Picture the sounds

Three weeks ago Herman Leonard, one of the great jazz photographers, passed away in Los Angeles. Leonard, who died at the age of 87, took some of the most famous pictures in the jazz world: the young Dexter Gordon sitting with his saxophone, as cigarette smoke rises and envelopes him; Ella Fitzgerald singing in a small club as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman watch her from a small table; Billie Holiday leaning toward the microphone, her eyes narrowed and a roguish half-smile on her face; Frank Sinatra, photographed from behind, leaning back and raising his left hand.

The small Israeli jazz scene has never created icons, not musical and certainly not graphic. But Israeli jazz, too, has a documenter, a photographer who has been following it with persistence, devotion, talent and above all great love.

	The 1971 Giants of Jazz concert in Tel Aviv.
	Photo by: Abraham Kabilio

Jazz fans are already accustomed to seeing Abraham Kabilio hovering modestly at the edges of the stage. If he had used his elbows, there would have been an exhibition of his photos long ago.

His huge archive uses pictures to tell the story of jazz in Israel from 1970 to today. Now, 40 years after he began to photograph jazz performances and jazz musicians, the time has come to pull some of the most beautiful moments caught by the lens of the first and only Israeli jazz photographer. With a bit of imagination one can even hear the sounds that were being played as he clicked the shutter.

It's impossible not to start with the Giants of Jazz concert in Tel Aviv in 1971. Kabilio, who was a 22-year-old student at the time, does not remember much about this performance but his photos of it are testimony to an event that today seems almost a figment of the imagination. (Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Sonny Stitt on one stage? In Tel Aviv? Unbelievable. ) Kabilio's camera captured Blakey's tremendous swing, but does Stitt's amused smile betray enjoyment of the music or scorn for this whole notion of a peripatetic troupe of aging masters? Gillespie's face is hidden by a microphone and a handkerchief, with only his mighty cheeks shining through.

Kabilio discovered jazz only a short while before the Giant of Jazz concert.

At the end of the 1960s, when he was a member of Kibbutz Grofit in the south, saxophonist and educator Mel Keller came to perform at nearby Kibbutz Yotvata.

Keller, who came from the United States to Jerusalem and became one of the founding fathers of Israeli jazz (Kabilio calls him "the Tal Brody of jazz" ), held concerts to familiarize the Israeli audience with jazz and the concept of improvisation.

Until then, Kabilio had thought jazz was cacophony. Keller taught him to stop being afraid of the music. The amateur photographer was bitten by the jazz bug and began to combine his two loves.

On Sundays Kabilio was a regular at the Barbarim Club in Tel Aviv, which from the end of the 1960s through the 1970s was the home of the tiny Israeli jazz community, and he photographed the stars of the jam sessions held there: Roman Kunsman, Arale Kaminsky, Jess Koren, P.C. Oshrovitz and Rick Birman, one of the most colorful figures in Israeli jazz.

In one of Kabilio's "backstage" photos, Birman is seen talking to blues giant Memphis Slim, who performed in Israel in the 1970s.

Kabilio took many pictures backstage. There he was able to capture the spirit of jazz as much as on the stage.

"I love the backstage scene," he said. "Ron Carter opens his case and takes out his double bass - this hypnotizes me. Or Elvin Jones standing after a performance at the jazz festival in Eilat surrounded by a bunch of Israeli percussionists. Or Wayne Shorter, who came to Israel without his saxophone, getting a saxophone from Albert Piamenta and then returning it to him. Shorter the giant, and Piamenta, who for me is no less of a giant. This is exciting for me. This is what really creates the music."

In his many hours backstage Kabilio has also encountered the darker sides of jazz. He has seen several American jazz giants having bad drug trips, though he is not eager to talk about this. He has also seen greats whose old age made a mockery of their youthful genius, like organist Jimmy Smith who was so enfeebled he could only play with one hand. Kabilio displays a photo from that wretched performance in 2003, but then he says, "Wait a minute."

He dashes off to another room in his home and comes back a minute later with an expressive photo of Smith at an earlier performance in Israel, in the 1970s or 1980s. "Look at that power," he says, and it seems as though he is delighted to have restored the artist's pride.

Kabilio has never been a professional photographer. He is an importer of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, and he tries to see to it that the conferences he travels to are in jazz strongholds like New Orleans. "I take pictures for the sake of my soul, for myself, as naive as I can be," he says. What is needed for taking a good jazz picture?

He says an attentive ear and eye and a lot of patience is needed to take a good jazz picture. "Like a hunter. I watch the musician for a long time and I usually wait until he does a solo," he said. "Then, when he is starting to soar higher and higher and higher, I hit the pictures."

Kabilio counts shooting Miles Davis as his most memorable jazz experience. "He made it the hardest to take pictures, and especially for me. He allowed me to take pictures only during the first minutes of the performance and he stood the whole time with his backside to us," he said. "But he turned around for one second and that was enough."