Contents

CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION The Hearing Eye

i

ONE “Selling That Stuff ”: Advertising Art and Early Blues on 78s

Paul Oliver

TWO Blues on the Brush: Rose Piper’s Blues and Negro Folk Songs Paintings of the 1940s

Graham Lock

ii

THREE Michael Cummings: Stitching in Tempo

Interview

iii

FOUR “Pure Eye Music”: Norman Lewis, Abstract Expressionism, and Bebop

Sara Wood

FIVE Sam Middleton: The Painter as Improvising Soloist

Interview

SIX The Enigma of Bob Thompson

Richard H. King

SEVEN Wadsworth Jarrell and AFRICOBRA: Sheets of Color, Sheets of Sound

Interview

iv

EIGHT “We Used to Say ‘Stashed’ ”: Romare Bearden Paints the Blues

Robert G. O’Meally

NINE “Blues and the Abstract Truth”: Or, Did Romare Bearden Really Paint Jazz?

Johannes Völz

v

TEN Joe Overstreet: Light in Darkness

Interview

ELEVEN Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Robert Farris Thompson

TWELVE Ellen Banks: The Geometries of the Score

Interview

vi

THIRTEEN “And You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around”:
Jazz and Everyday Life in the Photographs of Roy DeCarava

Richard Ings

vii

FOURTEEN A Jackson in the House: Musicians Talk Painters

Interviews

Marty Ehrlich on Oliver Jackson

Jane Ira Bloom on Jackson Pollock

INDEX