Looking forward to looking back

For any followers in Southwest Florida who haven't heard, I wanted to let you know that the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in downtown Fort Myers is hosting a Jazz in the Key of Light retrospective of my 30-plus years of music photography in its Grand Atrium gallery for most of November. 

The show opens with an evening reception on Friday, November 2, from 6 to 10 p.m., as part of the city's ArtsWalk. The exhibit runs through Monday, November 19.

A most-unexpected tip of many jazz hats....

Each June, the Jazz Journalists Association holds a matinee program in Manhattan to honor journalists, broadcasters and photographers who have done distinguished work in the past year.

Wednesday afternoon's festivities at the Blue Note jazz club included an unexpected surprise. JJA's voting members selected yours truly as the 2016 winner of the Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Jazz Photography.

When my name surfaced with five other very talented nominees (John Abbott, Jimmy Katz, Richard Conde, Lauren Deutsch and Michael Jackson) several months ago on the JJA Awards ballot, I figured it was a mistake, since I won the award back in 2003.

More than a few JJA member photographers had been under the impression this was sort of a lifetime achievement award, one and done. Apparently not - or maybe the JJA Awards committee forgot that caveat.

New Jersey-based photographer and writer Mitchell Seidel, with whom I've shared concert photo pits dating back to 1985, shared an interesting perspective: something along the lines that winning a lifetime achievement award twice in one lifetime is quite a feat.


I am humbled by the honor, knowing full well that each of the five other nominees was just as deserving.

As best I can surmise, my book, "Jazz in the Key of Light," must have developed some degree of awareness within the JJA community over the past year and a half. Maybe the voters took note of a 30+ year commitment to writing about and photographing the jazz world. We'll never know with any certainty.

Here is the full list this year's winners in the various categories:

• Lifetime achievement in jazz journalism: Ted Panken
• Jazz periodical: DownBeat
• Jazz blog: Ethan Iverson‘s “Do the Math”
• Jazz book: “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth,” by John Szwed
• Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing in 2015: Nate Chinen
• Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting in 2015: Linda Yohn, WEMU, Ypsilanti, MI
• Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Photography in 2015: Ken Franckling
• Jazz Photo of the Year: Patrick Marek
• Jazz Album Art of the Year: Mike Park, for Kamasi Washington, The Epic

For more details, including all of the musician winners announced earlier this spring, visit the JJA online. Composer/orchestra leader Maria Schneider took home a whopping five trophies this time around: for Musician, Composer, Arranger, Large Ensemble and Record of the Year, the latter for her exquisite CD The Thompson Fields (artistShare).

Jazz Times.com has posted excerpts from my new book, “Jazz in the Key of Light,” that spotlight nine of its 80 featured musicians.

The coffee-table-style book is drawing five-star reviews. 

Here is a sampling:

• “Just want to let you know I'm getting a late piano start today and it's YOUR FAULT! I got your book, and I decided to read it this morning instead catching up on the latest health and terrorist crises in our world. What a treat your book is! I'm not sure if I've seen something like this before, and I have a lot of books. Great photos with insightful words. Very cool!" – pianist-composer Lisa Hilton
• “Some non-musician/non-musical friends, who were here on a visit, began looking at the book on my coffee table. The format interested them enough to ask intelligent questions about jazz. There is obviously a wealth of enjoyment for the jazz enthusiast, but I saw that the book can both intrigue and draw-in the beginner. You've got a winner here!” – singer-guitarist Tony Boffa 
• “This book is going to be a collector's item. It is beautiful and thoughtful, marrying masterful photographs with telling quotes from each profiled musician. Author Ken Franckling has harvested decades of his work to capture the vitality and spirit of the jazz world for anyone who loves this type of music (and how can you not?).” – reader Michael Blumstein (posted on Amazon)

Two FLA jazz book-signing events 11/15, 16

There will be book signing/meet the author events this weekend for "Jazz in the Key of Light" in two Southwest Florida locations. Find out more about the book here.

Jazz In The Key of Light

I’m pleased to announce that my new book, “Jazz in the Key of Light” (Eighty of our Finest Jazz Musicians Speak for Themselves), is being self-published in a limited edition on October 15. 

This is not your typical fine art photography book. Images of the featured artists, in performance or moments of personal reflection, are paired with illuminating quotes from interviews I had with those musicians in assignments for a variety of mainstream and music publications over the past 30 years.  

The spotlighted musicians range from legends Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan to a variety of today’s rising stars. Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein wrote the Foreword. 

“Ken has leveraged his backstage pass to bring jazz fans closer to the music’s human source. Jazz In The Key of Light’s connection of words and images is a powerful complement to the music, since listeners often have no other statement from artists besides their art. As a result, we feel closer to the musician as a person.” 

        – Al Basile, poet, songwriter, and jazz & blues cornetist

“Jazz in the Key of Light,” published in hardcover format with dust jacket, retails at $59.95 (plus tax where applicable, and $5.99 shipping and handling). It is also available for purchase through Amazon.com.

Orders for signed or inscribed copies can be made directly, payable by check or through PayPal. Contact me for details at kfjazzpix@aol.com.

Another jazz postcard from Newport

As George Wein said in 1954: "A little rain can't stop us"

Even in fine weather, the logistics are mind-boggling. Three stages running simultaneously, with jazz to savor set by set or as a smorgasbord. Forty-three different acts over three afternoons at Fort Adams State Park, and two evening sets at historic Newport Casino, better known today as the International Tennis Hall of Fame. 
The fans turned out despite heavy rain on Saturday, August 2 and intermittent drizzle on Sunday. This was the 60th anniversary edition of producer George Wein's first festival - and the sea of colorful umbrellas, ponchos and rain suits added to the ambience. The mud, not so much.

Jazz postcard from Newport

Here is some more color, memories if you will, from the 60th anniversary edition of the Newport Jazz Festival, August 1-3. This was my 33rd festival in 34 years, covering for various employers and freelance assignments.

Jonathan Batiste and Stay Human

And the winners are….

The Jazz Journalists’ Association presented the media portion of its 18th annual Jazz Awards this week at the Blue Note in New York. The full list of winners is detailed at JJAJazzAwards.org (scroll down).

• Three musicians won crossover honors. Pianist Ethan Iverson was honored for the year’s best blog for Do The Math. Vibes player Gary Burton won Best Book of the Year category for his autobiography, Learning To Listen: The Jazz Journey of Gary Burton (Berklee Press). Singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, the host of the NPR series Jazz Set, received the JJA's Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting. (Burton also won musical honors, announced in April, as Mallet Player of the Year).
• Veteran author, editor, educator and radio show host W. Royal Stokes received JJA’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award.
• Freelance writer Nate Chinen won the Helen Oakley Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing in 2013.

  

  Benny Golson, by Antonio Porcar Cano

• Spanish photographer Antonio Porcar Cano was honored for the competition’s Photo of the Year for his wonderful image of saxophonist Benny Golson, taken last July  26 at the  Festival Internacional de Jazz de Peñíscola.
• Videographer John Moultrie won the Best Short Form Jazz News Video category for "Gary Bartz Talks About Drug Use Among Jazz Greats."

Two perennial winners, JazzTimes magazine and AllAboutJazz.com, won again in their respective categories, Best Print Periodical and Best Jazz Website.

More depth on Newport

 Jazz Times has just posted Bill Beuttler's extensive review of last weekend's Newport Jazz Festival, along with 10 of my images. With more than 30 acts performing on four different stages Friday-Sunday, there was a lot more to hear and see. Here for your viewing pleasure are 12 more of my images.

Singer Kurt Elling

Jenny Scheinman and Bill Frisell

A pleasant surprise

Today’s mail brought a terrific surprise…a copy of the latest Miles Davis compilation, Warner Brothers’ European division’s five-CD boxed set Miles Davis The Warner Years: 1986-1991, which was released this fall in Europe. This project was first planned in 2001 with Rhino as a six-CD set. That was shelved due to legal and licensing issues. It is now out minus a bit of the originally planned material.

The surprise? The cover and spine of the box feature a Miles photo that I took at a jazz festival appearance in 1987. I had been in contact with Rhino folks about providing some imagery back when the initial project was in the works, but hadn’t even heard of the project's revival. As serendipity would have it, Warner Music France obtained the image through Dalle, a stock photo agency in Paris to which I have been submitting music photography for many years.

The Warner Years offers the complete albums Tutu (1986), Amandla (1989), Live Around the World (1996), the historic Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux (1991), on which Davis revisited his 1950s repertoire with Gil Evans for the first time in decades at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Doo-Bop (1991), plus seven elections from the soundtrack of Dingo (1991) and five from Siesta (1987). Disc 5 includes four previously unreleased songs and performances on which Davis accompanied Scritti Politti, Cameo, Chaka Khan, Zucchero, Kenny Garrett, Marcus Miller and Shirley Horn.

There is much here to enjoy from Miles’s final creative phase when he further blurred the jazz star/pop star boundaries.

2010 is a very Sonny year

The Chinese Lunar Calendar considers 2010 as the Year of the Tiger, but in the jazz calendar this is the Year of the Colossus.

Why? All of the deserved attention focused on tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who turned 80 on September 7 - still a vibrant musical force and restless explorer. (At right, Sonny Rollins at Newport, August 2008. Ken Franckling photo).

Here’s the rundown of significant moments that have taken place.

- On June 27, Rollins received the Montreal International Jazz Festival’s Miles Davis Award for his lifetime contributions to and achievements in jazz.

- On August 15, Rollins received the Edward MacDowell Medal from The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The prestigious award is given annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field. The Colony quite fittingly selected jazz writer, critic and Colony Fellow Gary Giddins to keynote the event.

- On September 10, three days after Rollins turned octogenarian, a sold-out 80th birthday concert at New York’s Beacon Theater was filled with much Rollins wonder and a few surprise guests. The biggest surprise - perhaps the only true surprise - was the appearance of Ornette Coleman, with whom Rollins likely never performed in public in their long parallel careers. In his New York Times review the following Monday, Nate Chinen captured the essence of the summit.

- Four nights later Rollins joined photographer John Abbott and writer/critic Bob Blumenthal at the Barnes & Noble store in Tribeca to talk with fans, including more than a few fellow musicians, and sign copies of Abbott and Blumenthal's Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins. The book was published September 1 by Abrams. See jazztimes.com for images from the event, and see Jazz Times' October issue for book excerpts.

It's not over.

On October 9 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rollins will be among more than 200 scholars, scientists, writers and artists, as well as civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary society is celebrating the 230th anniversary of its founding. In the , other new members from humanities and arts include film director Francis Ford Coppola, actor Denzel Washington, dancer Suzanne Farrell and singer Thomas Hampson.

“It is a tremendous privilege and honor to be made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences," says Rollins. "Not only for me, but for what I represent - the great American music called jazz."

Rollins was nominated by Academy member Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, a Minneapolis-based neuroscientist, amateur saxophonist and longtime Rollins fan. "It's a terrific tribute to a legend," says Georgopoulos, "and a jewel in the Academy's crown."

Since its founding in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation. Prominent inductees in prior centuries included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The Academy’s current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

In about two weeks, we can officially add a Saxophone Colossus to the list.

Rollins is being honored for a lifetime of achievement as a musician. But don’t for a nanosecond think he’s finished. He has many more creative notes to play.

A spectacular night - marred by one idiot

Guitarist John Scofield was a great choice to open the New Orleans portion/final phase of the 2010 Montreal International Jazz Festival. His Piety Street Band released an exceptional funky New Orleans-gospel and blues-based CD under the Piety Street name earlier this year. The band was even better in person last night at the Theatre Maisonneuve. Pianist/B3 player/ vocalist Jon Cleary was a strong foil for Scofield, at one point echoing or extending Scofield's guitar lines on the centerpiece, "Walk With Me." "Glory Land" was a strong shuffle beat romp. The quartet also included bassist George Porter Jr. and drummer Terence Higgins.

Was Keith Jarrett going to play one or more encores after his two-set Montreal perforamce with triomates Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette? We'll never know. The band's performance was beautiful, digging deeply into a wide range of standards that tended to have you / me / romance at their core. (But don't they all really?) "You Go to My Head," "Everything Happens to Me," "Too Young to Go Steady," Autumn Leaves," "All the Things You Are," "My Ship" and "I've Got a Crush on You" were all on the agenda. The players' empathy and synergy is always a joy to witness. DeJohnette's delicate and airy drum solo on "Too Young" was exquisite.

Jarrett's zero tolerance for photography during his concerts is notorious, preferring perhaps that rather than distract the band and surrounding audience members, that attendees savor the moment for what it is. There was a firm "no photography" request before the show, and again right after intermission - for both the performance and the bows that followed. In this world of people wanting to do their own thing in their own moment, some believe they are exempt from rules set for others. During the third bow, possibly before the band was ready to do another tune or so, the aforementioned IDIOT fired off a flash with his/her point-and-shoot. Too bad the neighboring ticketbuyers didn't gently push his/her arm down so there would be no mood interruption. Jarrett suggested that the neighbors take his/her camera away - and walked off stage to end the night.

At the dark and intimate Salle Gesu space an hour later, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's quintet explored a half-dozen originals that blended rhythms rooted in swing and an ethereal tone that bordered on the exotic. The packed house loved it. Stanko's young bandmates supported his music wonderfully, with very strong piano, electric bass and guitar solos throughout.