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holiday gift guide 2011 ✽ books
Keystone Korner:
West Coast Jazz Paradise
Nestled in San Francisco’s North Beach
district, occupied with cumbersome
benches and a fog of smoke, Keystone
Korner was a jazz lover’s paradise where,
according to guitarist Carl Burnett, “the
comfort was being there.” Through the testimonies
of its employees and a fanfare of
West Coast jazz legendry, Portrait Of A
Jazz Club explores the maturation of owner
Todd Barkan’s passion project from blues
bar founded on bohemian ideals to ’70s jazz
Shangri-la. Keystone Korner was beloved
by the genre’s heaviest hitters—McCoy
Tyner, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Freddie
Hubbard, to name a few—even after its
untimely death. The 224-page oral history
of the Bay Area’s musical epicenter—narrated
by a roundtable of the venue’s scotchand-soda-drinking,
instrument-toting regulars
and the scene-stalking waitresses that
slung them—is set into motion by over 100 intimate
black-and-white photos by venerable jazz
photographer Kathy Sloane, who humanizes
and visualizes the transformation of the “West
Coast Jazz Oasis.” From the antics of the photo-laden
backroom to the underground hype
of Ora Harris’ Keystone Kitchen, Sloane and
fellow editor Sascha Feinstein leave no stone
unturned. They examine the backstories of some
of Keystone’s most lovable characters and how
they strove to maintain its welfare, even playing
a benefit concert so the club could get a liquor
license. Complemented by a CD of club recordings,
Portrait Of A Jazz Club is a delightful
sensory overload definitive of the Keystone
experience.
—Hilary Brown
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
Every picture tells a story, and in 266 pages,
Benjamin Cawthra insightfully narrates
the vast history of jazz—and its turbulent lovehate
relationship with American culture. The
California State University–Fullerton professor’s
latest endeavor, Blue Notes In Black And
White: Photography And Jazz, examines a century
of jazz photography within political and
economic confines. It posits that William
Gottlieb’s shots of an ordinarily cartoonish
Dizzy Gillespie humanize the transition of
bebop from ephemeral fad to deified artistic
medium. The crowd-pleasing, happy-golucky
images of swing dancers that plaster
the pages of Life magazine depict a coming-of-age
American culture naive to the
social turmoil that infests it. There’s also an
analysis of Miles Davis, whose chronology
of portraits continually redefines the concept
of cool.
To Cawthra, jazz photography genuinely
captures a moment in time—these images
are “benchmarks” in the metamorphosis of
music. He probes the portfolios of some of
jazz photography’s well-known operatives—
Gjon Mili, Herman Leonard and William
Claxton—whose individual styles mirror a
musical genre that is just as dynamic.
Blue Notes bats an objective eye toward
jazz musicians, depicting them not as
romantic symbols of glorified nightclub
scenes, but as cultural pioneers championing
for acceptance. —Hilary Brown
76 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2011