| The title Seeing Jazz is a layered play on words
that refers to the artistic and literary works here as visualizations of music--visible
equivalents to the sound of jazz--and also to "seeing" in the metaphoric sense
of understanding: to get hip and then hipper, to hear jazz more deeply than ever before,
to dig this music, to say "yes, I see."  Seeing Jazz presents jazz
music as an expression of the United States in the 20th century--the music of e
pluribus unum with a swinging beat--and as a multicolored blue cornerstone of what
the world knows as modernism in art. As such, this music has had an impact on
many other modern musics, at home and abroad, "classical" as well as
"popular." Jazz is a part of a super-charged cultural continuum in which
painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, novelists, and essayists have worked (and
played) to capture with their pens and brushes, their wood and paper, and with light the
irresistible note and trick and dance of the music.
How does one begin to define this music that was born in the port towns and big cities
of black America and adopted by the world as its own?
From the earliest shy flights of James Reese Europe's military "jass" bands
of the 1910s to the latest experiments by bold jazz innovators, three aspects of jazz have
emerged as definitive: complexity of rhythm, the magic of improvisation,
and conversational call and response.  These terms provide the title and theme for each of
the three chapters in the book published by Chronicle Books to
accompany the exhibition.
"Seeing Jazz is an evocative experiment--a place to begin, not the last
word. It is not an encyclopedic effort to gather all of the jazz paintings and poems from
around the world and across the century of this music's existence. Rather it is a playful
attempt to illustrate how this music has made its cross-disciplinary mark. It also
endeavors to capture the full-spirited extravagance of joy so unmistakable in the music;
it strives to swing."
Robert O'Meally, from his essay in Seeing Jazz
Educational Resources
"Seeing Jazz... And Talking About
It," a symposium held in New York
|
