Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and one other

Lot 512
29.09.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 3 276
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1029163
Lot 512 | Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and one other
Estimate value
£ 1 500 – 2 500
WILLIAM GOTTLIEB (1917-2006)

Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, New York, 1947 and Minton’s Playhouse (Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Hill), New York, 1947
two gelatin silver prints, printed 1979
signed and titled in ink (lower margin, recto); stamped photographer’s credits (verso)
each sheet 11 x 14 in. (280 x 355 mm); each framed, the largest 445 x 436 mm.

The Library of Congress, who acquired a large portion of writer-photographer William Gottlieb’s archive in 1995, have said that his photographs ‘seem to express the essence of jazz’. Writing for the Washington Post, DownBeat magazine, and Record Changer, during the “Golden Age of Jazz”, the self-taught Gottlieb photographed and interviewed prominent and pioneering jazz musicians including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. ‘Gottlieb's portraits are well-thought-out character studies, not candids or pictures selected from dozens of exposures… Many of Gottlieb's photographs were taken in New York City clubs on Fifty-second Street or "Swing Street," the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The ground floors of brownstone houses had been converted into restaurants and nightclubs, notably jazz clubs such as Club Downbeat, the Famous Door, Jimmy Ryan's, the Three Deuces, the Onyx Club, and the Spotlite… The photographs Gottlieb took from 1938 to 1948 are perhaps the most widely reproduced jazz images today.’ Library of Congress.

The images here were published in Gottlieb’s 1979 Golden Age of Jazz, where he described Miles Davis as ‘the coolest of the cool cats’ and remarked that ‘it was at Minton’s [Playhouse] that bop had actually been incubated’. Gottlieb, 116, 153.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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