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Jazz and the Visual Arts: Painting Music

Jazz had an incredible impact on the visual arts during the twentieth century. The jazz performances of the Albert Ammons Trio delighted Piet Mondrian and influenced his painting, “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” We will begin with the early modernism in jazz and art and progress chronologically to include contemporary developments. Through listening to the various styles of jazz as we examine representative art, we will explore the parallels and connections between the two modernist forms. Starting with a brief discussion of the collaboration between Wassily Kandinsky and his theories of sound and color and Arnold Schoenberg and his modernist atonal music, we will progress to the development of the ragtime and blues and proceed to early New Orleans Jazz, Swing, Bebop, and Fusion, as we identify similarities in American and European abstract painting. Included will be jazz greats from Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Mary Lou Williams; as well as the contributions of George and Ira Gershwin, Esperanza Spaulding, and singers Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, June Christy, and Samara Joy. Artists include Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Deborah Remington, Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stuart Davis, and Romare Bearden. American modern artist Abraham Walkowitz, a contemporary of photographer Alfred Stieglitz commented on the connection between music and art, “Abstract art…is a universal language, and dwells in the realm of music with equivalent emotion. Its melody is attuned to the receptive eye as music is to the ear.” Throughout our six-week journey together, we will swing to the “Fascinating Rhythm” of music and art.

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