Photojournalist Ted Williams remembers first hearing jazz on the radio as a youngster in the 1930s in Wichita, Kansas; especially the sounds of Earl Hines, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway broadcast from Chicago's legendary Grand Terrace Ballroom.
In the late 1940s, Williams began to merge his love of music and of photography into an avocation: capturing unguarded photographic studies of some of the era's greatest jazz musicians. Soon his work began to appear in the publications, Playboy and Ebony, based in Chicago. His coverage of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival landed him a 21-page layout in Down Beat magazine. The spread contained images of many of the major jazz figures of the era, including Lester Young, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong. And it is in Down Beat that some of Williams most memorable photos have appeared over the years, including cover shots of greats such as Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
Several major record labels, including Chicago's Vee-Jay and Mercury, secured Williams' services for cover art, and among the numerous other publications that have also featured his photographs are: Time, Saturday Evening Post, Mademoiselle, Newsweek, and Look.
Early on Williams was fortunate enough to twice capture jazz giant Charlie Parker in performance, including a date at Chicago's Persian Room in 1949. And he has amassed one of the largest bodies of images by a single photographer of Duke Ellington. Not just in a professional context, but---rare in the instance of Ellington---in more intimate, non-musical surroundings as well.
Along the way, many non-jazz personages have also found themselves subjects of Williams, including, for starters, Langston Hughes, Jack Benny, Edith Piaf, Lorraine Hansberry, Lenny Bruce, Ralph Ellison, and Martin Luther King. Williams also extensively covered the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. throughout much of the 1960s, as well as spending 1967-72 in Mexico where he sensitively documented the culture and daily life of that country's people. During this time he covered the '68 Olympics and participated in a group exhibition at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. But it is finally the jazz world to which Ted Williams, now based in Los Angeles, has continued to return over the years.
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