Publisher's Note

Rashied Ali, The Village Gate, 1970, by Lee Santa

Here's a draft of the short Publisher's Note that will appear in Lee Santa's Journey into Jazz:  Anecdotes, Notes and Photos of a Jazz Fan.

I met Lee Santa in 1977 at the Breadline Café in Northwest Portland, a hangout for a "gang" of artists and writers who met there most afternoons to drink coffee or wine or beer and shoot the shit about whatever crossed our minds at the time.  Lee always had his camera hanging around his neck and often put it to good use, capturing the scene for posterity, and I soon learned he had another passion as well—avant-garde jazz.  In fact, I think the first two words I heard come out of his mouth were “Sun Ra.”  Or they might have been “John Coltrane.”  Or perhaps they were “Pharoah Sanders.”

You get the idea.  Lee was a jazz nut of the highest degree, which was fine with me because like the photographer I had passed through my rock ‘n’ roll stage.  Lee was an advanced student of jazz by the time I finally began to listen hard to avant-garde music in the early ‘70s.  He had joined the U.S. Army in 1965, the same year I started high school, so I guess that makes him about four or five years older than me, which in the fast-moving American culture of the ‘60s could have been a lifetime.  By 1967, Lee was in Paris taking in the sights and sounds, seeing the ex-pats playing in the clubs, and beginning his informal study of photography.  Once out of the service he returned to his home town of Sacramento and studied photography full-bloom.  The rest, as they say, is a photo history—this one.

Hearing him talk long ago, I knew I’d met a simpatico character who might teach me something about jazz. And, as it happened, I went to The Earth Tavern the night Sun Ra played there in 1979.  I don’t think Lee remembers that I was there, probably because he was too busy shooting great photos. Thanks, Lee, for turning me on to Sun Ra, and for your 2011 cover shot for RBP’s Cold Eye anthology as well.

I also want to offer special thanks to K.C. Bacon, who helped finance part of this project’s development.

Terry Simons


TS