On
any given weekend, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, or Stan Getz might be
performing at the Ridgecrest Inn. Dave Brubeck or Louis Armstrong could be
headlining at the War Memorial. Ray Charles might be playing a dance at the
Roller Palace. And Ron Carter was always in the house band at the Pythodd Club.
           Welcome to Rochester in the late
1950s, the thought of which would make any jazz fan swoon.
           “It’s a time out of reach,” says
Paul Hoeffler. “You can’t go back there.”
           That world may be gone forever, but
thanks to Hoeffler, the golden age of jazz in Rochester will not soon be
forgotten. As a teenager studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology,
Hoeffler documented some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century with the
reverence of a jazz aficionado and the aesthetic elegance of a master
photographer.
           His photographs have been used on
album covers and in Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary. Now the largest collection of them ever displayed is on view at
the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the Rush Rhees Library at
the University of Rochester, where they are part of the permanent collection.
           Hoeffler had no fancy equipment,
just a used pre-WWII Leica 3C. He usually shot with available light,
occasionally using a strobe unit that he won in a Boys Life magazine contest in 1953. His modest gear didn’t stop him
from taking knock-out photographs, capturing the energy and spirit of the time:
Jimmy Smith gazing down at the keyboard of his Hammond organ, Louis Armstrong
radiating love to an audience, Oscar Peterson’s trio in an image so vivid you
can almost walk right into it, and so many more.
           When Hoeffler arrived at RIT in the mid-1950s,
there were three teachers working with the illustrative side of photography:
Charles Arnold, Minor White, and Ralph Hattersley. Hoeffler remembers them as
dedicated, kind, firm individuals who knew how to open up imaginations at a
time when photography was not commonly regarded as art.
           “A lot of students were there on the
GI Bill after Korea or World War II,” says Hoeffler. “They were there to learn
a trade, and all of a sudden you have Minor White talking about the sound of
one hand clapping. What do you mean by that, Mac? So there was a confrontation,
which was very healthy.”
           While most students were in their
20s and 30s, Hoeffler was 17, fresh out of high school. Born in Buffalo, he had
grown up in New England, where he was drawn to photography by his love of
vanishing locomotives. Using his dad’s Argus C4, he chased steam engines. It
wasn’t long before he outgrew drugstore processing and put together a darkroom.
           By the early 1950s, Hoeffler was
earning money shooting local sports events. By the age of 18 he was spending
summers on the staff of the Providence
Journal. Still, he never regarded photography as an intellectual pursuit.
           “It was strictly intuitive; I
followed what was in my mind’s eye. If I followed my instincts things would
work out pretty well.”
           But things were not working out well
when he started at RIT.
           “He never showed up for my morning
class,” Arnold says. “So I found out where he lived and went to his apartment.
He answered the door half asleep and invited me in. There was pail of water on
the floor in his room; in it were eight reels with freshly developed film. He
explained that he spent every night at the Pythodd until it closed at 2 a.m.
Then he processed his film.”
           Not showing up for class could get
you kicked out of school. But Arnold knew that some of the best artists don’t
toe the line.
           “He was doing exactly what I wanted
students to do,” Arnold says. “He was making marvelous photographs. So we
worked out a gentleman’s agreement: He would come show me work and I would
criticize it.”
           But how did a 17-year-old white kid
from New England end up closing black jazz clubs?
           “I grew up in a middle-class home;
there was not a lot of music around. We were 50 miles from Boston, but we never
got to hear the Boston Symphony. But the radio played a lot of big band remotes
in the early 1950s, so it would get into my ear. I hadn’t had any direct
contact with the music, but in Rochester there were small clubs you could go
into that had music. Even though I was a bit under age I was able to get in.”
Hoeffler
remembers the day he got started. He walked over to the Pythodd, a couple of
blocks from his apartment. He took some shots of the local musicians, printed
them, and brought them back the next week. Through his photography, he got to
know Bobbie Hendricks (one of singer John Hendricks’ 16 siblings), who helped
run the club.
           “I’d be one of the very few white
people in there, but I never felt a draft,” Hoeffler says. “Nobody ever gave me
a hassle. This was true in most of the situations. I’d usually know somebody
and be introduced. There was a trust; this wasn’t some honky kid walking in. I
had a purpose and I think people sensed that.”
           Hoeffler had a similar relationship
with Jane Morey, who owned the Ridgecrest Inn.
           “These pictures would not exist
without three people,” says Hoeffler, “Bobbie Hendricks, Jane Morey, and Will
Moyle.”
           Moyle, a Rochester broadcasting
legend, took Hoeffler under his wing, allowing him to photograph shows he
produced at the War Memorial and taking him out to lunch with stars like George
Shearing. Moyle gave Hoeffler access to the backstage, where he was able to
take candid photos.
           One of the first musicians Hoeffler
photographed was Nat King Cole, who was chatting with Mel Torme before a show.
Hoeffler began shooting, unobtrusively.
           “He looked over at me and said, ‘You
might want to have a more formal picture.’ He put his arms on the back of the
chair and posed for me.”
           Another memorable encounter occurred
in the fall of 1955.
           “With Louis Armstrong, I was in the
wings photographing for the first half. At intermission I went back and there
were people around Louis’ dressing room. He was handing out 5, 10, and 20
dollar bills — a lot of money in 1955 — to people who needed ‘a touch.’
Then he went back in his dressing room and he and his trombonist, Trummy Young,
were chatting. I shot a few pictures and he looked up and said, ‘You might want
to have a picture like this.’ He put a bandana around his head and put the horn
up to his lips and posed for me.”
           Hoeffler shot a half-dozen frames.
Before leaving he turned to Armstrong.
           “I said, ‘By the way, Mr. Armstrong,
last year I saw you in The Glenn Miller
Story and you played a tune called “Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya,” which I thought was
marvelous. Is there any chance you could play that in the second half?’ He
looked up at Trummy Young and said, ‘You think we can play that for our
friend?’ Trummy nodded, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that.’ I thanked him and went down into
the pit right in front of the stage.
           “The band came out and played a
number, and then Armstrong spotted me a few feet down in front of him. He made
an announcement to the audience: ‘Last year we made a movie about Glenn Miller
and we played a tune called “Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya.” We have a special friend here tonight
who has requested that tune, and we’d like to play that and dedicate it to our
friend.’ I was floating.”
           Hoeffler bemoans the fact that this
sort of personal contact for photographers has all but vanished.
           “You have all these stage managers
who come up with 20 reasons why you can’t do something. Or you have maybe the
first eight bars of the first tune to shoot. I don’t work that way.”
           As a result, Hoeffler believes many
contemporary performers never allow themselves to be presented in a compelling
way to the public.
           “Sometimes there’s not even a
backstage anymore. At festivals there are trailers, which are rather
unglamorous and unromantic. There are a lot of generic pictures being done
today which don’t mean very much.”
           But access isn’t the only reason for
the magic in Hoeffler’s images. He believes it’s the musicians themselves.
           “I had access to the original,
first-generation players and artists,” Hoeffler says. “Today there’s a huge
amount of very talented and very well-trained performers. There aren’t a lot of
individualists, though, and individuality was really valued then. You could
tell an Armstrong from a Roy Eldridge from a Dizzy Gillespie from a Miles
Davis. Today, I don’t know. A lot of players are so good and they play all the
right notes, but I don’t find the individuality.”
           In his nightly excursions, Hoeffler
photographed more than musicians. He portrayed Rochester’s African-American
community in a manner reminiscent of the way Eugene Atget and Henri
Cartier-Bresson caught the essence of Parisian life.
           “You realize there’s all this energy
going on around the musicians, which is why they’re on the stand performing,”
he says. “You look around and you have all these different personalities
reacting to the music in different ways. Some dance, some simply stand there
and listen and nod their heads, some are having conversations with other people
and the music is just a background, but they’re all involved.”
           As for his attraction to black
culture: “I just found there was more going on of interest in the black
community than around the college where you had these kids in crew cuts and
white bucks, swallowing goldfish.”
           For Hoeffler, documenting the jazz
scene soon moved beyond covering gigs. For his senior thesis, he decided to
examine the musical career and life of Ron Carter, who Hoeffler had gotten to
know from the house bands at the Pythodd and the Ridgecrest Inn.
           After recording thousands of albums
over the last four decades, Carter is firmly in the pantheon of jazz greats.
But back in the late 1950s he was a student at the Eastman School of Music,
encountering some of the racial prejudice of the era.
           The series provided an opportunity
for Hoeffler to explore social issues and music. Black students were rare at Eastman, and jazz did not receive the
respect it enjoys today.
           “There’s one picture of Ron
practicing cello in a rehearsal room at Eastman. He’d written out some Sonny
Rollins lines transcribed for cello. As I was photographing, one of his
teachers came in and stood at the door for a while and said, ‘Oh, what an ugly
sound,’ and turned and walked out.”
           When he began the series, Carter had
just gotten married. Many of the shots involve no instruments at all, just a
young couple getting to know each other.
One of
Hoeffler’s most famous photographs, taken outside of Rochester, depicts a
woman who came to be known as the Bedford Blonde. Sitting in the front row at
the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, she got up and danced during a 27-chorus
saxophone solo by Paul Gonsalves of the Duke Ellington band, igniting a
reaction from the band and the crowd.
           “Everybody was sort of on that
evening,” says Hoeffler. “There was an electricity in the air. Gerry Mulligan,
Teddy Wilson, and Anita O’Day had performed and some people were getting up and
leaving. It was a long evening. There was this shock of electricity through the
whole audience. You could sense something was happening, this wave of energy.
The band really was in a groove. Then the ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo’ came about
and the audience just surged up around the bandstand. They all have these
marvelous expressions on their faces. I was in the zone and that doesn’t happen
very often.”
           But exhilarating times were matched
by tragic moments. Hoeffler caught Billie Holiday at the end of her career.
           “She was a woman caught up in a
cycle that she never seemed able to get away from,” he says. “I didn’t really
see very much of her as a person, there was more of a shell at that time. The
week she was at the Ridgecrest, I went out three times. There weren’t many
people at the tables. On weekends it would fill up. She would get into a song
and then she’d forget where she was. I have a couple of pictures where she’s
turning around to the pianist, Mal Waldron, and she can’t remember what she’s
doing.”
           Hoeffler did manage to capture some
happier moments in pictures of Holiday with her dog, Peppi. “This was a joy for
her that removed a lot of the cares and worries and woes that she had.”
           When 20-year-old trumpeter Lee
Morgan came to town with Art Blakey in the fall of 1958, Hoeffler tried
something different.
           “I said ‘Lee, let’s go outside.'” He
took the picture in a dark parking lot, with a somewhat frightened looking
Morgan about to put his trumpet to his lips. A background sign saying NO OUTLET
became an sadly ironic twist when Morgan was shot by his wife in a New York
City bar 12 years later.
           After a while, Hoeffler’s jazz
connections led him to bring artists like Oscar Peterson and Eric Dolphy to
RIT. He would ask the musicians to play and then approach the Student Council
for funds. They would tell him he had to ask in advance. Then, reluctantly,
they’d hand over a check, saying “This is the last time!”
           When Blakey visited the school,
Hoeffler took him up to the photo studio for a formal portrait. Blakey liked it
so much he insisted on using it as an album cover. A week later, Hoeffler got a
phone call from Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at Blue Note Records, who offered
him $40 to use the shot.
           “I thought: This is a long-distance
call from New York. This was a big deal in 1958. I said ‘$50.’ I hear muttering
in German. ‘Alright, $50!'”
           The album was Moanin’ — Blakey’s classic. Decades later, when it came out on
CD, Hoeffler contacted the producer and explained the situation. He received a
$500 check.
           Perhaps Hoeffler’s most stunning
photograph depicts organist Jimmy Smith.
           “I had something in my mind’s eye.
Rather than the conventional shot, at keyboard level or in front of the
instrument, I thought I’d get underneath and shoot up,” Hoeffler says. “I was
able to place a strobe off to the side and create this deep shadow. I got
underneath the Hammond organ that he had and I was able to scrunch myself
around and got off a number of frames both horizontal and vertical. It was a
late-night kind of thing.”
There were
some that got away. Hoeffler had just finished shooting Thelonious Monk surrounded
by members of the Prague Mime Troup at New York’s Village Gate. It was a
humorous photo with the mimes hanging on to every word by the equally silent
Monk.
           “I had one frame left. Everybody
else had left, but Monk is still sitting there. I really wanted to photograph
him by himself. But I just felt I would intrude. So we just looked at each
other. I nodded and we left it.”
           Art Tatum died the week before he
was going to appear at the Ridgecrest. And despite seeing Ben Webster many
times, Hoeffler never photographed him.
           “You almost took some of the people
for granted,” he says. “There were concerts with Ellington that I went to where
I didn’t have my camera. I kick myself because now you realize that each and
every opportunity was precious. But you can also build up this sense of
responsibility. Then you’re on edge so much that you’re getting no pleasure
from it whatsoever. It’s like being pulled in two different directions.”
           Hoeffler was never a generic
craftsman who could photograph anyone. He had to be involved.
           “Everything that I photographed was
a personal commitment,” he says. “That takes a lot out of you because you’re
giving a great deal. Cartier-Bresson said it well, ‘You don’t take a
photograph; a photograph takes you.’ You’re constantly seeing images and you’re
moving around a little bit because you want to get the composition accurate.
And you cannot turn that off. It’s almost a curse.”
           Hoeffler has had a busy career
beyond his Rochester years. He shot the first several P.D.Q. Bach album covers,
worked for Vanguard Records, and shot countless images for the New York Times arts page. He made a name
for himself in the classical world and got to know greats like Leopold
Stokowski. He’s never slowed down long enough to examine countless unprinted
negatives — possible treasures waiting to see the light.
           “I literally don’t have the time to
go looking and print for myself,” he says. “I’m always printing for a project.”
           Now 65, Hoeffler lives in Toronto
with his wife, a classical pianist. He still does his black and white printing
himself and sells his work on the Internet (www.paulhoeffler.com) and in
galleries. He still photographs in the arts and also shoots scenes north of
Toronto that he believes will not exist in 10 years: barns, farms, single-lane
bridges. “All of these things — in many cases, they’re going to be decimated
by what is called progress.”
           But thanks to an obsession Hoeffler
had five decades ago, we have a glorious pictorial record of a pivotal era in
American music.
Mid-Century
Jazz in Rochester, 1955-1962: Photographic Prints from the Paul Hoeffler
Archivecontinues
through February 15 at the Rare Books & Special Collections Department,
second floor, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5
p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m. to
2 p.m. Saturday. Info: 275-4477.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2003.
