Clicking with JAZZ

Young Chang

You could say it was a nasty bout of trichinosis and a major

newspaper’s hesitancy to shell out the bucks that made William

Gottlieb’s career fall into focus, forever freezing the faces of

jazz’s greatest during the 1930s and ‘40s.

The photographer of jazz musicians, who is now 85 and lives in New

York, still remembers the funny stories that changed his life.

The trichinosis mishap happened in college. Brothers in Gottlieb’s

fraternity served up a batch of improperly cooked pork that landed

him in bed for much of the summer. His entertainment, thanks to a

committed visitor who always brought over jazz records, became the

music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

“By the time I recuperated, I was a jazz fanatic,” said Gottlieb,

whose photos will be exhibited at the Orange County Museum of Art’s

satellite gallery at South Coast Plaza starting Saturday.

More than 50 images make up “Portraits from the Golden Age of

Jazz: Photographs by William P. Gottlieb.” They are of the genre’s

most famous, including Ellington, Benny Goodman, Armstrong, Frank

Sinatra, Billy Holiday, Charlie Parker and many others.

By their sharpness, you can believe the photos once appeared as

part of Gottlieb’s regular jazz columns in the Washington Post. And

by their intimacy, you can believe Gottlieb knew these guys, that he

was a familiar face in the late ‘30s to late ‘40s jazz scene.

“I have to know the musician,” the photographer said. “What they

play, how they play, so I can intelligently photograph them.”

Gottlieb started as a writer. His first job was with the Post, in

advertising. He skipped departments, though, after convincing key

editors to pay him extra to write a weekly column on jazz.

But convincing them to send a photographer to his assignments

wasn’t as easy.

“They decided it would be too expensive, so I went out and bought

a speed graphic and took my own pictures,” Gottlieb said. “Like in

the old time movies with old time photographers. It was a big box,

big flash, very clumsy, very difficult to use.”

But he got good at it. So good that he photographed hundreds of

jazz musicians and later published more than 20,000 photos having

nothing to do with jazz.

“I became, at one stage in my rather varied career, the most

prolific producer of educational film strips,” Gottlieb said. “And I

did those for Encyclopedia Britannica films and McGraw-Hill.”

Now the author of more than 15 books -- many are for children, a

few are about science and others are about jazz -- Gottlieb still

remembers how some of his jazz sources were more than just subjects

on the other side of the lens.

Ellington used to come to Gottlieb’s home for dinner.

Nat King Cole was his friend. The late musician also photographed

very well.

“I liked just about all of them. I had trouble with maybe only a

couple of subjects,” Gottlieb said.

Sarah Vure, curator for the Orange County Museum of Art, said

Gottlieb’s extensive knowledge of jazz helped him tap into the human

side of his subjects.

“In many ways, he was able in his images to capture something of

the feeling of jazz in a visual form,” Vure said. “And in that way

the images become more than just a document and are appropriate in

the art context.”

During his jazz decade, before and after his four years of service

in World War II, Gottlieb worked not only as a jazz aficionado for

the Post, but also for NBC Radio and Downbeat Magazine.

Oddly enough, Gottlieb loves and knows everything about jazz, but

has never played it. When asked what it was about the music, when he

heard it from his sick-bed as a young man, that grabbed him, the

photographer wisely quipped, “What is it you like about what you

like? You just like it.”

Now busy with his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren,

Gottlieb doesn’t do much in the way of photography other than

supplying museums and galleries with his work.

“I don’t have the time,” he said. “I can’t just go click-click.”