Late summer in Madison means free jazz on the square every Wednesday at 5pm. It's a great for the community, and well, it's also really great for a creative guy to do some fun work. Over the years I've played with the concept of 5 in the afternoon being an odd time for Jazz, to street musicians being ticked because this music is happening on their turf, when they're working. Here are a few of my favorites.
This season was a straight shot, how do we combine the number five and music in a new and unusual way. I did the simple illustrations and decided to leave them rough, improvised in appearance.
This season played off the idea of Jazz being everywhere in the city, all the time, it's just a matter of finding, or rather listening for it. It started with figuring out what kind of sounds to write about. There was construction that year so that was easy, the city as a whole was the another and then finally a coffee shop. As a pro bono endeavor, I decided to do all the shots, I also wrote the copy. Images just came together once I had the copy, I just spent an afternoon walking around State Street capturing images that paired with the jazz poetry on each one.
The concept for this season was that because the concerts are free, the other street musicians on State Street would have something to say about Jazz at Five cutting into their gig. From anger to relief, each musician had a different take.
The idea driving this season is that for most musicians, when all of us working folk are done for the day, that's when theirs is just beginning, So you see in the first poster a guitar play swimming against the stream of office workers heading home, or a trumpet player getting off the bus as most people are loading on. We used an old vinyl album to lift the distressing off of to lend them a bit more of an authentic feel.