"There could be no better symbol for the illicit mystery and poignant impermanence of jazz than the cigarette smoke in a Herman Leonard photograph. Spiralling, billowing, hanging and twisting into shapes of oriental delicacy, the smoke is the perfect prop for the beautiful and sometimes tragic faces at the centre of his night scenes. Herman Leonard was around the jazz world--with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at Birdland, with Dinah Washington and Gerry Mulligan at Newport, with Erroll Garner and Stan Getz in the recording studio--in the Forties and Fifties, long before anyone thought that nicotine needed government warnings. His photographs retain their potency too: he trapped the image that we find capturing the hearts of today's retro-crazy avant garde in Soho, the Lower East Side and the Marais: Ben Vopeliere-Pierrot's beret, Bryan Ferry's suits and Sade Adu's chignon all find their originals in Leonard's 1950s studios of the madcap bebop singer Babs Gonzales, the sharp dressed tenor saxophonist James Moody and the ineffable Billie Holiday. In these photographs, all the banal mess of the average jazz musician's life in the post-war years--the booze and drugs and bone-chilling dawns, the rapacious managers, indifferent club owners, vengeful booking agents and interfering record company A&R men, the endless cross-country treks in overloaded and unreliable cars, the fly-blown boarding houses and segregated restaurants, the broken piano keys and the saxophone held together with rubber bands and paper clips, the twisters and fixers and hustlers and pushers of every description--falls away to reveal the pure and graceful outline of the artist. Leonard's Art Tatum sits, eyes closed and hands clasped, waiting for genius to speak in Los Angeles one day in 1955. Bud Powell, another fountainhead of jazz piano, displays the authentic and eventually insupportable mixture of anguish and ecstasy. Leonard's drummers--Art Blakey, Shelly Manne, Jo Jones, Kenny Clarke--are shot from knee-height to emphasize their commanding strength. His trumpeters--Miles Davis, Oran 'Hot Lips' Page, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown--are burnished heroes: his tenor saxophonists--the louche Dexter Gordon, the bemused Lester Young and the angel-faced Stan Getz--are poets"--Richard Williams, from the 'Sunday Times Magazine', 12 June 1988, p. [2] of dust jacket.