Herman Leonard dies

Most of you probably don't know who Herman Leonard is, and this post has nothing to do with politics. One of the greatest contemporary music photographers, Harman Leonard, died yesterday in California at the age of 87. The long-time New Orleans resident had moved there after Hurricane Katrina which destroyed many of his exquisite handmade prints; luckily his negatives were stored in a vault on the upper floor of a building and survived intact.

Leonard specialized in jazz photography, and many of the black-and-white images he shot over more than half a century were iconic. He captured the atmosphere of cabarets, theaters and recording studios, of artists wreathed in cigarette smoke you couldn't take in this era of no-smoking laws — it's bad for your health but makes a gorgeous, evocative photo. I discovered his work on trips to New Orleans, where it was often on display at the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, or at A Gallery for Fine Photography on Royal Street. Ella Fitzgerald Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, and Louis Armstrong were among his long list of subjects.

My sister had her eye on a plaintive photo of Billie Holiday he took that she eyed on every trip she made to New Orleans and passed on because she thought it was too much of a splurge. When we were back in NOLA together in the early ’00s, she looked a it again and took the plunge, with my encouragement. I reminded her his prices would go up after he died, which luckily he didn't for almost another decade. That photo hangs on her living room wall in Chicago now.

Herman Leonard set the standard for music photography.

Check out his work at http://www.hermanleonard.com/default_home.htm

We'll get back to bashing John Boehnhead tomorrow.