American Musicians: Photographs by Lee Friedlander Hardback - 1998

In the 1950s Lee Friedlander arrived in New York and began work as a house photographer for Atlantic Records. Over the next two decades, he would create some of their most famous album covers, and his picture style--including portraits of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and countless others--became forever associated with that golden era of American music. This book is Friedlander's tribute to the great musicians of the post-war years. It includes work from his trips through the Deep South, where he met Delta Blues musicians like Mississippi Fred McDowell, New Orleans marching bands and Nashville performers such as Johnny Cash, the Carter Sisters and Flatt & Scruggs. There are photographs of unknown bluegrass guitarists in Appalachia, photographs from tours with Count Basie's Orchestra, and images of Jazz geniuses like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and Yusef Lateef. Interviews by Friedlander with R&B legend Ruth Brown and modern jazz pioneer Steve Lacy are included along with an introduction by music impresario Joel Dorn.
"...an irresistible appeal... a new and exciting understanding of Friedlander, one of our most important contemporary photographers."--Andy Grundberg, The New York Times Book Review.
"This informail but vast [book] -- 514 images! -- may be the best look yet at a half century of American music... Few labors of loves ever paid off so handsomely."--Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek.
"The sheer breadth of American Musicicians puts it in a class by itself."--Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune.