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Jazz and Comics: A Brief History

By Bob Weinberg Once considered “low-brow” entertainment, jazz and comics have each attained high art…

Enter the Blue

When we first meet her, Jessie Choi is in crisis. During a recent concert, the…

Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound

To understate the obvious, Miles Davis was a complex individual. A relentless innovator, he changed…

Emanon

Jazz fans recognize Wayne Shorter as a major innovator. His playing and compositional skills made…

Graphically Miles

By Bob Weinberg Graphic novelist Dave Chisholm takes readers on an eye-popping excursion through the…

Chasin’ the Bird: Charlie Parker in California

In late 1946, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie headed west for a two-month stint at…

Billie Holiday: The Graphic Novel

From the gritty to the sublime, Billie Holiday’s journey to jazz immortality is chronicled in…

Saluting the Master: Wayne Shorter

This feature was originally published in the Spring 2013 edition of JAZZIZ. By Ted Panken…

Wayne Shorter: Giant Footprints

By Michael Fagien Zero Gravity, a film about Wayne Shorter, plumbs the depths of the…

Into the Multiverse

This feature originally published in the Fall 2018 edition of JAZZIZ. By Larry Blumenfeld With…

JAZZIZ Discovery Fall 2023

“MANKURT” HILLAI GOVREEN AND NITSAN KOLKO From the Album: ALLUSIONS Purchase Album New School graduates…

Orrin Evans, ‘The Red Door’ (Smoke Sessions) | Review

By John Frederick Moore Pianist Orrin Evans reflects a more collective ethos on The Red…

Ember, ‘August in March’ (Imani) | Review

By Hrayr Attarian A dynamic collaborative trio, Ember consists of saxophonist Caleb Wheeler Curtis —…

A World of Women’s Voices

By Josef Woodard Around the globe, women are singing the international language of jazz. A…

Meshell Ndegeocello: Keeping It Real

By Shannon J. Effinger For Meshell Ndegeocello, honest expression is everything. Her debut album for…

Harmonizing Culture and Jazz: Eunmi Lee’s Sonic Journey

Join us for an enchanting episode of “Jazziz Not What You Think” as we dive…

Musical Allusions and Intimate Dialogues: Hillai Govreen’s Journey in Sound

In this episode of “Jazziz Not What You Think,” we embark on a melodic journey…

Nordic Noir and the New York Groove: Kaisa Mäensivu

In this episode of “Jazziz Not What You Think,” we delve into the intriguing world…

Rhythms of Resilience: JoVia Armstrong Unveils the Musical Tapestry of Her Journey

Join us on a captivating musical odyssey as we sit down with the multi-talented artist,…

Roxy Coss: Jazz Beyond Boundaries

In this episode of “Jazziz Not What You Think,” we dive deep into the multifaceted…

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By Bob Weinberg Once considered “low-brow” entertainment, jazz and comics have each attained high art status. For fans, their pairing is a match made in heaven. Though it may sound counterintuitive, jazz and comic books share plenty of common ground. Both art forms are uniquely American, innovated by minorities (namely, Blacks and Jews) who largely shaped their aural and visual vocabularies, as well as their underlying ethos. For the most part, jazz and comics creation are team sports, dependent on give-and-take between collaborators — say, band mates King Oliver and Louis Armstrong or Superman progenitors Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. And both art forms — widely considered low-brow entertainments at best — were once thought to be a pernicious influence on American youth. Their value was degraded in often racist, xenophobic and homophobic attacks that appeared in newspapers and radio broadcasts and, in the case of comics, led to legislation and an onerous “Comics Code” that curbed what was deemed as salacious or subversive content. A tidal change in societal norms was wrought by the 1960s counterculture, and was vividly expressed in the burgeoning underground “comix” movement. Author-illustrators such as R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton bypassed the Comics Code by going through independent publishers and retailers and aimed for more adult (or at least not kiddie) audiences. Art Spiegelman, who came of age during the heyday of underground comix in the 1970s, brought a new respectability to the format with the publication of Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale — My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale — And Here My Troubles Began (1991), and even non-comics fans appreciated the literary merits of his extremely personal narrative. Using anthropomorphized animals — Jews were represented as mice, Nazis as cats — Spiegelman related his father’s Holocaust experiences in the graphic novel format and the work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. (Alarmingly, school boards and other groups have sought to ban the book from schools in recent years.) Jazz has also proven fertile ground for graphic novel creators, with books appearing about figures such as Thelonious Monk (2018’s Monk! Thelonious, Pannonica and the Friendship Behind a Musical Revolution by Youssef Daoudi), Bix Biederbecke (2020’s Bix by Scott Chantler) and John Coltrane (2013’s Coltrane by Paolo Parisi). In this digital edition of JAZZIZ, we present a glimpse of graphic novels about Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, a modern-day jazz fable (Enter the Blue) and a graphic novel written by a jazz innovator (Wayne Shorter’s Emanon), as well as an interview with graphic novel artist, author and jazz musician Dave Chisholm, who provides insights into jazz and comics from both sides of the equation.

Featured images by Dave Chisholm, courtesy of Z2 Comics.