"In the 1950s Lee Friedlander arrived in New York and began work as a house photographer for Atlantic Records. Over the next two decades, he would create some of their most famous album covers, and his picture style--including portraits of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and countless others--became forever associated with that golden era of American music. This book is Friedlander's tribute to the great musicians of the post-war years. It includes work from his trips through the Deep South, where he met Delta Blues musicians like Mississippi Fred McDowell, New Orleans marching bands and Nashville performers such as Johnny Cash, the Carter Sisters and Flatt & Scruggs. There are photographs of unknown bluegrass guitarists in Appalachia, photographs from tours with Count Basie's Orchestra, and images of Jazz geniuses like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and Yusef Lateef. Interviews by Friedlander with R&B legend Ruth Brown and modern jazz pioneer Steve Lacy are included along with an introduction by music impresario Joel Dorn."
Of all the great modern photographers, MacArthur "genius grant" winner Lee Friedlander is probably the hippest to music. Inspired by a Charlie Parker record at 16, he left Aberdeen, Washington, and launched his career alongside ambitious friends like Diane Arbus. Arbus had a cold eye, but as this book of photos he took for Atlantic Records from the 1950s to the '70s proves, Friedlander's eye was warmly empathetic, at one with his subjects' emotions. (He has compared himself to the guy in the Joe Turner song who's "like a one-eyed cat peekin' at a seafood store.")
A first-rate visual extravaganza, American Musicians captures the country's virtuosos in some of their most candid moments: Aretha Franklin getting respect in 1968, Mahalia Jackson wailing on her knees, Ella in her heyday, on the road with Count Basie, Miles Davis actually looking the viewer right in the eye the year of Bitches Brew. Friedlander was a great discoverer--he found the discarded 1917 photos of New Orleans' Bellocq (immortalized in the film Pretty Baby), and one of his own early nude models was the unknown Madonna Ciccone. He helps people bare their souls to the camera, and the souls in this book are of historic importance. American Musicians also includes Friedlander's interviews with Ruth Brown and Steve Lacy.
