New York City, Chicago and New Orleans are all cities strongly
associated with jazz. But a jazz photography exhibit on display in
the Charles E. Young Research Library lobby, running through Sept.
30, is a reminder that Los Angeles should be on that list.
“L.A. was a major jazz center and it continues to
be,” said Gordon Theil, head of the UCLA Music Library.
“It was a center of jazz, not the center of jazz.”
The collections of Howard Morehead and Mark Weber feature
photographs of prominent jazz musicians in Los Angeles from the
1950s through the 1980s.
But while Morehead and Weber both focused on the Los Angeles
area, they worked in radically different styles and during
different times.
Morehead, who specialized in portraiture, photographed jazz
legends like Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Louis
Armstrong, among others. And while he has an ample body of work
from the early ’50s, most of his photos are from much later
dates.
Weber, on the other hand, photographed mainly during the 1970s
and 1980s. And unlike Morehead’s portraits, Weber’s
collection features photographs taken in clubs, at homes and at
festivals.
“The jazz scene is not just made up of musicians,”
Weber said. “I like to have the whole band in the picture,
the club owners and the collectors. There is a whole holistic
scene. I didn’t just go for the A-listers. You can see not
only the people on the stage, but the front row of the audience,
too.”
Weber, a Los Angeles native, studied photography in high school
but chose journalism as his profession. He followed the jazz scene
as a reporter and soon fell back into photography.
“I was hanging around the clubs all the time. I would use
my press pass to get in and I thought I might as well be
useful,” Weber said of his early days in jazz
photography.
Weber left Los Angeles in 1986 because he needed to get away
from his heroin addiction, although he attributes the origin of his
addiction to the neighborhood in which he grew up rather than the
jazz scene. He now lives in New Mexico with his wife, where he
retains his ties to jazz ““ he runs a jazz record label, is a
jazz disc jockey for a University of New Mexico radio station, and
formed a country music band made up of former jazz musicians.
UCLA’s collection of Weber’s work is far larger than
the group of photos on display. Weber estimated the collection to
contain around 10,000 photographs. Theil whittled the collection
down into an exhibit by choosing photographs that featured
mainstream artists photographed from 1970 to 1986, which was the
time Weber was most active as a photographer.
But despite having such an enormous body of work, Weber still
remembers the names of the artists featured in his photos.
“He did a magnificent job of identifying (all the artists
in his pictures). It is a very significant photography collection
for jazz in the ’70s and ’80s,” Theil said.
Though Weber considers Los Angeles to be one of the largest jazz
cities in the world in terms of the number of musicians ““
second only to New York ““ he says the culture here does not
support the music.
“There are hardly any jazz clubs anymore,” said
Weber.
According to Weber, the jazz heyday was in the ’30s and
’40s, but the genre was still thriving when he began
photographing in the ’70s.
“(The jazz scene) was dwindling, but it was still really
happening. Every night you could go to eight different (jazz
events) if you wanted to,” he said. “You could see some
of the 1920s jazz guys that were still around. You could see the
whole spectrum.”
Morehead was born in 1926 and moved to Los Angeles 20 years
later. He received a photography degree from Los Angeles City
College and spent some time at UCLA studying motion picture
photography.
Like Weber, Morehead was a journalist during the main part of
his photography career. His pictures were featured on album covers
and in magazines.
Morehead died in July 2003, shortly after donating his
collection to both the UCLA Music Library Special Collections and
to the California African American Museum.
Weber decided to give his collection to UCLA because he felt it
belonged in Los Angeles.
“I love L.A. It’s my hometown. Seventy-five or 80
percent of the pictures are of Los Angeles musicians,” he
said. “I wanted to honor the work that went into it and the
culture. I was so scared of just having it in my garage. It might
burn down.”
The UCLA Music Library was thrilled to receive such an extensive
collective that chronicled jazz in Los Angeles.
“We accepted everything they gave us related to
music,” Theil said.
The exhibit began its run in July. Theil decided to hold it over
the summer when he heard of the empty space in the Young Research
Library.
“There was a three-month slot available and we grabbed it.
It might have been nicer to have it up during the school year when
more students and faculty could see it, but we take what we can
get,” Theil said.