| BELGIAN DESIGNER-ILLUSTRATOR YVES BUDIN TELLS ABOUT HIS INSPIRATION BY JAZZ MUSICIANS Sundance Jazz Notice | |
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JAZZ… what an ear delighting word of a pleasant sounding, especially when pronounced the American way. I discovered jazz not by the sound but rather through words : those of beat author Jack Kerouac.
His descriptions of the hot night, grandiose, maddening, of San Francisco during the '50ies with its smoked out jazz clubs, good or badly reputed, sprinkled with shaved wood, where wild tenor saxophones wail, blow, blow, blow, to the quest of " It ", where women of burnt honey skin dressed with split skirts get drunk on high stools, where you sweat, lament, rock your feet to an incredible succession of bottles. I say, his descriptions for me are the best pages written by a white man about black music. This is what widely opened the doors for me to step into a passionate universe: jazz. So, I have implicated myself. It is few years now that I design around the theme of jazz. Think about it, what's more natural for someone who employs black ink and devoted to the culture of masters such as Pratt, Breccia, Munoz, Comès, Beardsley… ?
After all, Pratt, wasn't he a buddy of Gillespie and Dizz himself didn't he name one of his pieces " Kerouac " ? Boom. It sticks. It holds tight. Bueno. What was I saying ?... Yes, more than wanting to depict the jazzmen jamming and working their instrument like damned, I am endeavoring with my designs to convey the atmospheres, ambient and the jazz particular sensations.  Bring up the daily life of blacks. Hum. A tall order. But I must invest myself. Because jazz is more than music, it is a way of life. |  speciman from a comic's project "Crépuscules d'un jazzman" |
| Down a last whisky at dawn in a New York bar, crouch with a sax hung from the neck at a waiting room in the airport, wake up disoriented the morning after a jam session in a shabby Harlem hotel and be named Coltrane, Monk, Parker, Kirk, Davis or Mingus, it is no longer just drink a whisky, wait for a flight, wake up..., no, it is far more : it is being jazz.
This is what I try to bring out through my work.
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