Distinguished jazz historian James Lincoln Collier remarks that Reinhardt is, “without question, the single most important guitarist in the history of jazz, and probably would be named on most lists of all-time jazz greats. Despite a crippled left hand, he had a solid technique; his melodic conception was formidable … and his ability to swing was immense”. Original silver gelatin print (image size: 316 × 260 mm, sheet size: 400 × 305 mm), verso with Ronis’s studio wet stamp and pencilled inventory numbers. One or two minor creases otherwise in excellent condition. ¶ James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History , 1978; Michael Dregni, Django Reinhardt and the Illustrated History of Gypsy Jazz , 2006. £3,500 [150388] 45 ROLLINS, Sonny. Original poster for performance at Town Hall, New York, 15 March 1969: Sat. eve., March 15 – 8:30 Alstan Productions, Inc. presents Sonny Rollins Ensemble. Jaki Byard Quartet. Jazz Samaritans with Artie Simmons. New York: Printed by Brooklyn Poster Printing Co., Inc., 1969 sonny at town hall in 1969 – Scarce poster in an unusual narrow format for a very singular gig that catches Sonny briefly back in New York between excursions to India during the period of the second of his two famous sabbaticals, fronting a remarkable line-up of seven bass players, including Richard Davis and Ron Carter. After several months in India, Rollins returned to the United States and “gave an unusual concert at Manhattan’s Town Hall. The bassist Bill Lee (father of the filmmaker Spike Lee) organised a group of seven bassists, a pianist, and a drummer, which he called the New York Bass Violin Choir … As six of the seven bassists played arco arrangements (with one bass being plucked in the usual style for jazz), Sonny walked among them soloing. A couple of times he wandered clear off the stage, where the audience could only faintly hear him. Unfortunately, the group had less than half an hour’s worth of arrangements. When the short set ended and the musicians left the stage, the crowd went wild, demanding that Sonny played more. He had been doing very few live engagements around this time and had not released a new album since East Broadway Rundown three years earlier [in 1966]. He finally came out and tried to reason with the crowd, then gave up, put his horn in his mouth, and played solo for a few “an extraordinarily revealing spectacle”
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44 REINHARDT, Django – RONIS, Willy (photo.) Django Reinhardt et son fils Babik. Paris: Willy Ronis, 1945 Captivating and deeply compatissant image of Django with his young son Babik, captured in 1945 by the celebrated French photographer Willy Ronis. At the time Django and his wife Naguine “were living in such a crummy, cramped apartment in Paris, Ronis was forced to shoot the image in a mirror to have space to capture them both” (Dregni, p. 102). Willy Ronis (1910–2009) “has been called ‘the most poetic photographer of the menu peuple this century’. He travelled little, preferring his native France, better still his native Paris, and best of all the patch around Belleville-Ménilmontant where he could photograph the local people of the ‘popular classes’, with whom he felt such a gentle affinity … Ronis was born in Paris, the son of a Jewish refugee from Odessa who had a photographic studio near the Place de la Nation. His first love was music. He learned the violin and studied composition, but his studies were interrupted in 1932 when his father fell ill and he took over the studio. He later claimed to find a resemblance between music and photography in ‘the taste I have for composition, particularly counterpoint. Many of my photographs are taken from above, either looking down or up, three planes in one image, like three different melodies in a fugue which work together to give the piece structure and harmony’” ( The Guardian obituary).
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minutes. The crowd demanded more. Sonny tried to explain, talking to the audience and finishing his sentences by playing a few bars on his horn. One had the feeling that he felt more comfortable explaining the situation through his saxophone than attempting to quiet the audience with actual words. It was an extraordinarily revealing spectacle … Following the Town Hall disaster, Sonny played a week-long engagement at the Village Vanguard. After that he left the scene again. After his time in India, he found it virtually impossible to deal with the business aspects of his art form and the damage they had done to his soul” (Nisenson, pp. 185–6). Before he took his second sabbatical from public performance and recording, Rollins commented in an interview, “I guess I had a general disillusionment with American society. This included the jazz business, which was pretty mercenary. There was nothing happening there for me” (cited in Nisenson, p. 182).
“we called him ‘phip’ in the jazz- speak argot of the day” Affecting and engrossing archive that charts a young man’s love affair with jazz and his warm association with a number of leading figures in the music, notably Ellington cornettist Rex Stewart and Basie altoist Earle Warren. Unusually for the time, Phillip Young was white and the men with whom he conducted such an evidently reciprocal relationship of affection and respect were Black. The teenage fan was Phillip T. Young, who would go on to have a distinguished musical career in North American academia. Here he is a young man clearly infatuated with jazz, pictured having a ball at some of the leading New York jazz clubs of the period – the Hurricane, Zanzibar Café, Three Deuces – captured in the presence of stars Ben Webster and Rex Stewart. The latter keeps up an endearingly warm and
A highly evocative memento from a fascinating period in the long career of one of the saxophone masters. Poster (570 × 287 mm), printed in purple and black on white-faced medium card stock. Some chipping at edges, lower right corner a little fragile but intact, 15 mm closed tear at right corner of top edge, yet this remains in bright and very presentable condition. ¶ Dave Liebman, What It Is: The Life of a Jazz Artist. Dave Liebman in conversation with Lewis Porter , 2012; Eric Nisenson, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and his World of Improvisation , 2001. £950 [149488] 46 STEWART, Rex; Earle Warren; Duke Ellington; & others. Archive of autograph letters, inscribed photographs, and ephemera from the collection of Phillip Young. 1943–61
humorous correspondence with Young over more than a decade – surviving Young’s peripatetic wartime service in the military – in a series of eight letters, replete with fascinating day-to-day detail of a jazz musician’s life and in which Stewart’s reputation as a raconteur shines through. Other items of particular note are original photographs of the Ellington band in their famous 25-week residency at the Hurricane club in 1943 and a series of engagements that played a significant part in boosting Duke’s national reputation and which saw the instigation of a racially integrated door policy at a Broadway club. In a hurriedly pencilled note on the back of a postcard, Earle Warren writes from the Lincoln Hotel in New York, mentioning that night’s opening at the hotel’s famous Blue Room, a landmark engagement for the Basie band that saw a Black orchestra being booked there for the first time. The collection glitters with such “in the moment” pieces.
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All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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