“Francis Wolff’s images of musicians at work are so relaxed and intimate that they capture the spirit not just of the moment but also the era.” – Herbie Hancock

One of the most renowned Jazz photographers of all time, Francis Wolff (1907-1971) was essential to the success of the Blue Note record label. Born Jakob Franz Wolff in Berlin, Germany, he soon became a Jazz enthusiast, despite the government ban placed on this type of music after 1933. In 1939, Wolff, a Jew, left Berlin where he had worked as a commercial photographer, and established himself in New York. He began working there with his childhood friend Alfred Lion, who had co-founded Blue Note Records with Max Margulis. The latter soon dropped out of his involvement in the company, and Wolff joined Lion in running it. Wolff took thousands of photographs during the Blue Note recording sessions and rehearsals. His highly personal visual concept would be forever associated with both Blue Note and jazz as a whole.

This book compiles more than 150 Francis Wolff photos of jazz stars, most of which are published here for the very first time. Among the many artists portrayed are Art Blakey, Tina Brooks, Clifford Brown, Donald Byrd, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and Wayne Shorter. It also includes a special introduction by Grammy Award Winning music historian and jazz critic Ashley Kahn.

Text in English, with an introduction in English, French and Spanish.

“Jean-Pierre was himself a musician, but his choice of instrument was a camera, which he never put away.” – Michel Legrand

“I am so happy to see Leloir’s work published, because behind each image is a story – one that needs to be told and appreciated. Leloir was not just a photographer; instead he was a preserver of history. As a result, this book holds hundreds of stories that shine a light onto the lives of those who live in these pages. Leloir had a unique ability to preserve an entire atmosphere and its surrounding emotions. between the four corners of a picture, but beyond his talent as a photographers, he presented himself not as paparazzi, but a friend. He and my other brother Herman Leonard were two of a kind; they had the same passion for photography and an endless supply of vision.” – Quincy Jones

This book gives ample proof of Jean-Pierre Leloir’s amazing ability to immortalise performers and to capture candid moments at the airport, backstage, and in the dressing rooms of the most legendary Paris jazz and concert venues: “I loved the people I photographed, so I made myself as available, yet as discreet as possible”, he used to say. “I never wanted to be a paparazzi. I wanted them to forget my presence so I could catch those little unexpected moments.” The selection of photographs showcased here has been carefully selected from Leloir’s immense catalogue. Many of the images have never been previously published before, and can be easily catalogued as ‘atypical’ shots, as the musicians were captured primarily in spontaneous situations, away from the fanfare of the stage.

Text in English with an introduction in English, French and Spanish.

For more than thirty years, Jazz Hot, the world’s oldest jazz magazine (launched in 1935, as DownBeat), has regularly published Pascal Kober’s photos, breakfast interviews, album and festival reviews and feature articles. Over the years, he has built up a unique catalogue of more than 35,000 jazz photos, taken all over the world. As a freelance journalist and photographer, he later contributed to many publications in the French and international press. The venue: musée de l’ancier évêchée. Located in the heart of Grenoble, the Bishop’s Palace (l’Ancien Évêché) is today a protected historical monument dated from the thirteenth century, housing a highly visited heritage museum. Since its establishment in 1998, this museum has been curated by Isabelle Lazier, an ethnologist, with a passion for both music and photography. In alphabetical order: Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Stanley Clarke, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Joao Gilberto, Dizzy Gillespie, George Gruntz, Jon Hendricks, Elvin and Hank Jones, Joachim Kühn, Michel Legrand, Manhattan Transfer, Branford and Ellis Marsalis, Mike Stern, Sam Rivers, Linda Womack and… the public.

Late in his life, confined to a chair or bed, Matisse transformed a simple technique into a medium for the creation of a major art. “I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.” Cutting dynamic shapes from painted paper, Matisse created his images. While producing pieces for Jazz, the artist used a large brush to write notes to himself on construction paper. The simple visual appearance of the words pleased Matisse, and he suggested using his reflective handwritten thoughts in juxtaposition with the images. The original first edition of Jazz was an artist’s book, printed in a limited quantity. This selection from the original is an exquisite suite of colour plates and text that, like the music it was named for, was invented in a spirit of improvisation and spontaneity. These magnificent cut-outs of pure colour celebrate the radiance and emotional intensity of the artist’s oeuvre.

In 1935, a violinist from Minnesota named Leon Abbey brought the first ‘all negro’ jazz band to Bombay, leaving behind a legacy that would last three decades. In a decade, swing found its way onto the streets of India. It influenced Hindi film music: the very soundtrack of Indian life. The optimism of jazz became an important element in the tunes that echoed the hopes of newly independent India. This book tells a story of India, especially of the city of Bombay, through the lives of a menagerie of geniuses, strivers, and eccentrics, both Indian and American, who helped jazz find a home in the sweaty subcontinent. They include the burly African-American pianist Teddy Weatherford; the Goan trumpet player Frank Fernand, whose epiphanic encounter with Mahatma Gandhi drove him to try to give jazz an Indian voice; Chic Chocolate, who was known as’ the Louis Armstrong of India’; Anthony Gonsalves, who lent his name to one of the most popular Bollywood tunes ever; and many more. Taj Mahal Foxtrot, at its heart, is a history of Bombay in swing time.

“The style that Jimmy Katz has developed over the years has become a distinctive feature in the iconography of jazz photography, comparable to the tone of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet or the sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone.” – Michael Cuscuna (Blue Note) The volume, published on the occasion of Umbria Jazz 2019, collects 80 images by Jimmy Katz (New York, 1957), award-winning photographer of the most famous jazz musicians. Over the course of two decades, Katz has immortalised the main actors of the jazz scene against the background of New York: Cassandra Wilson, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Keith Jarrett, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny and many more. In the studio, in clubs, on the streets, at work or at rest, Katz portrays the musicians in their most intimate aspects, capturing the traits that unequivocally define their personality. The wise use of lights and the glimpses of New York locations make his shots iconic and unmistakable, a sincere testimony to his great passion for jazz. Text in English and Italian.

They were reviled, ridiculed, and ignored. Today, the Zurich Concretists — along with Dada — are considered the most important art movement originating from Switzerland. Circle! Square! Progress! tells the story of the city’s avant-garde movement, which is rooted in the Bauhaus and renewed the formal language of art, shaped design and architecture, and also positioned itself politically. It traces its relations to the heroes of Constructivist–Concrete art, such as Johannes Itten, Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Theo van Doesburg, and Georges Vantongerloo, and looks at the influences that came from graphic art and advertising, jazz music and dance, colour theory, and mathematics.
Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, and Richard Paul Lohse — a group incidentally thrown together rather than true conspirators — formed the centre of gravity of a milieu that wrestled with critics, institutions, and authorities. Lavishly illustrated, the book explores Zurich as the habitat of highly gifted people engaged in lively debates at bohemian cafés, drifting in jazz clubs, celebrating excessively at the legendary annual artists’ fancy dress ball, achieving fame and artistic triumphs with creative power and a sense of mission. It illuminates the Zurich Concretists’ successes of the 1960s, their at times extremely violent quarrels of the 1970s, and their disputes about the beauty of form.

Post-war Paris brought a blossoming of culture and thought. The Nouvelle Vague transformed French cinema, young couturiers reinvigorated French fashion, existentialism flourished in literature and philosophy, and the city swung and swayed to a vibrant jazz and rock ‘n’ roll scene. In the middle of it all, was Paul Almasy.

The well-travelled photojournalist, born in Hungary, had made Paris his hometown and spent his days and nights wandering its alleys, avenues, and after-hours bars. Through his photographs, we visit the old markets and artist’s studios, its music joints and glamorous cafes, but also the burgeoning banlieues, where immigrant workers were housed in high-rise apartment blocks in peripheral and isolated locations.

Text in English, German and French.

From rockstars, pop icons, soul singers to jazz musicians – Michael Putland has photographed them all. Over his 50 year-long career, he has captured some of the world’s most famous singers and bands. Now he brings them all together in one fulminant photographic anthology.
Here, pictures of action-packed concerts are set aside intimate portraits of stars, and atmospheric still life shots accompany those of tension-filled tours and legendary performances. An exclusive insight into this era and the stories behind each photograph is offered by Putland’s personal anecdotes, creating a testament to music’s greatest moments and a must-have for all fans of music and photography.
– unique picture book with images from photographer Michael Putland – in black and white and in colour
– various famous artists found in this book: Madonna, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, ACDC and many more
– the photographer’s view tells the stories behind the photographs
– a great present for every music and photography enthusiast 
A photographic journey through 50 years of music history
Throughout the years, Putland’s work led him around the world. With great passion he photographed greats such as ABBA, The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner. His unique and incomparable photographs capture the soul of each musician, on and off the stage. With an eye for detail, he manages to portray the artists’ individual styles from new and unseen perspectives, making their music tangible through light, shadow and colour.
This photographic anthology is an homage to the greatest legends in music history and to the distinctive work and artistry of Michael Putland!

Text in English and German.

“This is a volume that will be informative to specialists, but also a visual delight for the average reader. An indispensable addition to the field.” ― John Wilmerding, Sarofim Professor of American Art, emeritus, Princeton University

“William Morgan offers an overview of the flowering of the collegiate Gothic style in America between the Civil War and the crash of 1929. Here is a splendidly illustrated book full of insight.” ― New Criterion
Explore America’s most breathtaking college campuses ― where Gilded Age wealth found a Gothic inspiration.

The Collegiate Gothic style, which flourished between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, was intended to lend an air of dignified history to America’s relatively youthful seats of higher learning. In fact, this mash-up of Oxbridge quaintness with piles of new money gave rise ― at schools like Princeton and Vassar, Yale and Chicago ― to unprecedented architectural fantasies that reshaped the image of the college campus. Today the ivy-covered monuments of Collegiate Gothic still exercise a powerful hold on the public imagination ― as evidenced, for example, by their prominent place in the Dark Academia aesthetic that has swept social media.

In Academia, the noted architectural historian William Morgan traces the entire arc of Collegiate Gothic, from its first emergence at campuses like Kenyon and Bowdoin to its apotheosis in James Gamble Rogers’s intricately detailed confections at Yale. Ever alert to the complicated cultural and social implications of this style, Morgan devotes special sections to its manifestations at prep schools and in the American South, and to contemporary revivals by architects like Robert A. M. Stern.

Illustrated throughout with well-chosen color photographs, Academia offers the ultimate campus tour of our faux-medieval cathedrals of learning.

Meet Ella Fitzgerald and discover the story of her life and work in this engagingly illustrated biography – narrated by the singer herself. Sometimes called “The First Lady of Song,” other times “The Queen of Jazz,” Ella Fitzgerald was one of the most popular singers of the 20th century. She not only worked with the greatest composers and musicians of her time, she won 13 Grammy Awards, received the National Medal of Arts, and the Kennedy Center Honors, and sold millions of records. Learn about the life of this incomparable diva, including her difficult childhood, her first performance in the famed Apollo Theater’s amateur night, and the discrimination she had to overcome. Ages: 6 plus

Born in 1935 in France, Jean-Louis Avril studied architecture at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Technique is central to his building process. He is passionate about jazz and is interested in American minimal art, particularly the work of Donald Judd. This monograph traces his career and focuses on his furniture, which represents the taste and aspirations of a generation of baby boomers. The choice of Celloderm, a derivative of cardboard, allows for a simple and accurate design language. The solutions display strong ideas: a beautiful shape, a practical function, an accessible price. His creations are very successful. With the creation of the company Marty-Lac (Carton Applications) in 1967 associated with his father-in-law, he achieved commercial success by developing numerous models of furniture, seats, tables, bed, shelves and lighting. They offer a strategy, a catalogue, sales outlet and export to England with Hull traders. Faithful to his commitment as an architect, he also imagines interior spaces with great spatial efficiency.

Text in French.

HR Giger (1940–2014) is one of the outstanding figures in Swiss art and design history, celebrated around the world for his design of the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film Alien. Yet very little is known about Giger’s childhood and youth in his native town of Chur. A trove of photographs, drawings by the young boy Hansruedi, and early art works that already reveal the future HR Giger’s artistic force, recently unearthed in the Giger family’s former holiday home in the Grisons, now offer intimate insights into his early years until the early 1960s.

Richly illustrated with more than 230 images from that collection, HR Giger: The Early Years tells, for the first time, the story of those two decades before Giger decided to move to Zurich and train as an architect and designer in 1962. Supplemented by brief texts as well as by statements from his schoolmates, friends, and others, these images form a lively picture of that period: family episodes; the Mickey Mouse adaptations Giger created at the age of ten; his growing love of jazz music, photography, and weapons; the trips around Europe he took together with his friends; and the youth culture of Chur of the 1950s and 1960s that shaped him. The volume will appeal to any fan of the extraordinary art and the fascinating personality of HR Giger.

Text in English, German and French.

In this opulent coffee table book, photographer Werner Pawlok shows us the diversity of New Orleans and paints a breathtaking portrait of the city. He captures special places, personalities and stories in his expressive photographs. We marvel at the colonial-style rooms steeped in history as well as the passionate music scene in the city, which is also known as the “cradle of jazz”. The magical feeling of life in this unique metropolis in the south of the USA becomes immediately tangible.

Text in English and German.

“Highly recommended for vinyl lovers. This should find a home in most public or academic music collection” – Library Journal “It’s the ritual element of it. It’s running your finger down the side of the record, trying to open the plastic wrap, and then pulling it out, seeing if there is an inner sleeve, hoping for a gatefold. Nowadays, you just walk over to your computer, you click three times, and you have 140,000 songs at your fingertips. Vinyl was just a different kind of thing – and it still is.” – Lars Ulrich, Metallica
In 2015, vinyl sales in the US increased by 30% – a raise for the tenth year in succession – and 1.29 million vinyl albums were sold in the UK in 2014, the first time the million mark has been surpassed since 1996. Vinyl, once thought to be a dying market, is now facing a major revival. Pop culture writer and historian Jennifer Otter Bickerdike interviews some of our most iconic artists, including hip-hop stars, Indie legends, DJs, producers, album cover designers, photographers, label founders and record store owners. Each superstar and superfan talks about their own experiences of vinyl and what it means to them, and the importance of its re-emergence – seemingly against all odds – as a physical format in the era of the digital economy. Why Vinyl Matters is part history, part future forecasting, part nostalgia and all celebration. A collection of more than 25 interviews, all illustrated with photos, sidebars, quotes, album covers, outtakes and much more. This is the book for anyone who has ever gone to the store and bought music on vinyl. Includes interviews with: Fatboy Slim; Tim Burgess (Charlatans); Henry Rollins (musician, actor, writer, comedian); Gaz Coombes (Supergrass); Lars Ulrich (Metallica); Maxi Jazz (Faithless); Rob da Bank (DJ and founder of Bestival); Clint Boone (Inspiral Carpets); Mike Ness (Social Distortion); Chief Xcel (Blackalicious); Cut Chemist (Jurassic 5); Fab 5 Freddy (hip hop pioneer, visual artist); Fat Mike (NOFX); Julia Ruzicka (Future of the Left); Steve Hackett (Genesis); Nick Hornby.

This book represents the first retrospective in print on the fascinating work of the English artist in jewellery David Watkins, who started out as a jazz pianist and sculptor but has been designing jewellery since the 1960s. At the outset of his career, he designed miniature works of sculpture. Later he began producing outsize wearable objects. Watkins is increasingly preoccupied with the interrelationship of the body and jewellery; his pieces of jewellery are becoming autonomous art objects in their own right. David Watkins’s versatility as a jewellery-designer is astonishing: the diverse materials he uses range from paper to acrylic, Neoprene and Colorcore to gold as well as a profusion of plastics. His aesthetic “idiom” encompasses stringent structuring as well as monochrome Minimalism and compositions improvised in stunning forms and vibrant colours. Watkins is equally comfortable working with traditional jewellery-making techniques and computer-aided design as used throughout the manufacturing sector. Drawing on a wealth of photographs, drawings and statements made by the artist himself, the book provides invaluable insights into the way David Watkins works.

Published on the occasion of the first Italian anthological exhibition dedicated to her, the volume retraces the successful work of Lisette Model, an artist of Austrian origin who had great importance in the development of photography in the Fifties and Sixties.

Parallel to her teaching activity – she had among her students authors who later became famous such as Diane Arbus and Larry Fink – Lisette Model was an ironic and irreverent photographer, able to capture in her shots the most grotesque aspects of post-war American society.

Alongside the most famous series – such as Promenade des Anglais, created in Nice, or the photographs dedicated to New Yorkers or the very suggestive ones made in jazz clubs – the book also includes lesser-known projects, which account for her personal and sardonic photographic language. The close-up shots, the recurring use of the flash, the exasperated contrasts are the expedients that the author resorts to in order to accentuate the imperfections of the bodies and the coarse gestures of her subjects, transformed into the characters of a sneering human comedy: an approach to reality that made Lisette Model the forerunner of a way of using photography that would find full realisation only in the following decades.

Text in English and Italian.

Yumi Katsura is the greatest fashion designer you’ve never heard of. One of the world’s bestselling luxury wedding-dress designers, she is venerated in her native Japan as a cultural icon and an inspirational business leader. Among her most celebrated pieces is a paper ‘washi mode’ dress housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a vestment worn by Pope John Paul II; and a diamond-laden wedding gown ranked among the most expensive of all time.
These beautifully illustrated pages tell the story of a woman who single-handedly created Japan’s modern wedding industry, turning centuries of tradition on its head. From Katsura’s childhood in the ruins of wartime Tokyo to her stellar international career, her life is an example to anyone who dreams of living for their passion. Written by Cori Coppola – producer of the acclaimed documentary House of Cardin – with co-author Kristin Coppola, this lavish fashion biography is a must-have for critics, connoisseurs and couture fans.

What do movable dolls’ eyes have to do with a Catholic church? Where could you meet Plain Bob Maximus and Surprise Major? Why does just one person know where Oliver Cromwell’s head is buried? And where is a dog a very large cat?

The answers to all these questions lie in Cambridge, which combines the magnificence of a medieval university with the dynamism of a high-technology hub. Tens of thousands of visitors flock to Cambridge every year to see the colleges, go punting on the river, and shop. But there is much more to Cambridge than its university and Silicon Fen. Over the centuries, town and gown together have transformed this city, which was an inland port until the 17th century. Eccentricity is something of a Cambridge tradition, and the town seems to delight in taking its visitors by surprise, whether that’s with a huge metal time-eating grasshopper, May Balls held in June, sculptures that dive into the ground feet first, or a museum that makes a feature of broken pottery. You will find these and many more curiosities in this book.