Ellington Session Break

What does a photograph sound like? Richly toned and tightly composed, Roy DeCarava’s jazz pictures record the New York music scene "for those who have eyes to hear," as he put it. He made this photograph of the Duke Ellington band in the mid-1950s, and later planned to include it in the sound i saw, an ambitious jazz photo-book published only posthumously. DeCarava was an ardent jazz fan, and his commercial jobs photographing album covers offered a backstage pass to the city’s clubs and recording studios. While he sensed a kinship between improvisational performance and photography, he often collaborated as much with the audience as the band, listening through his lens.　

As attentive to moments of silence as to sound, DeCarava captured Duke Ellington’s band in between takes at Manhattan's famous Columbia Records studio. Emptied of music, the space, a cavernous converted church on 30th street, echoes with sharp white light. It is just after seven o’clock—down time for Duke and his orchestra during a recording session for Jazz Cocktail (1954). But DeCarava does not need them, with so much else to look at; a coat rack stands in for some of the absent players, and a sound engineer overhead props up his feet in the booth. The strange geometry of the space invokes its own form of jazz; punctuated by penetrating lamps and pockets of darkness, the room plays itself.