Pieces of Jazz in Black & Colour

For the Romantics, music was the most powerful of all the arts, a language beyond language, unapproachable by words. This is an experience shared, albeit in different ways, by all those writing about music: however well one may describe and analyse music, the sheer presence of every note, its power over the moment, cannot be conveyed by words. In 1938, the American William Gottlieb found he could compensate for the limitations of his jazz reviews with photography. Pictures went beyond what I could say with words , he remembers. Today my writing is all but forgotten, but the photographs live on. The picture as a manifestation of the invisible, carrying an echo of vanished music. Karl-Heinz Schmitt is an improvising photographer. He sets up nothing, stages no poses or situations, and works with available light. He photographs what he finds. He goes to see concerts in Den Haag, Duisburg, Bochum and Bonn, and he takes his camera. He goes to concerts because he is interested in music. Taking pictures, he says, is just a by-product, a hobby that puts him under no pressure to succeed. Neither does he seek attention, to push towards the front rows or mingle with the musicians. Schmitt, the photographer, remains in his seat, hopes for sufficient light and waits politely for those moments when a click won’t disturb. He uses no more than three rolls of film per night from which he selects the best pictures, the lucky strikes. The pictures in this book have never been published before; some he may have put up in his photo shop in Andernach for a while but he did not sell them to the papers. A by-product, after all. – taken from the Introduction.