"Cosmic Scholar"- The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed

[sgcim]

Although there's a lot of other content on this wild polymath, Szwed brings out a lot of Smith's love for and incorporation of bop into his work. He's generally known for his anthology of folk music, but not much is known of his attempts to 'transcribe' bop tunes into his paintings, and later on into his films.

He would take a piece by Diz, "Manteca", and paint to it for sometimes a year or two, translating every sound on the record into a form e.g. dots, lines, circles, etc... until the entire painting became a literally painted version of Manteca. This wasn't a painted impression of Manteca; it was Manteca itself!

He had a great 'illumination' when he was high on pot, and went to see Dizzy play. He literally saw colored flashes, and at that point realized music could be put to his films. Before that, he had always shown his films silently. The rhythmic complexity of Dizzy's recordings put Harry's asynchronous matching of images to sound to the test.

When he lived in that all Black section of the Fillmore District in SF, Harry went to Bop City every night, taking notes, making sketches of the music. In 1950and 1951 he painted a series of large murals on the club's wall during the day, listening to jazz records while he worked, painting what he heard fueled by pot and Banzedrine.  Dexter Gordon sometimes sat listening with Harry while he was painting. He escaped the frame and canvas, the film, the projector, and the screen, filling the the room where jazz was performed with his visual perceptions of the music. large discs hang like planets with smaller discs within, giving off solar flares or starbursts. Running beneath the mural is what looks like a hand-scratched film soundtrack.

Percy Heath first met Harry at Jimbo's in 1950. He said, "all the musicians knew him as a bebop fan who was what he called a non-objective painter. He was a mystical person, and had a demeanor about him so that no one would approach except with awe and fascination. I used to ask him about so-and-so, and he'd say, 'You don't need to know about that, you've been through that in other lives. This is all an illusion except in your mind.'"

Smith began showing his films with a live jazz group providing the soundtrack to a film that will serve as the sixth instrument in a bebop jam session to consist of an expert group in person, on the piano, cornet, valve trombone, bass and drums. Silent movies had used live music to cue people to the mood of a scene, but Harry's films had no subject or narrative for the music to match, and the musicians collectively improvised on compositions they thought were suitable. At the SF Museum of Art, he did a concert like that with the Atlee Chapman band in 1950, playing  tunes like Boplicity , Move etc... to Harry's film. Later on, he moved to NYC and hung out every night at the Five Spot, hanging out with Monk whom he would have long conversations with. One of his reasons for moving to NYC was to paint a portrait of Monk, but he said Monk's rhythms were too complex to translate to one of his 'Transcriptions', and would have to make a film of him instead.