Jazz

Decorator's Insider newsletter featured Jazz. - Decorators Insider
Music influencer Baylee Lefton featured Jazz in her Instagram story, where she has over 528K followers. - Instagram
Musician Kieran Brown posted a teaser story about Jazz to her 25.9K followers. - Instagram
Musician Kieran Brown reviewed Jazz on her Instagram stories. - Instagram
"""See how he makes Nat Adderley appear to levitate at the music stand, or the side-by-side placement of a pair of photos of Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, in which Schapiro’s use of focus all but transmits the sound of the two veterans trading lines with each other. Even in quieter moments, his lens gets to something at the core of his subjects, whether that’s Miles Davis leaning in to listen to his lawyer with an intimacy that’s at odds with the “Dark Magus” legend, or Sonny Rollins looking every inch the saxophone colossus in a shadowy Apollo Theater stairwell."" ""There are countless highlights among the 300 images collected here – chosen from a reported 20,000 negatives – but the space given to undersung female talents such as vibraphonist Terry Pollard and pianist (and ex-wife of Louis Armstrong) Lil Hardin Armstrong deserves special mention, as does Richard Scheinin’s accompanying text, which riffs like the music Schapiro’s work celebrates.""" - Record Collector
Music influencer Baylee Lefton featured Jazz in her Instagram story. - Instagram
"""The Late Sax Master Sonny Rollins on Steve Schapiro’s Forgotten Photos of Jazz Giants."" ""The work captured the vibrancy of the Manhattan jazz scene in the early 1960s—all chronicled by the 20-something Schapiro."" ""The best of those images, revealed here for the first time, appear in the new book Jazz (ACC Art Books), with photos selected in part by his widow, the filmmaker Maura Smith Schapiro, and son Theophilus Donoghue, a photographer, and text written by Richard Scheinin with an afterword by Kurt Elling. Herewith, an homage to Schapiro and his jazz heroes by the saxophone master Sonny Rollins, who died this week at age 95, on the eve of the book’s June publication.""" - Vanity Fair
Photobook Weekly featured Jazz. - Photobook Weekly
"One of the leading social documentary photographers of the 1960s, Steve Schapiro’s images stand among the most important of the 20th century. These largely unknown jazz photos – shot just before his career breakthrough – showcase his early mastery and his empathy for his subjects, making Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions an essential archive. In the early ’60s, when Schapiro arrived on the scene, New York jazz was enjoying a golden age. A young freelance photographer who had grown up in the Bronx and somehow snagged a gig with Riverside Records, he began voraciously documenting shows, players, venues, recording sessions and gatherings both in his native New York and later in Chicago. Whether it’s Sonny Rollins lifting weights backstage, or Bobby Timmons lost in an instant of discovery at the piano, Schapiro was on their wavelength." - Old Jewish Men
"""Most fascinating about the new book is we get to see our favorite jazz artists in human situations—waiting, reading, napping, lifting weights and more."" ""Why should we care? Because these artists were exceptional, and the images give us a finer sense of their personalities, who they were off stage and at rest. Every single image in this 315-page hardcover, coffee-table book offers a fresh perspective of artists we thought we knew well from photos on album covers."" ""Leafing through the book was like looking at the images beamed back to earth by the astronauts who recently circled the moon. We know the moon is round and pocked with asteroid craters. But seeing the back side for the first time gave me chills. It didn’t look much different than the moon’s face we see all the time, but it was the moon without makeup on, the one napping in the back. As with the other side of the moon, this book shows us a new, unseen side of famed jazz musicians, and all provide us with a greater sense of their humanity."" ""The images also show us the love these musicians had for each other and the joy they felt playing this music. In many ways, Steve Schapiro was William Claxton East. All of the musicians he photographed were cool. His images make them even cooler.""" - Jazzwax Substack
"""History hiding in plain sight for 60 years."" ""The photographs are remarkable because they are so unguarded. Schapiro had a gift for capturing people at their most natural.""" - WBGO
"""Schapiro’s stunning images of jazz greats in New York – from Dizzy Gillespie to Elvin Jones – make up a new book featuring a foreword by late saxophone icon Rollins."" ""As social documents, Steve Schapiro’s images stand among the most important of the 20th century, covering Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others. These largely unknown photos of the New York jazz golden age showcase his mastery and empathy for his subjects. A new book collects them, alongside a foreword by the late saxophone icon Sonny Rollins Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions is published by ACC Art Books.""" - The Guardian
"""But before his career took off in 1963, Schapiro was a struggling freelancer who obsessively chronicled the New York jazz scene. We now have Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions (ACC Art Books), which includes 300 of Schapiro’s stunning and intimate photos."" ""But before his career took off in 1963, Schapiro was a struggling freelancer who obsessively chronicled the New York jazz scene. We now have Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions (ACC Art Books), which includes 300 of Schapiro’s stunning and intimate photos.""" - Jazz Times
"Steve Schapiro's photographs of Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin are world-famous, but the photo book "Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village, Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions" now showcases his little-known jazz photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, before he became famous. The photographs of Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, and Sonny Rollins are spectacular." - Ramp Magazine
"""the disciplines of jazz and photography have always made good bedfellows – two sophisticated modern art forms that seem to complement each other. And never has that been more apparent than in this collection of images by Steve Schapiro from the early 1960s.” “The 300 pictures in the book come from a collection of more than 20,000 taken by Schapiro in the early 1960s and showcase his early mastery and his empathy for his subjects.” “They are pictured performing, writing, rehearsing and relaxing, and it’s clear they and Schapiro were completely at ease in each other’s company. The effortless style and quality of the images make Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions an essential archive for fans of both the photographer and the music.”" - Black + White Photography Magazine
Downbeat Magazine featured a Sonny Rollins photo and book mention in their August issue. - Downbeat Magazine
"Turning to the pictures as photographs I should make it clear that all are in black and white and in sharp focus. Many take up a whole page, some occupy half a page and a handful are spread over two pages. (And many are accompanied by Scheinen’s helpful commentary.) Composition varies from conventional to striking and there’s plenty of imaginative artistic virtue. Amongst similar collections I would rate this very highly..." - Jazz Journal UK
"""With his camera, Steve Schapiro immersed himself in the action, as if he were part of the band. His goal was to connect with the musicians..."" ""Before Steve Schapiro (1934-2022) became known as a photojournalist in the 1960s, he documented numerous recording sessions of jazz musicians, which are now being published as a book for the first time.""" - Jazzthetik Magazine
"""Schapiro’s photographs of Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement have always struck me. He wasn’t the only photographer doing this work, but his photographs have a certain humanity to them. His gaze and his closeness to the subjects makes his photographs unmistakably his."" ""With the publication of the book Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions, Schapiro’s remarkable career adds another chapter, one that more fully shows the power of his photography and finally sheds light on work that has not been seen in decades."" ""It is also not hard to see in this “early” work what also makes his Civil Rights photographs stand out. The intimacy and warmth is there. The closeness and caring are there. And there is more to the connection between the two bodies of work than just Schapiro’s eye.""" - Bling Magazine
"""The photos find the musicians at work in the studios, backstage, and greeting each other, capturing their humanity for all time."" ""300 of Steve Schapiro’s best black and white jazz photos from that period are in the recently released book Jazz (ACC Art Books, 316 pages). Forgotten but luckily fully preserved through the years, most have rarely been seen before."" ""Richard Scheinin contributed a definitive six-page introduction covering Schapiro’s brief but significant association with jazz along with a few profiles of musicians that are scattered throughout the book. A page of reminiscences from Sonny Rollins is also an added plus as is a final page by Kurt Elling about knowing the photographer near the end of his life.""" - LA Jazz Scene
"""You can smell the cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Taste it even. And if you've ever blown a horn, you can also probably taste the acidic brassiness, or the warmth, nutty reediness that seem to emanate from Steve Schapiro's photographs."" ""Schapiro was no jazz obsessive. Maybe he chose to document the scene because he saw something representative. Jazz, the one true art form of the 20th century, contained an energy and a message that was all about social change. In those trumpets, saxophones, keys and bass lines, there was an urgency, a call, that Schapiro couldn’t ignore.""" - FT
WDCB Jazz (Chicago's Home for Jazz) featured Jazz and an interview with Richard and Maura. - WDCB Jazz
Jazz is Dead's TikTok account shared Jazz on their account. - TikTok
Art Don't Sleep's Instagram account shared Jazz on their account. - Instagram
Linear Labs Music's Instagram account shared Jazz on their account. - Instagram
"Late Chicago photographer Steve Schapiro captured land mark moments of the civil rights movement for Life, Time and Look magazines. “Jazz: Best of the Apollo, Village Vanguard, and Riverside Sessions” (ACC Art Books), ushered across the finish line by Schapiro’s widow and son, anthologizes his little-known jazz photography from the early 1960s when he was a young unknown in New York." - Chicago Tribune
"If you love jazz, photography, or just beautiful books, this one is essential." - Freakout Bookshelf