It is not so often that Cab Calloway makes the cover of a book on jazz! What’s more, at the piano, in the company of Duke Ellington himself on guitar!
Charles Peterson is one of the photographers who best captured the essence of jazz. It is his son, Don Peterson, who undertook the restoration of more than 5,000 exceptional shots.
Charles Peterson was a freelance photographer who worked for several newspapers, such as Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Time. From the 1930s onward, he managed to persuade a magazine (Town and Country) to carry out an in-depth report on the world of jazz. The era is shady, and one can be sure that with all those gangster stories, Negro art (as one still said in France) was going to attract readers! To accompany his photos, Frank Norris wrote an article entitled “Hot combinations”, that says it all! The success of his photos led him to work also for the reference jazz magazines of the time, Downbeat, Metronome and Stage. Yet, despite the numerous publications, there remained a few boxes of unpublished negatives that this book proposes to discover.
Fats Waller, Chick Webb, Benny Carter, Earl Hines, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Art Tatum and many others are revealed on stage or in private in photographs exceptional for their spontaneity and of a class from an entirely different era.
The cover photo – absolutely superb – dates from 1939 and represents Duke Ellington on guitar, accompanying (yes, you read that correctly!) Cab Calloway at the piano (to see Cab playing other instruments, check here) during a private evening at a French diplomat’s.
Around them, the gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Duke borrowed her guitar), the cornetist Rex Stewart, the trumpeter Max Kaminsky and Ivie Anderson, one of the singers whom Duke Ellington’s orchestra accompanied.
There exist other “unpublished” shots of this evening (which do not appear in the book) that I take the liberty of submitting to you, with no other aim than to share them with you—just saying that for the rights holders…).
The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson by W. Royal Stokes
(preface by Stanley Dance), Temple University Press 1994
(ISBN: 1-56639-227-6)
