Emoplux

Raymond Clement was a musician before becoming a photographer. He played trumpet, piano and organ, which explains the extraordinary sensibility of his jazzmen portraits. The effort in the creation of the music is seen in the tense bodies, covered in sweat and the emotions on the musicians faces. His series started in 1970, when asked by Tony Krier to cover the Wiltz festival. He photographed the jazz legend Duke Ellington and thereafter, he went from jazz clubs to festivals to take his live shots. The title of his itinerant exhibition “Family of Jazz” that travelled to Nevada in 1977 is an allusion to Edward Steichen, who originally inspired his vocation. In his speech at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated: “Jazz speaks for life. […] This is triumphant music.” In 1983, also at the Berlin Jazzfest Clement met the iconic Miles Davis. The clothing style of the latter had evolved from the sharp suits of the fifties to the hippy style inspired in 1968 by his wife Betty Mabry (who had also introduced him to rock music, initiating his jazz-rock fusion phase) to the psychedelic look that Clement photographed. To give this scarlet red outfit its due, he had to borrow colored film from a colleague, having taken only black-white portraits until then. Thanks to Miles Davis, Clement started to photograph life in color. Miles was enchanted by his European tour, “[…] people were happy to see me, and really related to the music.” He seemed to have changed personality after his bad patch from 1975 to 1980 and gave many interviews in each city. Miles had the talent to reinvent himself in each era by surrounding himself with talented musicians.

The tribute of Raymond Clement to Miles can even be gathered from the title of his exhibition “Miles & more … from Family of Jazz” in 2023. By contemplating the pictures of Miles taken by Clement, the quote of George Wein springs to mind: “Miles put the bell of his horn right into the microphone and changed the whole world of jazz.” Clement makes us rediscover the big names in Jazz, past and present, with pictures full of life.