Summary

The journey of the research on the softening of borders between comics and jazz is explored, starting with considerations and anecdotes from the past. Billie Holiday’s connection to comic books, the transformation of jazz and comics into accredited forms of art, and the evolving relationship between jazz and comics are key points of exploration in the research. The impact of recognition on these art forms and the representations of jazz in comics are also critical topics for discussion.

In 2017, I presented a paper at a communication conference in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, entitled On Comics and Jazz and, since then, I have been dedicating myself to the subject from both an academic and artistic point of view. In fact, one of the issues raised concerns precisely the softening of borders.

I would like to share with you the journey of this research, starting with some considerations that served as starting points. Enjoy!

In the Spring of 1948, the promoter Ernie Anderson met legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday in midtown Manhattan. They discussed details of her much waited come-back to show-business in the Carnegie Hall stage the following night. After leaving the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderston, Virginia, where she served 10 months for ‘receiving and concealing a narcotic drug’, Billie depended on that act to re-establish her career.

As Anderson prepared to leave, ‘Lady Day’ asked him for some comic books. In that crucial evening, comic books made company to the great artist.

Forty-five years later Billie herself would become a much praised graphic novel by the hands of Argentinean authors José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo (1993) and much before, in 1927, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian had published “Jazz and the Neo-Plasticism”, claiming that jazz and the new movement he helped to put up were nothing less than expressions of a new life and considered them revolutionary movements capable of dealing with the new time and space impositions of the metropolis.

In 2015 jazz performer Kamasi Washington released his debut album called The Epic, a three hour piece, comparable to an opera and deliberately inspired in comic art both musically and also in the art of the album. Washington revealed he was actually working on a graphic novel and album final structure was directly influenced by it.

Both considered during long time marginal forms of expression, comics and jazz proudly arrived in the twenty first century as accredited forms of art and a regular subject for thesis and dissertations. But does this recognition also have a price? Did it implicate in some sort of compromising?

How (far) did it change jazz and comics features? Since the links between both jazz and comics continue to develop, how are these two languages interacting, that is, what are the representations in comics about jazz?

These are some of the questions we will develop throughout this topic.

Be seeing you!

G. F.