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Wednesday, August 18, 2004

A jazz picture. A thousand memories.

Question: What do Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Krupa, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Mary Lou Williams have in common? (No points for simply pointing out that they are all giants in Jazz music.) In fact, all these luminaries -and 49 of their peers- share one very specific time and place in jazz history - the front of a Harlem brownstone at 10 o'clock on an August morning in 1958.
That morning they gathered to appear in a group portrait for Esquire magazine, and the resulting image has come to be known as the greatest photograph in the history of jazz. Surfers can explore that picture in detail at Harlem.org

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