She dances alone in the Mercado accompanied by Elvis on his cardboard guitar. Crowds gather to watch as she glides through space with supple elegance. The music exists for her alone. It must be beautiful to inspire such grace.
The heyday of Jazz performance photography is long over. The great masters of the genre and the musicians they captured on film are gone. Those wonderful gritty dark club interiors were of course captured on film.
As far as I know the best album covers ever printed were for jazz LPs in the fifties and early sixties. They were often as avant-garde as the music itself. They mirrored qualities of the music transposed to the visual medium. Maybe you can tell I’m a jazz buff.
Every now and then I try my hand at jazz photography. For one thing I can’t resist music. In this era jazz musicians they are something exotic. They have a presence that may have been overlooked when the music was more common. Of course the best players were never main stream for the pop audience. You had to pay attention to the music and the musicians. They demanded that the audience be up to their standards.
For native peoples the agave was a multipurpose toolkit providing food, drink and fiber. Later inhabitants preferred to make tequila, mescal and sotol from various varieties of agave. They are the legendary firewater of desert America. Makes you crazy they say and don’t forget to eat the worm. Mescal and hot sun is a dangerous combination.