Graham Marsh x Jim Marshall’s Jazz Festival + Kamakura Shirts

Last week Kamakura Shirts used its Madison Avenue location for a soiree book signing for Graham Marsh. Marsh, an author, designer and illustrator, is one of the biggest names in the UK Ivy community. He has also collaborated with Kamakura on a line of vintage Ivy shirts.

The party was in celebration of a new coffee table book of vintage jazz images taken by Jim Marshall, considered the godfather of music photography.

There’s a great promo video for the book that will make you want to build a time machine:

Jazz Festival: Jim Marshall from Reel Art Press on Vimeo.

The publisher, Reel Art Press, has been kind enough to allow us to reproduce some text Marsh wrote for the book, in addition to serving as art director, which rhapsodizes on the music and Ivy clothes.  — CC

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COAST TO COAST
By Graham Marsh

Stay cool, look sharp and let the music lay a taste on your ears

For any hipster or Young Turk riding on a blue note in the 1960s, jazz festivals were the genuine article. Whether it was at Fort Adams State Park in the resort town of Newport, Rhode Island in August, or at the 20-acre oak-studded Monterey County Fairground in California in September, it must have been something else! Both festivals were like a vinyl record collection coming to life. Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and the endless roll call of jazz luminaries live on stage at Monterey and Newport was an outstanding experience for all those lucky enough to have been there.

You can almost feel the sun’s warming rays and an ocean breeze emanating from Jim Marshall’s evocative photographs in this book. Jazz Festival is not a nostalgic yearning for the past but a celebration of the continuing cultural craze for all things relating to Modern Jazz and Ivy Look clothing which for some people, who care about these things, is important. Sartorially and musically both are intrinsically still linked and both are without doubt the essence of cool, the ultimate in hip.

Miles Davis, the coolest man on the planet during his Ivy suited period was probably most responsible for both the ‘look and sound’ of Modern Jazz. The look was predominantly East Coast Ivy League but the sound was uniquely his own. Miles used to get most of his Ivy clothes from Charlie Davidson’s Andover Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square. Davidson was a sort of bridge figure between Modern Jazz and the Ivy Look. As well as Miles Davis, Davidson was a friend of George Wein and Charlie Bourgeois, who were both closely associated with the Newport Jazz Festival, and at the same time to a famed journalist, George Frazier 111, himself a well-known connoisseur of clothes and jazz. Indeed, Frazier christened Miles, ‘The warlord of the Weejuns!’ If Miles wore it, it was instantly hip.

In the 1960s, when it came to jazz, style was part of the equation in both clothes and attitude. At Monterey and Newport black culture was openly embraced and integrated audiences were the norm. Nobody cared – as long as you looked sharp and dug the music – anything else was just jiving, there was strictly no room for squares. At both festivals, on any given day it was a sea of Bass Weejun loafers, natural shouldered seersucker jackets, essential Lacoste tennis shirts and Clarks desert boots. Definitely on the money were also button-down shirts, chinos and 501 Levi’s. Topping off these proto-cool clothes was a formidable array of men and women’s hats. From straw pork-pie snap-brims with deep Madras bands, back-buckle Ivy sports caps and deeply hip berets to Audrey Hepburn influenced wide-brimmed straw hats and head scarves plus a confection of groovy chapeaus that would not look out of place on the catwalks of a Parisian fashion show. It was a veritable catalogue of Ivy cool. It was dressing fine, making time and moreover, a visual feast for Ray-Ban and Persol shaded eyes.

Although the Ivy clothes may have been de rigueur, at the centre of it all was the music. It was Ornette Coleman on stage playing his yellow plastic Selmer Alto Saxophone, accompanied by Don Cherry on Pocket Trumpet. It was John Coltrane endlessly riffing on some standard-issue show tune. Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan paring the music down and laying it out, looking like fashion plates to the assembled congregation. It was saxophone colossus, Sonny Rollins taking care of business, always ahead of the musical curve.  His insouciant trademark top button only fastened on his three-button jacket. These musicians were the cat’s whiskers and in mid twentieth century America it was Modern Jazz that fused the connection between music and the Ivy Look.

The original Monterey and Newport Jazz Festivals have, over the years, spawned many music festivals worldwide but like Dobie Gray says in his song,  ‘The ‘In’ Crowd ‘  – The original’s still the greatest!’ You have bought the book, absorbed the images, now play the music!

Images copyright Jim Marshall Photography LLC/Reel Art Press