A Wealth of Wealth
The blizzard of 2007 has come and gone from Richmond, and no one seemed to notice. The Canal Club was filled Friday night with the smokin’ sounds of The Big Payback, Richmond’s own James Brown themed funk outfit.
The gallery has received several new additions, including two paintings that were generated for my brother over the summer, based on Francis Wolff’s photography for the Blue Note record label.
It is worth noting the importance of Wolff’s contribution to our perception of jazz music as a whole. The photographs he took help us identify not only the musicians themselves, but often what they were going through at the time. He sat in on many recording sessions, and the high contrast black field photography has defined the genre and given us some of the most memorable images of modern music. A great collection of Wolff’s work can be found here, and is worth having on any coffee table.
The paintings depict Jimmy Smith (1925-2005), perhaps one of the greatest organ players of our time, and Joe Henderson (1937-2001), a remarkable tenor saxophonist who has appeared on a multitude of albums with everyone from Horace Silver and Herbie Hancock to Blood Sweat and Tears.
I had the pleasure of seeing Jimmy Smith play in the fall of 2004, just before his passing. We caught the tail end of a brief tour that took him from Europe to downtown Norfolk, VA of all places. Performing with Mark Whitfield, a notable up-and-coming jazz guitarist, Jimmy was touring as a tribute to the late Wes Montgomery. While he was visibly winding down, he still played with surprising agility. He shimmied out on stage about half an hour into Whitfield’s trio set and scatted and grunted his way through 90 minutes or so of bad blues and hot funk. It was emotionally intense and touching to see him helped off the stage at the end of the show, and an honor to get to witness a legend of the 20th century.
The challenge in creating these paintings was trying to take the best elements of the photographs, namely the high contrast, movement and minute details, such as facial expression and whisps of cigarette smoke, and find something of my own to bring to the table. Obviously, the colored rendering is an immediate departure from the photo, but I found the more notable difference to come from redefining the compositions and really working into the black, trying to add a sense of overall movement by not simply rendering the flat black and white, but adding hints of color and subtle pattern and line work.
