The Library of Congress and All That Jazz

Booktryst, one of the better literary-minded blogs around, discusses jazz and the photography of William Gottlieb.

From the piece...

After a few months on the job, Gottlieb offered to write a weekly column on jazz for the Sunday edition. The Arts Editor agreed, and his pay jumped from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a week. But more importantly, he became the writer of the first jazz column to appear in a daily newspaper. At first a Post photographer was assigned to illustrate Gottlieb's column. But soon the management of the paper decided the arrangement was too costly, and the lensman was reassigned. Unwilling to publish the column without photos, Gottlieb sold his prized record collection and used the proceeds to buy a camera. With a lot of help from the Post's staff photographers, and a tremendous amount of practice, William Gottlieb taught himself how to take photos that were not only good enough for publication, but were works of art in their own right.


By age twenty-two, Gottlieb was known in the Washington, D.C. area as "Mr. Jazz." But Mr. Jazz had a growing family, so he left the advertising arm of the paper in 1941 to earn a graduate degree in economics at the University of Maryland. However, he never gave up writing and illustrating his Sunday jazz column. After serving as an Army photographer in World War II, Gottlieb once again followed his heart, and in 1945 he moved to New York City, determined to become a full-time jazz writer and photographer. He stopped in at the New York office of DownBeat magazine, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the staff was not only familiar with his work for the Post, they downright admired it. Gottlieb was hired on the spot as an assistant editor.

Here's Charlie Parker playing "Confirmation":