Jazzlife: William Claxton's adventures in American jazz

It’s a quote which haunts the late photographer William Claxton. But it’s a good one. “Photography is jazz for the eyes”. The Californian’s passion for the music was inextricably bound up with his photography, first finding professional expression in the early Fifties as art director for Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label, where he would famously frame a handsome young trumpeter called Chet Baker.

Over the next decade Claxton would photograph most of the jazz musicians who mattered, often for album covers for companies such as Contemporary, Atlantic and, most notably, Blue Note.

Years later, when Claxton would find himself increasingly engrossed in the world of fashion and Hollywood (his volume on Steve McQueen and his fast cars is still a classic) it seemed that one of his most extraordinary early projects might simply fade into memory.

In 1960, along with Joachim E. Berendt (“Joe”) a musicologist and writer from Baden Baden, who came armed with a cheque book and a Nagra tape recorder, Claxton set about zig zagging across the US for weeks in a rented 1959 Chevrolet Impala on a remarkable jazz adventure. Published a year later under the title Jazzlife, the book offered an unrepeatable snapshot of every aspect of what Joe called “America’s most important artform”.