Music lovers visiting Norway often make for the Ringve Music Museum in Trondheim. Jazz lovers now have an extra reason to visit this marvellous collection—an exhibition of jazz photography by the Norwegian critic, journalist, aficionado and unstinting supporter of visiting musicians, Randi Hultin.
Born in 1926, and later married to jazz pianist Tom Hultin, Randi was an influential figure in Norwegian jazz from the early-1950s to her death in 2000. She recalled that her passionate interest “didn’t awaken until I brought jazz into my living room;” and, indeed, her home in Oslo became a refuge for local musicians like Radka Toneff, Karin Krog and Jan Garbarek and visiting players including Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz and John Coltrane. Numerous guestbooks filled with greeting and drawings, audio and film recordings, autographed manuscripts as well as her unique photographic collection from these years amounts to a remarkable record of both individual personalities and Norwegian jazz culture.
Randi developed close friendships with many musicians which Bud Powell, Eubie Blake, Jon Eberson, Phil Woods and others celebrated by dedicating compositions to her. Her unstinting support in directing visiting musicians towards performance opportunities and generally steering them in a foreign country was an invaluable, if less noticeable, service.
Two factors explain Randi’s approach to photography. First, she was untrained as a photographer, relying on the instinct and intuition which can often be subsumed by the more formal and technical aspects of the medium. Then she was a woman in a man’s world. Her interest was in the uniquely human aspects of the jazz life as she sought to capture musicians in a relaxed domestic environment. Visitors to this exhibition will notice few of the evocative performance shots, the elegant smoke-infused chiaroscuro location portraits or formal studio portraiture, or even the studied documentary which form the core of the classic American jazz photography tradition. Randi’s expressive photography might perhaps be seen as parallelling the spontaneous intuitive gestures of the 1940s and ‘50s informel but also bears comparison with the new documentary forms of Lee Friedlander and insider views of another female jazz photographer, Nancy Miller Elliott.
True, we see a shot of McCoy Tyner on stage listening intently to Coltrane; Chet Baker, shrouded by darkness, is shown in deep concentration playing at an Oslo club in 1983 and Bob Berg and Billy Higgins are captured during a performance in 1977. Mostly though we are invited by Randi’s photography to enter an inter-personal world in which the musicians are captured by loosely-framed informality.
It is difficult to describe Randi as a portraitist in any formal sense. Individual portraits of Coltrane’s quartet taken backstage are shot from a low angle and in which she seems to have encouraged deliberate jokey gestures; and the musicians from Basie’s Orchestra are shown hamming it up during a jam session at Randi’s home in 1962. A backstage shot of Coltrane is devoid of setting and taken from the side. When I look at her portrait of the Danish jazz singer Grethe Kemp lighting a cigarette for Ben Webster in 1965 I am reminded of Harry Adams’ image of Basie shaking hands with an unidentified man who has just given him a pack of smokes—the interaction seemingly more important than the ‘star’ personality.
during their visit to Oslo, 1965. Photo courtesy of Randi Hultin/National Library of Norway.
Yet for me it is Randi’s portrait of Rollins mowing the grass at her home, or that of Basie shown legs akimbo on her sofa in 1977 or Clifford Jordan relaxing with a book in her garden which best characterise her work.
When she travelled outside Norway, Randi seems always to have looked for the informal mise-en-scène she found at home. Visiting Eubie Blake in his New York home she celebrated his birthday in 1983 with a shot over breakfast, the pianist still in his gown drinking coffee from a mug boldly proclaiming “Boss.”
Randi Hultin’s photography demonstrates how less can be more, how spontaneous imagery leaves room for the viewer to move beyond the formality of the portrait towards the individual behind the music.
Photographs reproduced by kind permission of Randi Hultin/National Library of Norway. For more on Randi Hultin see her 1991 autobiography ‘In the Sign of Jazz’.
