I planned for years to create a painting titled “The Jazz Musician”. I didn’t start working with that title in mind, but as the painting began to develop I saw what was taking shape - an image of the power of music (jazz in particular) to call forth deep emotion from the listener’s unconscious mind. I also found I was channelling an idea I recalled from a story that impressed me as a boy - “Black Man with a Horn” by T.E.D. Klein, a masterful vision of cosmic horror. There, as here, a jazz saxophonist could be a symbol of a primal entity with a horn like a trump of doom and revelation. As a side note, the musical notes were lifted from an actual jazz score, “So What” by Miles Davis. I exercised artistic licence to change them around, though! The curved lines of the score echo a popular (mis?)conception that the German phrase “Schräge Musik” (“slanting” or “strange” music”) is a colloquialism for “jazz.”
