David Bindman & Suzanne Preston Blier: Art of Jazz: Form / Performance / Notes

January 16, 2018
art_of_jazz

Picture it: Saturday afternoons in the late 1970s, on a train bound from Yale University to New York, artist Romare Bearden, jazz critic Albert Murray, and writer Henry Louis Gates , Jr. are bound in deep conversation, pontificating on the nature of jazz – not just as a form of music, but as a fundamental expression of the African-American vernacular. Jazz is not just a sound: it is a state of mind, a way of being, and seeing the relationship between the self and the world.

Now imagine that conversation found its way into a book and took form in a conversation of the visual arts. Art of Jazz: Form / Performance / Notes (Harvard University Press), edited by David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, and Vera Ingrid Grant looks at jazz through the eyes of artists including Bearden, Stuart Davis, Carl Van Vechten, Archibald Motley, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Hugh Bell, Josef Albers, and Ming Smith along with a host of other artists who collaborated with musicians to create a look for America’s great art form.