Yes or no?

Alela Diane
12" x 9"
oil on canvas, 2013

There's always something awkward about the first three or four paintings in a new top 100 series. From the outside it may appear that the top 100 paintings are a continuous effort in which a new series naturally picks up where the old left it, but in my experience this is far from the truth. There is no rhythm established yet, no continuity, no concept for the new series when I paint the first paintings. And then there's the question: Should I go for another year, or should I quit? The first paintings in a series foreshadow another year of hard work, frustration, and self doubt. Making the first paintings is like getting on a sailboat to go across the ocean. Once you embarked you're in it for the long haul. With the prospect of having to make 98 more there is no excitement yet in these paintings. I was a bit depressed making this small canvas portrait of Alela Diane. I never felt right about this painting, but I didn't know why. While the doubt is in the painting there's no hesitance concerning the inclusion of the musician. Alela Diane is about to release a new album (About Farewell) and 2 songs were released as teasers early on. The Way We Fall is one of the two song and is already guaranteed inclusion in the Top 100 2013.

I painted a nice (and inspired) portrait of Alela Diane for the Top 100 2010 in 2011, the reproduction of which became the most visited page on this blog. The original painting was sent to a fund raiser in Miami where it was purchased by an art collector. The painting ended up being displayed in her house in Miami. A few weeks ago this house was featured in an episode of Four Houses on TLC. The small Alela Diane painting came in full view. (I don't recall ever to have seen my own work on TV.) I made some screen shots:

Alela Diane painting featured in Four Houses on TLC

The Top 100 2013

John Coltrane and his band
40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2013

The first painting for the Top 100 2013 series is of a John Coltrane ensemble superimposed on a backyard landscape painting. This image of Coltrane is an iconic one in the Top 100 series. I've used the image many times before, but I had never included Rashied Ali and Jimmy Garrison in any of the paintings. It is the last, and my favorite Coltrane line up. Missing in the source photo, and in the painting, is the fifth member of the quintet Alice Coltrane. At the last moment I added her grand piano to the left into the painting to give her some sort of presence. The last time I used the source photo was in 2010. This is what I wrote then:

There's one image of John Coltrane I like better than all others. I believe that this may be the eight painting I've done from a photo taken by F. Winham. I have a copy of it in the book Jazz Heroes by John Fordham. The photo shows Coltrane performing at the end of his career. Gone are the black suit and tie, gone are the conventions of the traditional jazz combo. The photo shows Coltrane with with Pharoah Sanders on tenor, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Rashied Ali, precisely the line-up I cherish most. Of the eight or so paintings from the photo I've only included Sanders a few times, Ali and Garrison remain unpainted, and now again Coltrane is singled out. Funny thing is that of all eight paintings, the one just finished, still wet, is the only one I own. The first one I painted in 2000 and it was one of the first paintings ever to sell from the Top 100 series. Apparently my audience likes this image of Coltrane just as much as I do. If the new one doesn't sell I'll keep it and it will be time to close Jazz Heroes forevermore and find myself a different Coltrane image to paint. 

The painting sold and Coltrane is back in the top 100. That track is Leo, a 45 minute extravaganza that fills up half of the 1973 album Concert in Japan (1966). As a novelty I filmed the process of making the painting. From about 10 hours of raw footage I edited this hour outtake.

Sound States

Sonny Rollins
±14" x 9", oil on wood, 2005

Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (1997) is a book compiled by Adelaide Morris that contains articles by some leading scholars in the field of musicology. The sound cd that accompanies the book, is an anthology of some of the most innovative sound works of the 20th century. Some of my favorite music collections are on cds tucked into academic research works. In book stores and libraries these are the first items I look for. In 2005 I got my hand on a copy of Sound States and in the top 100 that year the cd was my highest ranking album. The list of my 100 favorite songs that year featured a score of tracks from that cd: La Niña de los Peines, Prince Buster, and Henri Chopin are just a few of these. The books also places (free) jazz at forefront of the avant-garde in the latter half of the 20th century. It inspired me to paintings that in retrospect belong to the best musician’s portraits I’ve ever made. The images here of the performance poet Kamau Brathwaite, and the Sonny Rollins painting, are some the most enduring of all top 100 paintings.  

Edward Kamau Brathwaite
11.5" x 7.75", oil on wood, 2010

Jazz in the Top 100

Albert Ayler
oil on wood, 2009

The Top 100 2012 contained very little music that one one would label as jazz. It's a bit surprising as I consider myself a jazz aficionado. Surprising too because jazz, unlike blues for example, is not a rigid style at all, it evolves along with changes in the world's music, and the world's cultures. (I do seriously question if this is still the case though—did jazz stop evolving somewhere in the 1980s, has jazz become a vestige of a once thriving culture?) The Top 100 2012 exhibition takes place in a jazz venue and I would like to cater to my audience a little bit beyond the two Rahsaan Roland Kirk paintings that are in the exhibition. To do this I'm referring to my archives. Looking at the 100 Greatest Recordings Ever that I compiled last summer, I see, for starters, a few candidates to be framed up and claim a spot in the WDNA 88.9 Serious Jazz Gallery come May 25. The 100 Greatest series contained 11 jazz paintings, all of them have appeared on these pages here, but most have not been exhibited yet. The Top 100 of 2009, the year before I started the Top 100 blog, contained 13 jazz paintings: John Zorn (2), Roland Kirk (3), John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Art Ensemble of Chicago (2), Milford Graves, Billie Holiday, Walter Roland, and Machito. Reproductions of all these paintings, together with their accompanying texts, appeared in the book Top 100 2009, published in an edition of 100 by Iconoclast Editions, 2010. The small paragraph illustrating #23: Albert Ayler – Change Has Come reads: "My Name is Albert Ayler is the name of a film (2008) by the Swedish director Kaspar Collin. I saw it in an art theatre on a big screen in 2009. The audience became eerily silent when, in the film, things went wrong with Al. Albert Ayler (1936-1970) was from Cleveland, Ohio. The film made quite an impact on me. The tune Change Has Come was not featured in the film but comes from the LP Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village that I recently bought. The album was Ayler's first release on Impulse!, it was recorded live in 1966. I played this record, together with the other two Ayler albums I have, directly after coming home from the theater that night."

Stats for the Top 100 2012

The Top 100 2012 is all but wrapped up and what's left for me to do is a bunch of busy work. Update the archives, create wall labels for each painting (for the exhibition starting May 25th), and things like that. I've been collecting some data from the 100 entries in the list that I plotted into some graphs. Not that it proves anything like serious statistics would, it's just indulgence. First I collected, as well as I could, geographical data. There are a remarkable 43 countries represented in the list, the same amount as last year but more than ever before that. The percentage originating in the United States is at an all time low, at exactly 25%, but still by far outnumbering any other country. Here's the top 10 countries represented in a bar chart:

There were eight countries with two representatives: Albania, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Italy, Japan, Niger, Peru, and Romania.

The remaining 25 countries had one recording in the list: Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Sudan, Sweden, Thailand, and Venezuela.

The chart would look a little different if I change the country of origin to the country the recordings were actually made in. The United States gains 9 more to count to 34%. England drops out of the top 10 altogether with only one of the six recordings originating in England actually recorded in England. It should be noted that 4 of the top 5 in the list are from England, and that New York is the most often occurring state and city with quite some distance.

This is what the graph looks like when the numbers are plotted to represent the continents (numbers total 100):

The next graph then is the years the 100 recordings were made in, plotted to their corresponding decades (numbers total again to 100) 2012 is the single year that yields the most (9) recordings.

 

Here's an example of what kind of data I collected. For Macedonski Narodni Ora by the Maliot Radio Orchestra at #92 (I haven't posted this one yet):

Country of origin: Yugoslavia (Macedonia)
Ethnic group: Rom (? and/or Slavic)
Recorded in: Skopje, Macedonia
Year of recording: 1951 (or earlier)
Source: blog –Excavated Shellac
Performers: Maliot Radio Orchestra (Two zurlas players, tapan, and double headed drum)

Skopje Radio and Television Orchestra
8.5" x 11"
watercolor, pencil on paper, 2013

So that one (like many others) came courtesy of the blog Excavated Shellac. Jon Ward, Shellac's writer, goes two steps beyond the sort of data collecting I've been doing. This is what he had to say about this tune:

"The Sperry label, based at 10625 Shoemaker Street in Detroit, Michigan, was run by Sperry Boge and issued a number of recordings originating from tape, and all from Macedonian groups sponsored by Radio Skopje. Radio Skopje began broadcasting in 1944. I know very little information on Sperry, however, they were in operation for a number of years in the early 1950s, issuing approximately 120 selections on 78 and 33rpm. All of their records were RCA Custom pressings. RCA had three custom pressing plants in the United States including one located in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the pressing number on this disc indicates that this Sperry record was pressed in 1951 – though finding an actual recording date might be more difficult."

This then brings us to the last category: What were the sources for the recordings? Over the years, with the shifting towards the digital, the whole concept of collecting records has changed. For the first time in the 30 years of the Top 100, with 49 provided, my own collection as the source for music has fallen below 50%. In the following pie chart music from my own collection are in blueish colors while the reddish colors represent music I picked up elsewhere (all but one from the web): Read clockwise from 12:00.