Photos Make CAW Swing

Side by side, they’re studies in coolness and heat, like the music they play has often been. They’re examples of how far jazz has traveled; one is Afro-Cuban composer Melvis Santa and the other is South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela. They’re brought together by the lens of Maurice D. Robertson, a photographer who, in capturing them and dozens of other jazz musicians practicing their craft, shows an astonishing range of expression in the world of jazz — and finds New Haven’s place in it.

“Expressions in Sound and Movement: Jazz Portraits,” the exhibit of Robertson’s photographs, is now at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street through Aug. 24, with a reception on Saturday, Aug. 17 at 5 p.m.

“With my camera in hand, for the past four decades, I have been chronicling jazz and other music genres,” Robertson writes in an accompanying statement. ​“I am attempting to convey to the viewer both the flowing dynamism and intimate meditative qualities of musicians intensely at play. Through strict portraiture, camera speed and lighting experimentation, I attempt to instill rapport and intimacy with the vitality of music making. I have been on the set, bearing witness since the seventies, with no formal art training, a student of the school of trial and error…. My ongoing photo work is a love affair with jazz and its offshoots and is simply a quest for displaying the energy of performance and connecting the audience to some of the past and present contributors to America’s greatest cultural contribution to the world.”

Robertson’s infectious enthusiasm for the music — the Connecticut-based photographer also hosts a jazz show on WWUH out of Hartford — is on ample display in his images. It’s clear from each shot that he loves them all and the music they make.

For people with only a passing familiarity with jazz, Robertson’s images also reaffirm the way in which jazz musicians have always looked criminally cool in photographs. Beyond the iconic image of Dexter Gordon wreathed in smoke, there’s Thelonious Monk working the keys of a piano, or John Coltrane looking like he’s already playing himself into another dimension, or Duke Ellington’s effortless charm. Whether you know the names of the musicians or not, Robertson’s images are soaked in that same vibe.

Though there are also big names in Robertson’s collection of images — a testament to the depth of his passion for going to jazz shows for decades all over the Northeast. There’s Sun Ra at the piano at Sweet Basil’s in New York City. Wynton Marsalis is working hard at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1989. Lionel Hampton appears to be deep in concentration over his vibraphone in Cranbury Park in Norwalk, from 1997. There’s drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach, bassist Ron Carter, and perhaps most iconic of all, a shadow-drenched photo of Miles Davis at Avery Fisher Hall in New York from 1987.

But Robertson isn’t just star hunting, and in the course of the exhibit, he deftly outlines New Haven’s own place in the jazz tradition. There’s an understated still life of a saxophone at Cafe Nine, and there’s Tony Williams on the drums on the New Haven Green. There’s saxophonist Wayne Escoffery (who has a concert tonight at Neighborhood Music School) at Yale in 2018, and there’s trumpeter Jeremy Pelt working a sweat at Firehouse 12 in 2009. Side by side in the exhibit is Matthew Shipp — a regular visitor to New Haven — in Amherst in 2014, and a double portrait of bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, among the leading lights of New Haven’s (and, really, the country’s) jazz scene, performing together at Firehouse 12 in 2018. As a photographer, Robertson doesn’t play favorites. His lens loves them all.

So it makes sense that the first floor of CAW’s gallery is bursting with Robertson’s images. As they spread from the back wall to the sides to the columns next to the windows — that’s avant-garde master Wadada Leo Smith looking toward the street — their urgency and vitality is that much more evident. It’s possible to imagine that the music is somehow embedded in the paper, and if you concentrated hard enough, you could hear it.

“Expressions in Sound and Movement” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Aug. 24, with a reception on Aug. 17 at 5 p.m. Click here for hours and more information.