November 13–15, 2007
The Getty Center
Côte à Côte was an experimental public program developed in conjunction with the Orange County Museum of Art's exhibition Birth of the Cool and conceived with the assistance of the Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman Foundation. By extending the parameters of a traditional scholarly conference through the inclusion of conversations with artists, poetry readings, performances, film screenings, and a jazz concert, Côte à Côte explored the underexamined relationship between jazz and contemporary art.
A screening of rare archival film shorts, featuring live musical accompaniment by renowned French jazz pianist René Urtreger, explored the representation of jazz musicians in film and the inclusion of jazz-like forms in cinematic vocabulary.
Conversations with photographers William Claxton and Marcel Fleiss probed the inseparable relationship between our perception of jazz and the high contrast black-and-white photographs that Claxton and Fleiss pioneered.
The importance of improvisation in a variety of postwar artistic activities was demonstrated by the performances of two Beat Generation artists: poet David Meltzer performed selections from his work (accompanied by jazz pianist Theo Sanders) and assemblage artist George Herms enacted selections from his free jazz opera.
Scholarly papers investigated the spatial and social geographies of the West Coast and French jazz scenes, scrutinized the challenges female jazz musicians faced while performing in a male-dominated world, and examined the relationship between jazz and the black freedom movement.
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