Herman Leonard: making music with light.

In the following interview, Herman Leonard speaks about his jazz photography, examples of which appear on pages 222-230.

ya Salaam: Not many photographers have been able to capture the feel and texture of jazz as you have.

Leonard: I'm glad to hear that, because it wasn't consciously done that way. I think the difference between my work and other photographers' is that I didn't depend on it for a living, and maybe they did. So if they had an assignment to go out and shoot a subject, they had to come out with a photograph that was lit in such a manner that it would reproduce well on news-stock paper. That wasn't my consideration at all. I didn't have anybody to answer to but myself - no editors, no critics, nothing.

ya Salaam: So, why did you do it?

Leonard: 'Cause I loved the music. Also, it was my way of getting away from the monotony of the daily routine of photography. I was doing portraits, and some magazine work which was interesting, but I really loved the jazz.

ya Salaam: Some musicians have a favorite instrument, some photographers have a favorite camera. Was that the case with you in terms of doing the jazz photographs?

Leonard: Yeah! My favorite camera was the old speed graphic, that 4 x 5, handheld, large monstrous thing that you see in a lot of black-and-white films from the '40s and '50s. It was that newspaper man's camera - great big thing you held with two hands and it had a big flash on the side.

ya Salaam: Why that one?

Leonard: Because you had to take your time. You could only take a certain amount of pictures in one night, physically I mean. The camera didn't have roll film. It had 4 x 5 slides. You could only carry so many film packs physically unless you were a horse. So if I went out to shoot something at the Roost or Birdland, I knew that I could not snap more than twenty or thirty pictures for the whole night. You had to be really careful and take your time about what you were shooting, compose it well and wait for the right moment. Sometimes I'd go for many nights without having a good shot. I would go home, process the stuff, and throw it away. In time you get up a collection of good shots. When you work with smaller cameras you have a tendency to overshoot, hoping to catch that moment, and you end up with a lot of junk.

ya Salaam: You said "compose," how does one compose something as spontaneous and free flowing as jazz?

Leonard: You look, you just look. I think that when a musician or a musical composer sits down to compose a piece he will get the general outline of what he is doing and then he'll refine it, listen to it back, and make the changes that he wants. When I'm sitting there in front of a drummer or sax player, I look. I look at the angles. I look at the light. I look at the background. And being disciplined by using a large camera, you have to look. You don't look into the camera, you look at the subject. You feel the composition within the frame within which you're working, and you do it to your own liking. I happen to like a certain style. I like back lighting because it sets the subject off from the background, especially if the background is dark, which most of the clubs were. I like light that goes around the subject and not flat lighting.

ya Salaam: All right, but given the club setting, how do you achieve these lighting effects that most people would only try in a studio?

Leonard: I became friends with the club owners.

ya Salaam: What does that have to do with photography?

Leonard: I had my training with Karsh of Canada. I was a photographer and I went to school for it, but I went to Canada and spent a year as an apprentice with Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian of Armenian descent. He's the greatest portrait photographer in the world. His portraits are so incredible that five hundred years from now, if we lost all traces of that individual, someone could take one of his portraits and do a three-dimensional sculpture. That's how well he captures the texture, the detail, and the essence of the personality of the people he photographs. He taught me to look for certain things, and that's what I look for, especially in my music work. I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the club. I wanted to capture the feeling of a particular musician, if it could be done in a graphic form rather than an audio form. Everybody was there with microphones and tape recorders; I was there with a camera. I wanted to capture the music, but I had to interpret it with black and white, with light, with shades and shadows. The fact that people react to my pictures the way they do now, which is a total surprise to me, to be honest with you ... these pictures were just lying around in a box for all these years. I never did anything with them because nobody ever paid me any money for them, and I had to make money for the family by doing other things like mail order catalogues. When I was starving a couple of years ago, I dug these out hoping to sell a few and people reacted. Now, I see what they see.

ya Salaam: At the time you didn't?

Leonard: No. To be very honest, I was not aware that I had captured so essentially the spirit of the times in those clubs.

ya Salaam: So, you got to know the club owners. What did that have to do with the lighting?

Leonard: I said, hey, your lights are too weak. May I come in during the afternoon, set up my lights, and then shoot later on? They said, as long as it doesn't bother the audience. So I went in, stuck the lights up in the ceiling, clamped them up there, and ran a long wire around the back of the bandstand to wherever I would position myself hidden from the audience. That's the way I would do it. I set up my own lights to simulate the natural lighting of the club. If a guy smoked and the smoke was billowing in the air, when the flash went off it just highlighted that smoke. That's how all that came about.

ya Salaam: How did you achieve the three-dimensional quality you spoke of earlier?

Leonard: Photography is painting with light, and you do it the way you feel - if you want to do a soft, natural, flat effect, you light from the front. That's not my cup of tea. I like things I can touch in a flat plane. By doing edge lighting against a dark background you can make a thing stand out. If you have your lights positioned behind a guy to the right and to the left and just a very soft fill from the front, then you can get what I call a three-dimensional effect, which shows the depth of the subject and doesn't flatten it down.

ya Salaam: At the time you were doing it, what was the reaction of the musicians?

Leonard: I hope none, because I didn't want to disturb, interfere, or intrude while they were playing. They didn't react when I was shooting, but they did react when I gave them a print. They said, hey, man, thanks a lot. And I would say, can I hang out? And they would say, sure. That's how I got to hang out.

ya Salaam: Were most of your shots done in the music setting?

Leonard: They were all done in a music setting, either on stage, in a club, in rehearsal, or at a recording session or concert, like that.

ya Salaam: So for the most part you were actually about recording the music?

Leonard: Yeah, I was recording the moment which was musical wherever it took place.

ya Salaam: So you didn't say, for instance, Diz, I want to do a portrait of you, come into the studio...

Leonard: That happened a couple of times. I did that with James Moody, Art Tatum, and a couple of others because physically I could not achieve the photographic results. After a while, I had begun to get a few assignments to do album covers or magazine covers. In those cases when I didn't have a shot that was adequate, I would set it up. But that wasn't a playing picture, a portrait study.

ya Salaam: So you're making a distinction between the two. It's almost like the difference between a studio recording and live recording.

Leonard: Yeah, that's the difference. My portraits were setups, but they only comprise maybe 10% of the shots; all the rest are either performance or off-the-cuff stuff, like at a rehearsal or something.

ya Salaam: Do you have a favorite photograph that you've done?

Leonard: I don't know. I look at each one and they just bring back a memory. I like a lot of them. Some of them I like just for the image and it has nothing to do with the music, but I can't name one particular shot. I very much like my still lifes. I have a still life of Duke Ellington's shoes on a dressing room table with a cup of tea and a satin tie. To me that's the elegant Duke. That captures the essence of the man. I like my picture of Lester Young's hat with a Coke Cola bottle because that's Pres, and I didn't set that up. I didn't set any of the still lifes up. They were there. I just looked and said, hey, that's nice. My principle is, I never want to inject myself into the picture. It shouldn't be a Herman Leonard; it should be a Lester Young or a Louie Armstrong. My still lifes are the personalities of the musicians.

ya Salaam: It's like hearing a record that has a few words spoken by Miles in that famous voice of his. That's as much Miles as the music is.

Leonard: Exactly. Miles, incidentally, was one of the greatest photographic subjects in the whole music world.

ya Salaam: Why?

Leonard: First of all, he had that terrible personality that you had to deal with, which is great as a challenge, and which I managed to overcome. Structurally, his face was incredible. He's had those definite bones, he had a skin texture like satin that just glowed, his fingers were long and slender, his eyes were intense. All of that put together physically makes a very interesting object, so to speak, to photograph. He was such a bastard, and I loved him so much. There was a lot to work with; he was a great subject.

ya Salaam: So you can do a good shot today and then turn around and do a different take tomorrow, and they both would still ...

Leonard: They both would be valid and they both would be Miles. Both would be very interesting because there's so much going on. I had a great time with him out at his house a few years ago shooting an assignment. I first photographed Miles in 1947 - over forty years, that's a long time ago - and up until the end it was still fascinating to work with that guy.

ya Salaam: When you shot in the forties you went into the clubs. What would you do to capture jazz today?

Leonard: I don't know how to capture the music today. I would have to go out and hang out, and feel it in order to photograph it.

ya Salaam: So for the most part now you're just working on assignments?

Leonard: Yeah, and I'm concentrating on the portrait angle rather than the music angle.

ya Salaam: But in terms of the music angle what...

Leonard: I don't know. I haven't been exposed enough yet to the new music. I'd been living in Europe for the last 30 years, so I haven't really heard the new music. But my approach would be to just go in and hang out at the recording sessions and ... but of course, that's all different now than it used to be. At the old recording sessions, everybody would be there, and they would work for three hours or six hours, whatever it took until they got what they wanted. That was the fascinating part. You would come in and you could watch them run over the score. They'd practice it, they would play it and replay it until they got it together, and you would be privy to the development of a piece of music. But today it could extend for months with one musician at a time doing playbacks. To me that's kind of artificial; it's not a session.

I was with Quincy Jones when he was doing Michael Jackson's album. I was astounded by the space center-like recording studio, first of all, with flashing lights from floor to ceiling on all four sides, and also astounded by the proficiency of Quincy Jones, who is an incredible musician. He's got more talent in his little finger than most of these guys - not in terms of playing: I'm talking about musical knowledge. He puts it together like a great chef who cooks a great meal: a little of this, a little of that, let's pullback on this a bit. It's admirable, but from a photographic standpoint it's very limiting. You can't do today what I did then. You can go to a studio, you can go to a club, you can go to a concert, but what do you end up with? A guy standing in front of a microphone with a spotlight, and no matter what kind of photographer you are, you're going to get the same shot. That's not where it's at anymore. You see, the things I got were shot in little clubs with great audiences, with moody atmosphere, or in recording sessions with everybody together being inspired. A Gerry Mulligan sitting in the comer just whacked out from playing - these things don't exist anymore. So I don't know what I would do.

ya Salaam: So you might have had a shot of Billie listening to Lester playing a solo and...

Leonard: That's right, and you get that feeling.

ya Salaam: But you can't do that now, because Lester is going to be recording two months later, or he laid down his track a couple of weeks before?

Leonard: Exactly. That to me is the tragedy of the electronic age: You lose that cohesiveness, you lose that inspiration.

ya Salaam: So essentially you're saying that what you did was not a technique for all times. What you did was a part of that time period.

Leonard: Exactly. I really didn't do anything special, man. I was just there. I put some lights up and I pointed my camera. I waited and I snapped the button. I captured what was there. There's no great genius in that - O.K., I'm a good photographer, but people look at my work today and say, oh, wow . . .

ya Salaam: Part of what they're looking at is, how could that be done today?

Leonard: Yeah, they're looking at my work from the forties in today's terms. I must admit I look at old photographs that I didn't do and say, how did he do that? The truth of the matter is, if you had been there, that's what you would have gotten, or at least some variation thereof.

ya Salaam: What do you think of the jazz of today compared to the jazz you photographed so well in the forties?

Leonard: I once spoke to Dizzy about that. I said what do you think about so and so, mentioning a new guy I'd heard on the radio. I had turned on the radio and heard this incredible alto. I said that's Bird, and then I said, no, that's not Bird. But he had that proficiency with the horn. Well, Dizzy said, for the kids today it's not like it used to be. We learned in the streets and we were starving. These kids go to college and they take a class in jazz. We didn't have any classes in jazz in those days. Technically they get to be extremely proficient, but they don't have that soul. They don't have that suffering that we had because we went through all that development and all that pain. That's the difference.

ya Salaam: Do you think the same is true for the photographers today?

Leonard: Maybe. It's so easy to pick up an Instamatic today and go boom-dee-dee boom-boom and send it out to be developed. They don't even see the inside of a darkroom. I was astounded when I got back to this country. I was looking for someone to print my pictures, but nobody prints. They send it out. They don't know how. To me that's a tragedy, because the making of a photograph consists not only of snapping the camera but also of making the actual photographic print. There's such creativity in printing. You can alter the mood and tones and values for everything, alter them to your tastes, the way you feel - you've got to know how to print, but nobody today knows how to print.

ya Salaam: You said you've got to know how to print, but you're working with an "acoustic" instrument, if you understand the analogy I'm making. If you're working with an electronic instrument you don't have to know how to print. All you have to do is get somebody to program it and . . .

Leonard: Push the right buttons. That's true. I think that removes an element of individual creativity.

ya Salaam: I think part of it is that the technology replaces a lot of the human effort. What it took for you to figure how to do something with an acoustic instrument . . . that human effort comes through because the process of figuring it out individualizes whatever you do. But if you rely on the technology that part is no longer there. The reliance on technology diminishes the room for the human element.

Leonard: I feel a little sad about that because things are not as natural as they used to be and, in that sense, not as individual.

ya Salaam: That's why a lot of the music sounds interchangeable - because much of it is interchangeable, it's basically the same program.

Leonard: Maybe that's why I get bored a lot of times. Somebody says, wow, did you hear this great thing? I put it on and in the beginning it's O.K. but then I get bored because I've heard that.

ya Salaam: When you don't have the interaction of human beings, then what you're listening to is technique, and if you're not interested in technique then there's not much for you to listen to.

Leonard: We've got to get back to the roots, man. I hate to use the phrase. It's almost a cliche, but it is so true. I'm not one to give advice to anyone else. I just tell people to go out and do their thing. Maybe I'm all wrong. The photographer of today with his optic should record for later years what's happening today from his point of view, in as artistic and graphic a way as he can.

ya Salaam: So you're saying somebody with today's sensibility and also a real feel for today's technology should get down what's happening today?

Leonard: Absolutely.

ya Salaam: And they should figure out how to get to know the studio owners . . .

Leonard: So they can get in, because it takes time. You've got to spend a lot of time just hanging out, waiting for that moment, looking for those aspects that are characteristic of the period, moments that . . .

ya Salaam: Someone like you might not see even if you were there.

Leonard: That's right, even if I was there I wouldn't see it because I'm approaching it from a different angle. It's got to have a young, new, fresh approach.

Kalamu ya Salaam is guest editor for this special issue of African American Review.