Book review: Martin Connolly: Kind of Green - Jazz Legends, from ’86 - ’90, through an Irish lens

I don’t know if the new houses they are building nowadays have attics but if not that is a pity.

For a proper attic is a place to store memories - letters, photographs, old tapes, newspapers and magazines, Christmas decorations and old toys - and then forget about them for the next thirty years until a house sale or aged curiosity encourages one to take a last look.

By attic I don’t mean a little space above one bedroom but rather an area underneath the roof that ran the whole length of the house. Mostly they could only be accessed by a small trapdoor on the top landing or in a back bedroom. In my case this would involve balancing on top of a step ladder and then hauling yourself up into the roof space. As our attic wasn’t boarded out you had to move around carefully, tightrope style, from beam to beam trying to make sure not to fall through the ceiling into the bedroom below.

Clearly Martin Connolly, the author of Kind of Green, had a serious attic which involved balancing on a chair to even look in. While searching for the photographs that make up the content of the book he describes using a long pole to drag a pile of material from the attic which then crashed on the floor of his landing and though it looked like a heap of rubbish turned out to be the precious album of negatives. A classic attic find.

Connolly has now put together the rediscovered photos to create a fascinating memento to a particular period of jazz history - 1986 to 1990. His book Kind of Green is also a tribute to his late brother, Jim, who was a London correspondent for Ireland’s first ever jazz magazine, JazzNews International. This role gave Jim Connolly press access to some of the great names in jazz who were passing through Ireland, the UK and Europe in these years and he often brought along his younger brother, Martin, as his photographer sidekick.

Between them the brothers interviewed, talked with and photographed many jazz musicians who were (and some still are) jazz legends. As I think both Jim and Martin were guitarists quite a few guitar players feature - Tal Farlow, John Scofield, Mike Stern, Bill Frisell and two of Martin Connolly’s particular favourites, John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell. There are also some very nice shots of (amongst others) Cab Calloway, Candy Dulfer, Karen Krog, Dexter Gordon, Andy Sheppard, Charlie Haden, Lester Bowie, Wayne Shorter and in his ‘coolest man in a shell suit’ outfit, Miles Davis. These pictures of Miles are some of the few photos in the book in colour and they need to be!

One of the nice things about the photos is that they catch the musicians in rehearsal or relaxing as well as during a performance and this gives a warm, informal feel to many of the pictures. The Connolly brothers were blessed to have the opportunity to meet and photograph these musicians at a time when it was still possible to chat to them directly without having to negotiate minders and other staff and it is obvious that they both greatly enjoyed the experience.

Martin Connolly also highlights the role of Dara O’Lochlainn, a long time stalwart of the Irish jazz scene who founded the magazine JazzNews International which gave Jim Connolly, and through him his brother, an entry into the world of international jazz. The book includes some pages of one issue of the magazine and it is clear that O’Lochlainn was nothing if not ambitious about how far it could reach. The list of correspondents included people from Bombay to Swansea and Sydney to Warsaw and to prove these were not just names for show the contents page lists articles on jazz from Belgium, New York, Montreal, Lugano, Prague and I am delighted to say a piece on the second Newcastle Jazz Festival by our own sadly missed legend of the north east jazz scene, Chris Yates.

Kind of Green is a labour of love, both brotherly and jazz focused, and captures that great experience of seeing and hearing jazz close-up and live. JC

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