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Ensemble, An Exhibition of Art and Jazz

Ensemble, An Exhibition of Art and Jazz, presents a selection of Canadian artists, active since 1960, whose works explicitly evoke associations with jazz. The artists include Sam Borenstein, Graham Coughtry, Jacques de Tonnancour, Yves Gaucher, Betty Goodwin, John Heward, Harold Klunder, Guido Molinari, Michael Snow, Sylvia Safdie and Joyce Wieland. Whether it is through their experiences as jazz musicians, their love for music, or the jazz-like spontaneity communicated in their works, this art can be considered in musical terms. Jazz music provides an analogy for explaining modern and contemporary art, by using musical expressions such as distinctive tone colours, energizing and syncopated rhythms, pitch variations, pattern and improvisation. The real power of both music and art is that the artists have not only created, but also “improvised” their own sound.

This paper will briefly explore three of these artists who have done just that: Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry and Harold Klunder. A short history of the jazz scene in Montreal will also be examined to better understand the implications of the connection between art and jazz for the purposes of this exhibition.

Up until 1988, there was not much research available on the jazz scene in Canada, let alone in Montreal. In John Gilmore's book, Swinging in Paradise, the first major work of Montreal's jazz history, Gilmore tells us that Montreal was the entertainment capital of Canada from the 1930s to the 1950s.¹ Montreal was known as the Paris of North America, especially into the fifties as the nightlife was wide open and there was an abundance of work (fig. 1).² Montreal was also the jazz recording capital of North America, due to Emile Berliner, famous inventor of the record and gramophone and co-founder of Deutsche Gramophone, who had set up recording studios here, as early as 1909 (fig. 2).³ One of the professors in the Art History department of Concordia University, Dr. Jean Bélisle, is the current president of the Berliner museum in Montreal, a museum about Berliner's legacy in the creation of musical recordings.⁴ All the famous big bands and big names, like Dizzie Gillepsie (1917-1993) and Charlie Parker (1920-1955) came to Montreal to record, then all their recordings were sent back to the United States to be sold there. Unfortunately, very few recordings of all-Canadian jazz bands exist.

One of the main reasons that Montreal was a hotbed of entertainment, especially during the 1930's and 1940's, was that this city was not controlled by prohibition as was so much of the United States. This brought about the arrival of organized crime syndicates from the United States to take control of the lucrative liquor smuggling trade, which created a healthy nightclub life.⁵ The money flowed. While many jazz musicians preferred to play their own brand of jazz, they provided a backdrop for showgirls, comedians and singers, sometimes even taking requests for patrons to dance during the intermissions of shows.⁶ The two major clubs during this time were Rockhead's Paradise located on St. Antoine Street West, and Café St. Michel, situated on Mountain Street, almost directly facing each other (fig. 3).⁷

Show business stimulated the jazz community both directly and indirectly.⁸ The amount of work for musicians was directly responsible for the size and stability of the jazz community.⁹ Musicians could live well, buy instruments and travel to New York for inspiration. However, it was practically impossible to work there as a Canadian due to restrictive immigration laws. In Canada, most of the musicians did not think of themselves as jazz musicians. They thought of themselves as working musicians. Music was performed mostly in groups, not as solo artists that we see so much of today. The musicians could not function on their own; they needed to be plugged into a social community. When the work dried up, they moved on. If they decided to quit one band, they could easily join another.

Indirectly, jazz musicians were frustrated by their lack of creativity, due to nightly repetition of exacting music and bar owners' antipathy to jazz. During the late forties and early fifties, after hours clubs began popping up where groups of musicians would get together and jam. Popular American jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and Lionel Hampton (1908-2002), who came to Montreal, received the lion's share of available jazz fan's money (fig. 4).¹⁰ In 1954, this all changed with the election of Jean Drapeau. He launched a crackdown on the crime syndicates, thus reducing the revenue of nightclubs. The advent of television also weakened the need to go out for entertainment. By the early 1960s jazz moved to coffee houses and then to jazz clubs, like the Black Bottom located on St. Antoine Street West, which only survived for four years from 1963 to 1967.¹¹

After Expo 1967, the entire music scene changed dramatically and many jazz musicians left Montreal to work in other cities, such as Vancouver, California, Florida and Toronto. Toronto was a rapidly growing commercial center for radio, television and recording studios.¹² As rock music became the fashion, especially for the younger generation, swing, Latin and jazz rhythms were considered old-fashioned.¹³ However, those who continued to be seduced with jazz turned to a new version called free jazz, inspired by the American saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967).¹⁴

To understand John Coltrane and his influence on jazz we must go back in time to the late 1950s, when a revolution in jazz had taken place. During that era, Miles Davis (1926-1991) played a pivotal role, along with Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans (1926-1980) (fig. 5). Davis introduced “modal improvisation,” a technique of improvising on scales rather than on chordal patterns that allowed players to improvise more freely and flexibly.¹⁵ During the 1960s, Coltrane and Davis were making their mark on jazz with free jazz. This radical new style embraced the notion of collective improvisation by several musicians. As Gilmore relates, “the young musicians were at the same time rejecting the conventions and musical structures which had made early New Orleans jazz intelligible to listeners while providing a clear role for each instrument in the ensemble.”¹⁶

As jazz musicians were reducing their music to its own essentials, modern artists were now drawing attention to the essential forms and distinguishing content of a work of art.¹⁷ They were searching for new ways to convey their own sensibilities within a traditional framework in order to find their own voice. As Michael Snow (b. 1929) so astutely put it in 1976, “In one way, I work very consciously, but 'intuition' arrives in the 'sensing' that the order of what has been done has a totality that will enable it to live a life of its own.”¹⁸ It was in this environment that our artists were carving out their own history and communing with jazz each in their own way, be it in Montreal, Toronto or in New York where some of the artists lived, like Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland (1931-1998).

Michael Snow, sculptor, filmmaker, photographer, and painter has spent much of his artistic career also as a musician, playing with leading swing musicians and bands beginning as early as the 1950s. Rolled Woman II, shown in this exhibition, is a cut-out silhouette folded into shapes, in what Snow calls a "foldage" (fig. 6). The work belongs to the Walking Woman series (1961-67), a theme that dominated his art during this period. Figures from Walking Woman Works appear in Snow's New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), a film considered pivotal in the development of free jazz. In the early 1970s, Snow began playing with the Artists' Jazz Band in Toronto, an improvisational jazz group that over the years included visual artists Dennis Burton (b. 1933), Graham Coughtry (1931-1999), Richard Gorman (b. 1935), Nobuo Kubota (b. 1932), Robert Markle (1936-1990) and Gordon Rayner (b. 1935) (fig. 7). Snow wrote in his discography notes of their album, The Artists' Jazz Band Live At The Edge, 1975-1976: “The men in this group are 'professional artists' in a way that pervades more than a non-artist might expect from that description. (Their 'freedom' in music comes originally from precedents in the visual arts more than music.) The art-making-seeing-hearing experience can colour everything or transform anything. Art sense ebbs and flows but it rarely turns off."

Michael Snow had been involved with music since the 1950s when he had regularly played the piano in a Dixieland band and also led his own trios or quartets.¹⁹ It was during this time that Snow got involved in making films. His second film, the aforementioned New York Eye and Ear Control, was a film featuring several Walking Women cut-out silhouettes placed in various locations in and around New York with a soundtrack of improvised music played by a group of jazz musicians who had never improvised in this way. Interviewed in Toronto in 2005, by Jesse Stewart, Snow was asked about the relationship between his music and his visual art.²⁰ Snow responded that the two had nothing, to do with the other. He does concede that they intersect within his filmmaking where he works on sound/image relationships as a very specific area, as is clearly illustrated with the Walking Woman series. Snow has “improvised” his Rolled Woman II, (1961), presenting her from a different viewpoint, wrapped around a dowel, forming her into his own representation of a woman.

Another artist who also created his own representation of the female figure is Graham Coughtry (1931-1999). His Waking Figure – Dawn, (1961), shown in this exhibition, belongs to a series of seated and reclining nudes from the 1960s. Coughtry's abstracted figures, rich in colour, impasto surfaces and expressive brush strokes, suggest flesh in motion and energy forces. Coughtry had been absorbing influences through his travels and from viewing major art, especially figurative art. In the early 1960s after a visit to New York, Coughtry became very affected by William de Kooning's (1904-1992) figure paintings. He describes his feelings about de Kooning this way: “...his Woman series was very reassuring to me, in terms of trying to get the conflict resolved between wanting to use an image and at the same time wanting to just paint, in that very free way.”²¹ Interestingly, Coughtry's original ambition fresh out of high school in 1947 was to become an illustrator in the manner of David Stone Martin (1913-1992), whose expressionist drawings of jazz musicians formed the album covers of the Jazz At The Philharmonic records of the day.²² After a short stint at the Art Association of Montreal School of Art and Design, where he studied under well known Canadian painters of the day like Goodridge Roberts (1904-1974) and Jacques de Tonnancour (1917- 2005), he decided that he really wanted to be a painter rather than an illustrator.²³ In 1949, he enrolled at the Ontario College of Art and eventually met Michael Snow through their common interest in jazz. From the early to mid-fifties, they studied and traveled together, and in 1955 had their own two person exhibition of figure paintings in Toronto. Coughtry became a trombone player in the Artists' Jazz Band, as mentioned earlier. He considered the textured "Wall of Sound" of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane one of the major influences on his painting.²⁴ The term "wall of sound" (also known as "sheets of sound") was often used to describe Coltrane's way of running through scales in rapid fire causing the separate notes to blur into a larger pattern.

The final artist this paper discusses is Harold Klunder (b. 1943), who is a painter and teacher at the Visual Arts Centre in Montreal. He had begun a series of self-portraits in the 1980s, which includes Landscape (Self-Portrait VI), (1985), shown in this exhibition (fig. 8). Although not a self-portrait in the traditional sense, he wanted these paintings to be self-referential rather than referring to something external and for the viewer to experience the energy and vibrations of the work.²⁵ Klunder is also a musician. He was a member of a band, called Niagara, for a six year period during the 1980s in Toronto, one of the first “industrialized” bands, as he calls it. He played the synthesizer, steel guitar and harmonica. Klunder continues to play informally here in Montreal with those same instruments. He explained that even though the music that he performs is improvised, each musician has their own structure and when it is all put together the piece itself has its own structure (fig. 9).²⁶ When painting, he does not set out with a plan. Instead, he lets his painting evolve into something with which he is comfortable. In this way, there is a freshness and growth that never stops, he says.

Harold Klunder's paintings merge elements of abstract and figurative art in what he calls “psychic realism” (fig. 10). He explains: “There's a kind of inner realism that manifests itself artistically. In a sense it's similar to music in that if it is a dark and dreary day you will play deep chords that reflect that day. That to me is a psychic sense of connecting with something, and that is what I try to implement into my paintings." ²⁷

The harmony in composition, both in jazz and art is the result of the shaping and forming of sound or paint into a unique artistic moment. Each work holds the feelings and sentiments, variations and spontaneity of the artist who has created it. As well, each work requires the viewer's attention and emotional engagement to experience what is being communicated.

Endnotes