Jean-Marie Périer‘s Instagram Chronicles are pure wonders.
Every 2 Weeks, from now on, we will publish one of them.
Here is the first:
Count Basie, Mezz Mezzrow and Earl Hines in the 1950s.
They were probably there for the jazz evenings that Frank Ténot and Daniel Filipacchi organized at the Olympia. With my Leica around my neck I photographed these great musicians who let me follow them for “Jazz Magazine” and I found that normal.
My life as a young man was awfully good. No nostalgia, only desires for the future without any strategy.
It would be petty of me to hide from you any longer that I am not enthusiastic about our times. And if by a welcome spell some shaman offered me to come back to the 50s, I’m not going to tell you any nonsense. I would throw myself on a magic carpet to return to that day at the bar of the Lutetia with these three happy geniuses, in order to go down half an hour later the small staircase to the humid and smoky heat of the cellar of the Saint-Germain club. There I would sip at the bar a lukewarm coca-cola (I never had a glass of alcohol or smoked a cigarette before the age of 27) while watching girls molded in black sweaters dancing the be-bop with Jean-Pierre Cassel and “Moustache”, while in a corner Barney Wilen would caress his sax while waiting for his turn, without taking his eyes off the nimble hands of René Urtreger on the piano and Pierre Michelot, his back hunched over his double bass, while listening politely the endless rantings of Marcel Romano.
But alas, as Shirley Horn sang: “There is no yes in yesterday”
Jean-Marie Périer
