At tonight’s LSU Jazz Ensemble concert, Professor Emeritus Ed Pramuk and Music Professor Bill Grimes will sit down to talk art and jazz and art inspired by jazz.
Also performing tonight will LSU’s Willis Delony and Brian Shaw will direct.
Get tickets now for this special evening that starts at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Claude L. Shaver Theatre in the Music & Dramatic Arts Building. Pramuk’s original works will be on display in the lobby. Order tickets online, print at home and bring to the concert, or call the Union box office at 225-578-5128.
Until then, Pramuk shared his thoughts about jazz paintings in this essay.
Jazz Paintings
The great jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams said, “Jazz is a conversation.” My collage-paintings, based on jazz themes, is my conversation with revered musicians, their music, art history, the world and myself. Juggling all these elements is a labor of love. I improvise, cut and paste dissimilar parts and hope they form into a new reality that does justice to each subject. Discovery occurs at every turn.
I do not feel alone when I work. I have the brilliant sounds of jazz men and women filling my studio.
I credit fellow-painter, John Opie, for encouraging me to use Polaroid technology to capture video images of jazz performances. These portraits, centered in the compositions, begin a chain-reaction of imagery, some appropriated, some invented and some directly painted. My goal is to create a visual equivalent of the jazz idiom in question. I make a conscious effort to select cultural references that puts free-wheeling associations into play. I am looking to make a home for each musician.
Paul Zimmer opens his poem, Sitting With Lester Young, with these lines:
Dusk must become your light
If you want to see Lester Young.
I recall the half-lit world of smoke-filled rooms of the jazz clubs of my youth. Late night adventures at the Cotton Club in Cleveland, The Yankee Inn and Benny Rivers in Akron, as well as visits to Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York, are the stuff of my imagination.
This exhibition is my tribute to an art form I love and a bouquet to the creative spirits who send their bodies and souls into the world, come rain or come shine.
Ed Pramuk
LSU Music News 