazz was just getting started in Germany, more of a fad than a musical movement: the Shimmy and the Two Step had swept the dance floors, and the jazz trio – piano, drums and a Stehgeiger, standing violinist, and variants thereupon – was the most common ensemble. Doubek’s well- painted and attractively composed scene captures the hectic excitement and hope of the Weimar years. Oil on canvas (625 × 500 mm). In attractive gilt wood frame to style. In very good condition. £7,500 [133687]
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13 DAVIS, Miles. Pair of sunglasses owned by Miles Davis. New York: Optical Affairs, [ c.1984] miles’s shades Iconic memento of Miles, dating to the period of his renaissance in the mid-to-late 1980s. Sunglasses are the one style accessory most closely associated with the great trumpeter – a projection of an ineffable “cool” and a powerful affirmation of his renowned aloofness, which he described in his autobiography as a reaction to other “black musicians … grinning and scratching on stage.” They also reflected his innate shyness: “James Baldwin, who said of Miles that he was the only person he knew who was shyer than he, once compared Miles’ shyness to Floyd Paterson’s reticence, his ‘will to privacy’” (Szwed, p. 192). The trumpeter acquired these wonderfully stylish shades, with their distinctive peak over the bridge and slight wraparound look, from the New York eyewear boutique du jour, Optical Affairs, launched in 1984 by celebrated designers Christian Roth and Eric Domège. Provenance: by descent through the family; then through auction, being lot 171D at Guernsey’s landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center sale of 20 February 2005. Pair of black plastic sunglasses, left inner arm stamped in white “Manufactured in France Pat. No. 011394/9WZ”, right inner arm similarly stamped “Optical Affairs New York”, tinted lenses. Overall in excellent condition. ¶ John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis, 2002. £5,250 [144302]
14 DAVIS, Miles. Original poster for concert in Berlin, 1987: Miles Davis, 3.11.87 Dienstag 20 Uhr, ICC Saal 1. Berlin: 1987 “the band i had in 1987 was a motherfucker, man” Beautifully simple and highly effective poster for Miles’s appearance at Berlin’s Internationales Congress Centrum on 3 November 1987. The portrait shows Miles with left arm raised, apparently indicating “on the one”, a direction given to musicians to play on the downbeat (the first beat of a measure), most famously used by James Brown – and a phrase used by Miles himself in the closing lines of his autobiography. This was the period when Miles laid down covers of Scritti Politti’s “Perfect Way”, Prince’s “Movie Star”, Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”, and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”. The band for this Berlin gig almost certainly comprised Kenny Garrett (alto and flute), Robert Irving III (synth), Adam Holzman (synth), Joe “Foley” McCreary (guitar), Darryl “The Munch” Jones (electric bass), Ricky Wellman (drums), and Rudy Bird or Mino Cinélu (percussion); elements of this group were present on the albums Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989). Of this group Miles writes, “The band I had in 1987 was a motherfucker, man. I loved the way they were playing. People all over loved this band. See, all this interweaving stuff was up in what they played, you know, Ricky playing off Mino Cin é lu, and Darryl Jones was up under that shit and giving foundation, and Adam Holzman and
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JAZZ
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