A treasure trove of Bay Area jazz photos seeks a permanent home.
In the meantime, you can see Lenny Bernstein’s unique images online
On their first date in 1951, Leonard Bernstein took Evelyn Getz dancing at a Manhattan nightclub where trumpeter Miles Davis provided the music. It was an auspicious start for a sevendecade relationship shaped by their mutual love of jazz.
Known as Evey and Lenny to their friends, they eventually married and found their way to suburban Silicon Valley during its early 1960s emergence as a hightech hub. By the early 1970s, they’d settled with their two kids on a 28-acre Santa Cruz Mountains spread in Soquel.
Bernstein (no relation to the legendary composer and conductor) died in December. Evey has started figuring out what to do with the jazz-related archives created by her indefatigable husband. After decades of working for tech companies as a ceramic and metallurgical engineer he went on to earn a law degree from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. But Bernstein found his creative calling in photography, documenting hundreds of musicians, many of whom were also personal friends.
“I’m still struggling through everything,” Evey said. “Our friend Myron Cohen said I should look into donating Lenny’s stuff to a university. A friend owned an art gallery in New York and he looked at the photos. He didn’t take them on to sell, but said these are semispiritual and like old masters paintings.”
Shot with available light in nightclubs, Bernstein’s photos often have a painterly quality. Over the years many national publications have licensed his images, including Art Forum, The Atlantic, The Economist, Harper’s, Interview, The New York Times and Vanity Fair.
The 1998 book he co-authored, “Jazz Profiles: The Spirit of the Nineties” (Billboard Books), includes some of his most memorable photos captured at essential jazz outposts like Yoshi’s, Keystone Korner, Kuumbwa Jazz Center and the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Part of what makes Bernstein’s best photos so effective is that he was a trusted insider rather than an enthusiastic fan or hustling professional. Besotted with the music as a kid growing up in the Bronx, he became friends with many of the music’s leading players. Alto sax great Jackie McLean and his wife, Dolly, were regular houseguests, legendary drummer Elvin Jones greeted him with crushing bear hugs, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago found refuge at the Bernsteins’ home during a threadbare Bay Area sojourn.
Tim Jackson, Kuumbwa’s co-founder and artistic director, met Bernstein when the organization was just getting off the ground, and noticed that he wasn’t interested in checking out every gig.
“He would come to the shows where he felt the connection to the music,” Jackson said. “His tastes were a little left of center, which was great. Mainstream photographers might be looking for the star of the moment or the young lions. He was interested in shooting people like George Adams and Don Pullen. His strength was the ability to focus on artists he was enamored with or felt connected to, and I think that comes through in his photos.”
The Bernsteins’ daughter, poet, jazz vocalist and professional psychic Lisa B, grew up thinking it was normal to be surrounded by extraordinary musicians. She remembers sitting on Elvin Jones’ lap as a child and giving a private piano recital to Cecil Taylor. She’s spearheaded the drive to organize her father’s photo archives, making images available for artists and publications. The hope is to find a home for the vast collection (while retaining rights for the negatives), along with some of the other jazz ephemera he collected.
“We did something very unusual with the website,” she said. “We’re putting up every single image that he took. Some of the photos used in ads or by the Monterey Jazz Festival hadn’t gotten the kind of attention that those nostalgic bebop images get. But these images really capture the spirit of these musicians, who are aging and passing on.”
The images are precious and would enrich the collection of a conservatory or university library. Intangible but just as invaluable are Evey’s stories, like the time that Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter and motorcycle aficionado Lester Bowie gave her riding tips. Or when she surreptitiously lined up a gig for the Art Ensemble at a Cupertino elementary school.
“They were out of work for a while so I talked to the principal of the grade school,” she said. “They played for all the kids at a big assembly and the kids all wrote thank-you letters that I sent them a few months later. I paid for it, but I told them the school paid for it.”
DETAILS >> Bernstein’s vast collection of photos can be viewed at jazzjonesphotos.com.