DianaKrallfans.com

These days, Tate's favorite musician is Diana Krall.

“And do you know why?” he asks. “Because she moves. Like the old jazz musicians. A lot of these new jazz musicians, they're just dead. She's got life in her.”

Source: http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.a ... 79CF0247B7

To get an endorsement from someone like this really means something!

"She's got life in her."

(The jazz doctors can put away their resus paddles!)

The freely available access period has expired. I would still encourage you to register and get the official article which includes some of his photos (none of Diana though). You’ll see why his endorsement is meaningful.

Legends, In Black And White
Mystic's Harry Tate photographed many of music's greatest influences By BEN JOHNSON
Day Staff Writer, Arts/Music Reporter
Published on 10/23/2005

Sometimes Harry Tate has to look at the picture to remember the name. “See what happens to your brain?” he asks, while poring over the wealth of photographs he has taken over the years. Tate is 84, and his Mystic home is practically a museum.

“Like this guy,” he says. “A horn player. Name begins with an L — used to call him ‘Pres.' I pulled him outside and took his picture in the street, right in front of the wall.”

Jazz giant Lester Young stares out of a photograph, head cocked to one side, his tenor sax in his mouth. It's a beautiful image, the light of an anonymous Los Angeles club playing across the musician's face.

Like most men his age, Tate has many stories to tell, from his military service in Manila during World War II to adventures climbing the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. There are photos of all of it, but Tate's portraits of the late 1930s West Coast jazz scene make up an extraordinary collection that, for the most part, can only be seen if you visit his home.

Harry Tate was born in Mineola, N.Y., in 1921. When his father got a job covering the Pacific Coast as a wholesale fabric salesman, Tate's family relocated to Los Angeles, where the boy began to study photography and design at the Art Center (now the prestigious Art Center College of Design).

In the late 1930s, a lot of jazz musicians were living and playing on the West Coast. As a mere teenager with a second-hand camera, he got close to the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Count Basie, Joe Jones, Johnny Hodges, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and many other musicians playing around Los Angeles.

“I took these photos before I went off to war, mostly during 1936, '37 and '38. I was going to school at the same time, but you could, after school, go into these places, and I had some friends that introduced me to the Spirits of Rhythm, and others,” Tate says.

A jazz enthusiast even at the age of 15, Tate couldn't get into Hollywood clubs at night. So he would go in the afternoons and evenings when the musicians were rehearsing. As long as he promised to stay out of the way, the teenager could watch and listen. Sometimes they let him take some pictures.

“Duke Ellington was playing a nightclub in South Gate, which is near the water, near Huntington Beach. I found out that the trick to do was to go there on Sunday, because you could walk in then — nobody would stop you or anything. Just go in, and you could sit down and listen. Duke saw me there maybe a couple of times. And the other guys in the band got to know me a little bit. Finally I showed him a couple of pictures — things that I'd already made,” Tate says.

A few days after showing Ellington some of his prints, Tate got a call at home.

“Someone's on the phone for you,” said his father. “Do you know anybody named Duke?”

Ellington asked Tate to come back to the club and take some pictures of his orchestra for an album. The two developed a friendship, and Tate was allowed to come more often, sometimes at night, to see Ellington's orchestra play.

Before long, Tate had a whole portfolio of the many players in the big band. Sometimes, he would lie down on stage right near percussionist Joe Jones during a performance, staying quiet and out of sight, where he could enjoy the music from close up.

Tate's unprecedented access to musicians like Ellington was a result of his humble approach. Once the word got around that the boy was all right, he found himself spending time around more and more of the area's top musicians.

“They were all really good guys,” he says. “And they weren't used to anybody being nice to them. It was always orders, like ‘Hey, boy, do this' or ‘You! do that.' I never gave orders. I would say, ‘May I do this?' or ‘Is it all right if I did that?' If you treated them with respect, they'd let you in. I treated Duke like the emperor. And I had an interest in music. I'd ask him, ‘Hey, what's that you're playing?' and he would respond to that.”

Other people in the jazz scene responded to Tate's industriousness. Jazz Man Records, a Hollywood-based company where Tate bought a lot of vinyl, saw some of the teenager's photos and began to bring him to exclusive parties and performances, where Tate got even more chances to rub elbows with musicians, actors, and other celebrities — and sometimes take their picture.

Tate's success at getting close to so many musicians also had a lot to do with his talent as a photographer. At the Art Center, one of Tate's instructors was famous naturalist photographer and print perfectionist Ansel Adams. Adams' influence shows in the beautiful prints that Tate keeps in his old photo-paper boxes.

“He would take us on field trips to ranches in the valley where they filmed westerns,” says Tate of Adams. “We would go around taking pictures all over the place, while Ansel would spend hours taking pictures of a single leaf on the ground, or getting all angles around a tree.”

When World War II started, Tate continued his photography while stationed with the Army in Manila, taking many pictures of the local culture and the devastating effects of war. He made lots of friends in his company, as several of Tate's fellow privates were also from Los Angeles.

“They were all guys from Hollywood, so we had a great time together. Lots of funny guys — actors, musicians and guys who worked in movies,” he says. But when Tate returned to Los Angeles in 1946, many of the connections he had made in the jazz world had disappeared or moved to New York, where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were inventing bebop.

“By then it was all rock and roll,” Tate says. “Elvis was getting started around then, and all of the guys around were white. I couldn't establish the same kind of rapport with them — they didn't trust me.”

Keeping photography as a hobby, Tate followed in his father's footsteps, finding post-war work as a fabric salesman. He still listened to a lot of the music happening around Los Angeles, and saw Frank Sinatra in a sold-out performance at the height of the singer's game. A job transfer brought him back to the East Coast in 1953.

These days, Tate's favorite musician is Diana Krall.

“And do you know why?” he asks. “Because she moves. Like the old jazz musicians. A lot of these new jazz musicians, they're just dead. She's got life in her.”

Every once in a while, Tate will see one of his photos on the television or in a magazine, perhaps from a print he sold to Jazz Man records or someone else. Sometimes he's credited and sometimes he's not. But he's never had an exhibit or a book of his photographs published. For now, they serve as an aid to his memory of past experiences, a way to come close again to the music and people Tate loved dearly as a young man.

“That's what a photograph is supposed to do,” he says. “If it's done right, a picture can tell a story. That's what I always tried to do with my pictures. That's how I remember those times.”

© The Day Publishing Co., 2005

Yes, after reading the story, I'd say his endorsement of Diana is high praise, indeed.