Art/Muzike

Improvisation (second part)
DVD Booklet

Jammin’ The Blues

Some of the most vivid and rare portrait of jazz musicians in action during the 1930s and 1940s came in the form of the Hollywood movies and the so-called “soundies”, stand-alone shorts of the big bands that were packed with feature films. Frequently, popular bands such as those of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Woody Herman, Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller were the biggest draws of the otherwise mostly forgettable films in which they appeared. However, as valuable as these music sequences 60 and 70 years ago might be, they are remembered partly for their Hollywood embellishment rather than for probing for the music itself or its creators on a deeper level.


It took Norman Granz, then at the dawn of his career as a jazz impresario and record producer, and the technically dazzling Albanian-born Life Magazine photographer Gjon Mili in the short film Jammin’ the Blues to produce a work focusing on the spirit and drama of the jam session, Granz’s basic conception of jazz throughout his lengthy career. In terms of jazz history, July 2, 1944 is best remembered for the premiere of Ganz’s epic Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts at Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. Less well known is the meeting occurred backstage after the concert that led to a second milestone that summer. Mili, who had already photographed all-star jam session in his New York loft studio, had attended the concert at the outset at a trip sponsored by Warner Bros. to produce short film to gauge his potential as a director. The photographer decided on the spot to produce a jazz film, and asked Granz, who had worked as a journeyman film editor before joining a labor crew at Warner Bras. to collaborate with on the project.

Under the arrangement, Mili directed the photography (he was prohibited from actually operating the camera by union rules), while Granz selected the musicians and dancers he knew from when he began hanging to hear jazz in 1941 and booking jam sessions in some of those same clubs the following year. The film featuring Lester Young, Harry Edison, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, pianist Marlowe Morris, Red Callender and John Simmons resembled the small-group format of Jazz at the Philharmonic with its cracking mixture of standards and the blues. Joining the cast at the studio’s prompting were dancers Archie Savage, lead dancer with Katherine Dunham’s company, and Marie Bryant, a member of Duke Ellington’s revue Jump for Joy which played in Los Angeles in 1941.

Granz, 26 at the time of the filming, unsheathed his mercurial ways, in prompting the integrity of the music and those who made it during the sometimes stormy preparation and shooting schedule in August and September. First, he successfully fought for simultaneous recording of the performances on the grounds that expecting jazz musicians to synchronize their pre-recorded improvisations to film was impossible. On the second day of filming, after Granz discovered that the dancers were being paid substantially more than the union scale for musicians. He took the musicians out on the strike until studio capitulated and increased their pay to $50 a day. He had less luck in getting Warner Bros. to back down on its resistance to showing black and white musicians playing together, a worry particularly where Southern movie theaters were concerned. Barney Kessel was forced to stain his hands with berry juice in shots tightly focused on his guitar handiwork and in cascading images and tight camera angels that virtually obscured his identity.

Despite backstage tensions, the result was a film noir musical energized by Mili’s graphic imprimatur that transports the viewer in the interior experience of making jazz. Highlights of the film included the most evocative images of Lester Young on film. Marie Bryant’s sultry Armstrong-inflected vocal on “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, and Bryant and Savage’s lindy hopping to fiery performances by Jacquet and Edison.

“Jammin’ The Blues” received wide critical praise in such publications as Time and The Nation as well as the widely read African-American Press, following its release that December. Life promoted it with a layout of Mili photographs from the film. Mili and Granz’s achievement was recognized by the industry when “Jammin’ The Blues” was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Short of 1944. Mili hoped he and Granz could reunite the following year to collaborate on another jazz film, but Warner Bros. had had its fill of Norman Granz, and Mili continued his career as a magazine photographer. They eventually fulfilled their ambition six years later. In September 1950, Granz invited many of the musicians about to go out on tour that fall with Jazz at the Philharmonic to Mili’s studio on Broadway, and produced yet another landmark, only the second motion picture of Charlie Parker known to exist. The film, a source of speculation for decades, was sequestered in Granz’s archives until its release in 1995 that lead to this program “IMPROVISATION”.




Gjon Mili - "Theologian" of Photography
by Artan Kafexhiu

Published for the first time in Illyria, April 10-12, 1995 and later as part of the DVD Improvisation package.

Undoubtedly, it is my special attachment to and passion for photography which led me to the master of the "calculated accident". Gjon Mili. The man Sean O'Casey called, "the genial Albanian."

Mili, born in an Albanian village, spent his youth in Bucharest and at the urge of his uncle, moved to America at the age of 18. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in electrical engineering in 1927 and went to become a lighting research engineer.

It is safe to say that Gjon Mili revolutionized photojournalism; influencing two generations of photographic artists, thanks largely to his innovative experiments which took place in an old deserted church in Montclair, N.J. It was in this makeshift studio, where the strobe light and stroboscopic photography was developed. Mili was the first professional photographer to use the strobe light.

"Mili was a true visionary," said Harold Edgerton, an MIT professor and one of the first to collaborate with him. "He recognized the strobe's potential and for years led the field in a very imaginative way. He had drive. He pushed us," said Edgerton. It was Faik Konitza, a fellow Albanian, who drew Mili's attention to a column in the London Illustrated News on the movies and Photography as a significant medium that broaden Mili's interest in the arts.

In 1937, Mili's career as a professional photographer began when his "stop-motion" photos of tennis champion Bobby Riggs were published in Life magazine. It began a 4-year career where he would go on to become one of the most outspoken and committed individuals in the world of photography. Mili eventually became known as "the Pope of photography" living in the cloister abbey of ego that was the old Life magazine. He became a veteran life photographer only by association, on the outside he lived a true professional life.

The continuously Life photo assignments took Mili all over the world - to the Riviera to photograph Picasso, To France for Pablo Casals in exile, to Israel for Eichmann in captivity. He traveled to Florence, Athens, Dublin, Berlin, Venice, Rome , and Hollywood on his assignments. He photographed countries end people, celebrities and artists, sculpture and architecture, sporting events and concerts. Mili's associations with the magazine continued almost until his death but not before taking him to Bucharest to explore the legacy and spirit of his mother.


During his career outside of Life, Mili hosted several individual exhibitions, such as "Dancers in Movement" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 and "on Picasso" 1952; the Paris Galerie in and the France's "Musee Arleton" in 1946. He was a part of numerous group exhibitions in New York and London, Mili also became the premier dance photographer of his time.

With a series of flashes, Mili created his famous version of the Duchams classic cubist painting "Nude Descending a Staircase". he is perhaps best known for two exuberant Lindy Hope dancers leaping into the air and one of Picasso, who he "sketched" as a figure in the air with a pen light. It became known as the "definitive picture" of the artist. Mili visited Picasso twice, in 1949 and in later 1960 when he actually lived with Picasso in his house while they worked together.

It was during this time that Mili asked Matisse for an introduction to Picasso, but Matisse suggested that it was better for him to go to the beach, where Picasso frequently bathed. Mili, one day walked right in the artist's way and introduced himself by saying, "Excuse me. I am a photographer and I would like to do your portrait". laughing, Picasso said, "Oh? Go ahead." Mili insisted that he was serious and confronted him with a photograph taken in darkness, showing a skater traced with lights attached to the skates. Picasso instantly and positively reacted.

The need to understand the extraordinary artist brought Mili's mind to that kind of introduction. What went through his mind and struck him was Picasso's famous quote, "After all, a work of art is not achieved by thoughts, but with hands." Picasso taught, "If you want to draw, you must shut your eyes and sing." David Douglas Duncan of Time-Life said, "The 'Picasso episode' shows that Mili brings intelligence to this place." He explored thoroughly and brought to the international public "the three dimensional Picasso." Both Mili and Picasso remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Mili was respected by some of the most distinguished names in the world of arts and letters, many of whom had posed for his camera and later became his friends. Philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to one of Mili's Paris exhibitions, "The primitives of the South Seas we are told, refuse to allow themselves to be photographed, believing that thus they are made forever captive to the photographer. To understand their wisdom, you need only to look at Gjon Mili's portrait." Sartre wrote.

Photographers like Saul Steinberg helped create an illustration of Mili's exhibitions, Alexander Schneider used to rehearse the Budapest Spring Quartet in his studio. famous French photographer, Henry Cartier-Bresson, another one of Mili's colleagues and close friends, recalled Mili's Studio, as the "Athens of New York." He characterized Mili as, "Apart from our very animated friendship, Gjon Mili represents to me, a rectitude of spirit, and a clarity of mind. I admire his sense of economy, his respect for craftsmanship, and his distaste for pretensions. All this emanates from a very complex personality full of philosophical wisdom."

At his studio, jam sessions were held, that included at one time or another, such starts as Duke Ellington, Billy Holliday, Gene Krupa and Ted Williams, etc. The sustained high level of quality that marks Gjon Mili's work can be credited to his breadth of appreciation for literature as well as all the arts, plus history, dance and theater. He looked at photography as a theology and believed in it.


When we look at Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais." lined by the light of setting sun, they seem almost to breathe and talk to one another. Mili's feeling and respect for stone and metal, if not unique, were certainly rare among photographers. He became known as the master of "the calculated accident." He went on to say of his technique, "Time could truly be made stand still. Texture could be retained despite sudden violent movement."

Mili, however, was a modest individual. he addressed himself to the students at Yale University by saying, "I came here as a humanist. Teaching you photography would be a failure, How can you tech something that took me fifty years to learn and forget? You can't teach that sort of thing in life."

Ironically, Mili's towering achievement are today, more wedded to fashion and advertising photography that to photojournalism. Models now march incessantly to the pit-and-pat of popping strobes, yet the first notes of this "music" were played in his church-studio over 40 years ago.

Mili died at the age of 79, in February, 1984. The New York Times announced his death. It is said that Mili always carried in his wallet a piece of paper with a quote from Heraclitus which read, "Everything is and is not, or everything is fluid, is constantly changing."