Longtime JazzTimes contributor Ken Franckling’s new book, Jazz in the Key of Light, illuminates more than 80 musicians through a different format than the traditional fine-art photography book. Images of the featured jazz artists are paired with essential quotes from interviews the author conducted with those musicians for a variety of mainstream and music publications over the past 30 years. The format enables readers to pause and reflect, if they wish, as the players share insights into their musical roots, creative processes, personal inspirations, values and, in a few cases, anecdotal humor.
The spotlighted musicians range from legends Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and Sarah Vaughan to a variety of today’s rising stars in jazz, including pianist Benny Green, bassist and singer Nicki Parrott, singer Gregory Porter and alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Newport Jazz Festival founding producer George Wein wrote the foreword.
Several of the photographs are historical captures. One shows saxophonist and composer Benny Carter at a master class with student musicians at Harvard in April 1988, as he listens to freshman Joshua Redman play a solo.
Franckling is a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. In June 2003, he won the Jazz Journalists Association’s Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award as Jazz Photographer of the Year.
Jazz in the Key of Light, a 160-page work published in hardcover format with dust jacket, retails at $59.95 plus shipping. It is available at Amazon.com. To obtain signed or inscribed copies (North American orders only), contact the author directly at Ken Franckling.
