Hello, welcome to 2-5-1, two pianists, five minutes, one subject. Today we're going to be talking about the French photographer Jean-Pierre Laloie. My name is Nick Tomlin. And my name is Simon Whiteside and this is 2-5-1.

2-5-1 And a photographer. I like to have books of the great jazz photographers. So I've got Herman Leonard and Claxton and all different sorts of people.

But this is someone I hadn't come across. And basically he was a photojournalist who covered a lot of music, theatre, as well as other things. But mostly music and theatre. And I think he worked for Erato, which is a French classical label primarily.

So that would have been taking photographs of not jazz people, which won't be in the book, jazz images, obviously. But in this book there are lots of really nice colour photographs. So there's a type of photography called large format photography. Most people, if they use film still, will be shooting on 35mm, which is the same aspect ratio as old television pictures.

And it's what film was shot on for a long time. But this is shot on a square format. The film's called 120 normally. And it's a 6x6 large negative.

And the colour, I don't know what camera he was using, but in the 50s and 60s it was probably a Rolleiflex. Which is the camera mentioned in the Brazilian. The German version of the Girl from Ipanema, I think. I know Quiet Nights. It's in Quiet Nights.

No, Desafinado. Anyway, one of them. One of them Yo-Bims. One of the Yo-Bims.

Anyway, the colour is, he's obviously using a stock which was quite popular in the 40s, which gives you a sort of slightly muted colour palette. And I prefer black and white jazz photography mostly. But of all the colours, I prefer the white. And the colour photography I have seen of jazz, these are my favourite.

He's really got a warmth to the palette. If I was being super nerdy, I would have tried to find out what he was using, like Kodachrome or something like that, or Fuji. Although I think probably at that period, Kodachrome was one of the most likely. And they're great shots from Paris gigs of the great and the good of jazz.

Plus, of course, the French people like Michel Legrand. And Jacques Lussier. There's probably a Tete Montelieu in there somewhere. But mostly the visiting, when Ella Fitzgerald visited or Billie Holiday visited or whoever.

And there's a whole host of great photographs which many people might not have seen because we tend to see the American Leonards and Claxton. Yeah, they're definitely not as, I mean, just looking through. That's the first time when you showed me the photo. That's the first time when you showed me the book, the first time I looked through.

And yeah, there are a lot that weren't familiar. And like you say, very often you'll get the same photographs kind of reproduced, don't you? Yeah. Well, it's a limited stock.

And particularly these days, because Gottlieb's library is free. It's been given over to the Library of Congress. And it's, what's the word, common usage. Public domain.

Public domain, yeah. So a lot of people use those now because there's no copyright infringement to worry about. So you do end up with looking at the same things a lot of the time. There's some nice kind of candid shots of, as well, sort of behind the scenes.

I mean, I know they're kind of partly staged, but there's a great series, which I have seen before, of John Coltrane in his hotel room just sort of practicing. And those kind of images are really interesting, I think. Yeah, well, there are obviously some official portraits. Yeah, and he did portrait photography, yeah.

Well, sadly, we're out of time. So check him out. Check him out. Jean-Philippe Rasson.

Jean-Pierre Leloir. Jazz Images. I'm Simon Whiteside. Goodbye.

And my name's Nick Tomlin. Goodbye.