HERMAN LEONARD

This collection includes Leonard's classic photographs of the jazz greats: from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dexter Gordon to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. His uniquely evocative and cinematic portraits of jazz's most iconic figures in their heyday have gone on to become iconic images in their own right. This definitive and beautifully produced collection includes Leonard's most famous images as well as a significant number of previously unpublished photographs, and interviews with Herman Leonard by distinguished television producer Leslie Woodhead.

Since the 1950s, Herman Leonard's photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping the image of the music and the world in which it was created. Leonard's friendships with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis gave him rare access to the innovators who made modern jazz and the places in which they made it. Leonard took his camera into the smoky clubs and after-hours sessions, to backstage parties and musicians' apartments, to build an incomparable visual record of one of the twentieth century's most significant art forms. His luminous images of Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and many others, both in performance and "off duty," are at once supreme examples of the photographer's art and a unique record of a musical revolution. For this definitive collection of his work, Leonard has retrieved scores of previously unseen photographs, published here for the first time, alongside his most famous and widely recognized images. Accompanied by an essay exploring the stories behind the pictures, and an interview with Leonard revealing his techniques, Jazz captures and preserves the glory days of the music that has been called "the sound of surprise."

Herman Leonard ha fotografiado a las grandes figuras del espectáculo en el esplendor de su carrera, las estrellas de la pantalla en el set de rodaje y en sus viajes a lugares exóticos, el mundo de la moda en el Paris de los años sesenta y los lugares misticos de su amada Nueva Orleans. Su amistad con los colosos del jazz le permitio captar en primer plano sus momentos magicos en los clubes de Nueva York y Paris de los años cuarente y cincuenta, usando con maestria uan iluminacion de tinte cinematografico para capturar la esencia del instante. El presente volumen constituye la primera recopilacion sistematica de la obra en este extraordinario fotografo, de un modo que nunca hasta ahora se habia mostrado, y depara a las fotografias de Herman Leonard el reconocimiento artistico que merecen.