Camera Colossus

or, The music that helps me make things

As I write this I’m listening to the strains of “St. Thomas,’ the opening track from Sonny Rollins’s 1957 hard bop masterpiece, Saxophone Colossus. Two decades ago, newly adult me started listening to jazz while I write. Soon thereafter I stumbled upon what would become one of my all-time favorite albums.

Music has always played a pretty significant role in my life, but I had never given much consideration to jazz. I have no idea what inspired me to test the waters but I’m glad I did. Never before had I been able to listen to music while writing, because the lyrics I’m hearing and the words I’m writing get scrambled up and my brain gets stuck. So this discovery of vintage jazz as the ideal lubricant for my writing was a real blessing. Now when I write it’s all jazz all the time—ideally something with a saxophone, maybe an exceptional drummer or pianist, and never any vocals. 

I wish I could go back to experience the first time I put on Saxophone Colossus just so I could pay attention to how it made me feel. Did it move me deeply that first spin, or did it take a while before I realized I was in love? Did I have any inkling how profoundly important it would become in my writing life? Not likely. However many words I’ve written—millions at this point, perhaps?—I bet half of them have been typed to the sounds of Sonny Rollins. 

When I’ve been writing a lot and feel the need to mix it up, I’ll shift from Saxophone Colossus to some of Sonny’s other albums, most frequently East Broadway Rundown and Tenor Madness. When I’ve been really leaning on Sonny extensively, I’ll change it up even further. Next in line are Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Art Blakey’s Moanin’, Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come, and a more recent favorite, Ben Webster’s Soulville. Plenty of others make appearances in the rotation—Miles Davis is the trumpeter exception to my saxophone rule, and Art Pepper sneaks in from a later decade—but mostly it’s Sonny and the mid-century greats. 

If my words have a soundtrack, this is it. 

I was inspired to write this piece because earlier today I sat down to write something else with a tune in my head. It was John Prine’s “Sam Stone,” and I put it on and hummed along as I booted up my computer, opened the document and began to type. I’d not finished the first sentence before I recognized it just wasn’t going to work. My writing fingers get tangled when my writing brain is busy listening to lyrics. I knew it was likely, and yet I thought maybe this time it would be different. It never is. What would we be without wishful thinking.

I can’t write with lyrics. I simply cannot do it—with one exception: vintage French cafe music. Think Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet. The older and quainter the better. This stuff does contain lyrics, but because I don’t speak any romance languages the words come across as gibberish and don’t fire the synapses in the language center of my brain. At least that’s my theory. 

I may have found jazz because of its lack of lyrics, but after years of working with it it’s become essential to my process. Music stimulates my creativity and helps me find my way into a flow state. It also provides inspiration. It’s much the same feeling I get when I’m moved by a painting in a museum or a performance on a stage or the work of an amazing photographer. Surrounding myself with the art of others, particularly when I connect with it in a visceral way, helps my creative energy and puts me in the zone. 

This all got me thinking about the way I use music to facilitate not just my writing but all of my creative endeavors. I assume that’s somewhat universal, no? 

Music’s purpose has changed for me over the years. Kid me just wanted to be entertained. Young adult me wanted to be impressed. Middle aged me wants both of those plus to be simultaneously inspired and soothed. That weird combination I think is why the right music really helps me do my thing. 

As a little kid I’d listen to music in our suburban basement, behind the old plaid couch, wearing a giant set of Pioneer SE-70 headphones, listening to my parents’ John Denver and Carole King records, and that one Beatles four-track tape.¹ Eventually I graduated to a Walkman and Van Halen cassettes, but vinyl held my interest well into the era of compact discs. I was no audiophile, though. My interest was practical. I was a budding photographer who loved perusing the big pictures on record sleeves and—with the best albums—gatefold packaging. 

Music has become tied to the times I want to be creative—taking pictures, writing words, making things. During any right-brained activity I grease the wheels with music.

In the studio I listen to all sorts of things, but it’s almost always on vinyl. I never dumped my record collection even for those bleak decades when record players were found only in junk shops and eBay listings, and once they started their comeback I was primed to take advantage with my trusty Technics SL-1200.² Some people even gave me their records in lieu of throwing them out. Consequently I’ve got many more now than I did in the vinyl heyday.

It’s really fun having an old-school stereo in the studio, as well as a prominently but unfussily displayed stack of LPs. What this does is, along with filling the studio with the pleasant pops and crackles of old records, it acts as a fast friend maker. Maybe one in a hundred people who enter the studio catch sight of the record player and make a beeline straight to it. But when they do, it’s an instant icebreaker. Something about a stack of vinyl says, “I enjoy music and would like to talk to you about it.” For those who reciprocate we hit it off immediately, sharing stories of our favorite albums, why they matter and what we’re listening to today. I’m automatically inclined to like those lovely souls who come in and head straight for the hi-fi. 

What’s the soundtrack to the studio? Oddly enough it’s records from my early childhood that I never listened to until I was an adult. Elvis Costello’s first record, My Aim Is True, is about as timeless a rock album as you can find and it holds the record for most spins, I’m sure. Similarly, The Cars eponymous 1978 debut is wall to wall bangers and something super fun to sing along to while building sets and dialing in lights. 

Other popular plays in the studio include the Beatles and the Stones, largely because their timeless quality tends to be well received by strangers of all ages and persuasions. I don’t want to offend guests with anything too challenging, like my Aphrodite’s Child double album or Swedish bluegrass covers of heavy metal songs.³

When I think about all the ways music has been perpetually intertwined with my creative life, I tend to think about specific albums that coincide with specific eras—like precise and embarrassing audio time capsules. I came up in the darkroom era (the end of it, thank you very much) and when I envision the red glow of a cramped closet workspace during college I hear one album ringing in my ears: The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. This correlation exists because I had the cassette in 1994 and while working at the college newspaper I’d blast it on the darkroom boombox that sat on the shelf by the safelight. To this day when I hear the opening strains of the first track (“Cherub Rock,” arguably the most invigorating album opener of all time) I can smell the Dektol and feel the fixer on my fingers. 

The Smashing Pumpkins are all over the soundtrack of my earliest photography memories, in fact. I first heard of the band in high school, in Mr. Colgan’s photo class,⁴ when Shawna Morris loaned me her Gish CD. Shawna was cool and edgy with great hair and obviously the hippest taste in music, so I gave it a shot and now when I think about high school photo class I think about that band, that girl and that teacher. A few years later, around the same time as I would jam Siamese Dream in the darkroom, I took a trip to Death Valley with a half dozen other photo students. Atop my list of memories from our time driving through the desert in a rented RV was our ragtag group singing along to the radio hit of the moment: the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today.” We all sang at the top of our lungs, save one: the too-cool-for-school guy with the serious mohawk, knee-high Doc Martens and a Throbbing Gristle t-shirt. 

I suppose the grunge era’s evidence all over my school-age memories should come as no surprise. I was studying photography in the heart of the 90s, after all. But none of what I would consider my real musical favorites from that time are tied to photography. You can choose what you like, but you don’t get to choose what makes core memories. 

Obviously music is highly personal and you might be reading this and judging my terrible taste. I have no problem with that. (You’re wrong, of course, but I have no problem with it.) Anyone who argues otherwise is missing the point. 

The older I get the less I fret over other peoples’ preferences, especially when it comes to music. It’s a wide world and there’s a lot of amazing stuff to encounter. I think maintaining openness is a pretty essential life skill, actually. Maybe I’m naive, but I think the best artists are open to being pleasantly surprised. One might say that’s the entirety of the job, actually.

I try to work this way as much as possible, too. What might I learn if instead of doing what I typically do, this time I’ll try something different? This goes for lighting setups and lens options as well as what I look at and listen to.

I’m envious of musicians. What other genre of art is so simultaneously magical and practical? It’s got to be the medium most consistently used by artists across disciplines in the creation of their own work. How many studios are filled with the strains of another artist’s creative output?

Along those same lines, a friend once said “You can’t hang drywall if you’re not listening to KSHE 95.” We were remodeling his South St. Louis Victorian and I’ll be darned if I didn’t leave that day believing truer words were never spoken. The soundtrack of this old-school classic rock radio station was built on Foghat, Joe Cocker and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and it turns out that stuff makes mudding and sanding go so much smoother. I haven’t tested it, but my assumption is it’s equally effective for plumbing and electrical projects as well. 

And now a small ask of you, dear reader. If you are so inclined, I’d like to hear about the songs or albums or genres of music that are instrumental to some part of your creative process. Is Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie the soundtrack of your earliest darkroom memories? Or maybe you only listen to orchestral music while retouching your architectural photography. Is it the sound of early 80s new wave that takes you back to photo class, or perhaps your first assisting gig was the day you bought that one Radiohead album. If you just picked up your first camera last year and your street photography is backed by Boygenius or SZA in your Airpods, I’d like to hear about it. I think others might enjoy it as well, because music is universal! Or maybe it’s just me. 

As a thank you for your participation, and frankly for simply reading this far, I have a small token of appreciation for you. It’s a playlist of my favorite (and most useful) jazz recordings, the things that literally form the working soundtrack of this newsletter and the vast majority of words I’ve written throughout my career. I don’t know if you’ll find it inspiring or helpful, or even entertaining. But if I can give you one tenth of what this music has brought to me, it’ll be worth it. If you’d like to know what Art + Math sounds like on this side of the screen, here you go.

Saxophone Colossus has ended now, and I’ve been typing the last few paragraphs in silence. If they don’t read quite right… Well, now you’ll understand why. 

1. It was “Roll Over Beethoven.”

2. There’s a story about rescuing an old turntable from my alley dumpster, replacing the belt and rekindling my love for vinyl nearly 20 years ago. That led to more vinyl, which eventually inspired my wife to find the aforementioned Technics record player on eBay and, yada yada yada, my studio process has been better ever since. But I won’t tell it.

3. Have you ever asked a stranger what kind of music they like? As best I can tell, no one in recorded history has ever answered this question with anything other than “I like all kinds.” I certainly have never received any answer other than this. So I’ve largely stopped asking people what kind of music they want to listen to unless they make a beeline for my records. Instead I just try to play pleasant things that are also good—like The White Album or OK Computer. Aging millennial elevator music, essentially. 

4. Awesome instructor. Taught me about solarization, the definition of a camera (a light-tight box with three modifiers) and the fact that exposure controls density while development controls contrast. He also offered an A for the semester to anyone who could do more one-armed pushups than him, or if you could procure a bottle of Napoleon brandy and a box of Cuban cigars. Thanks, Mr. Colgan. These lessons—especially the ones about having fun in photo class—stayed with me.