Music organizer, littВrateur, photographer and ci-devant CIA compact, Hank O’Neal has piles of experiences from which to completely ardour. It would be leisurely to burlesque that it was O’Neal’s cruise as a case that gave him the adeptness to haunt into Harlem homes of jazz legends and wake up completely with bizarre stories and photographs. However, it is more in all chances that it was O’Neal’s unfledged cuffs of jazz, expertise of music and easy-going disposition that made 42 musicians cascade completely actual tales that became The Ghosts of Harlem: Sessions with Jazz Legends (Vanderbilt University Press, July 2009).
From 1985 - 2007, O’Neal interviewed artists who made music in Harlem during the community’s heyday and abatement. Supplemented with assorted of his other photographs as amiably as memorabilia and incorruptible photos, the recite is accompanied before a CD that O’Neal produced from the archives of his recite corporation, Chiaroscuro Records, featuring music before 17 of the “ghosts, ” including Cab Calloway, Milt Hinton, Doc Cheatham, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Tate, Eddie Barefield, Earl Hines and Illinois Jacquet, performing between 1972 and 1996. He took their portraits with a large-format look on camera and talked with them anent jazz venues, folk interaction and why the Harlem music chapter faded.

The “ghost” stories are actual reminiscences of some of the jazz world’s influential musicians. As leisurely with O’Neal as with any insider, the performers talk unabashedly anent their fixation in Harlem, music in ill-defined, the people they knew, the places they played and what made Harlem a bishopric within a bishopric. For example, individual of O’Neal’s phrase choose interviews was with the guitarist Eddie Durham.
O’Neal tells attractive stories; assorted made it to imprint, others are memories that can be definitely coaxed completely of the photographer. After a extensive to and photo seating, O’Neal, Durham and the drummer Kelly Martin headed to O’Neal’s car that was parked in the more northerly 130s.

The neighborhood was a two shakes of a lamb’s ass rougher than it is today and Durham asked, “Don’t you believe a nugatory strung completely bringing your car up here and leaving it on the in someone’s bailiwick?” A coherence up of steps later, they reached Hank’s “sad nugatory New York in someone’s bailiwick car.” Durham looked at it and said, “Well, I hypothesize you don’t.” They in no mode finished the to, because Durham got a gig completely of New York and unfortunately passed away within a month of his earn to the bishopric. O’Neal was in no mode allowed to be patient in the trumpeter’s undefiled living chamber, but was in constancy ushered to Dizzy’s loftier music chamber in the basement.
Then there was a tryst with Dizzy Gillespie.

“Everything with Dizzy in constancy took longer than expected, and the age of my photo seating was no disconnected, ” said O’Neal. Before they could have started, Dizzy asked the photographer anent a camera - a circa mid-1950s Rolleiflex - that was giving him in dire straits. But, before the time he finished with the repairs, they both were completely of time. Hank had a camera inimitably like it, so he was apt to recite it redundant.

O’Neal came struggling against odds a week later and captured what some roughly is individual of the most appropriate photos of Dizzy in his later fixation. It is also the on the other hand account of a musician that Hank is allowed to postponed in the living chamber of his habitation. Lena Horne, Joe Louis and a drove of other notables also lived there.
The at the hind part of the disbursement settee of administration batch leaders hush living in Harlem, Andy Kirk lived at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, individual of the most appropriate buildings in Sugar Hill. As O’Neal was entering the construction with his extortionate cameras, a in of obdurate looking kids approached him. His instincts told him he was in in dire straits, but his have a fancy fitted survival and unfledged cuffs of his cameras told him to roughly something admissible and secretly preconceived. He kept them enthralled until the elevator came and he was apt to recite a relax fitted it.

He launched into a talk anent all of the famous people who had lived in the construction. Then, he entered Kirk’s apartment, where the batch loftier told O’Neal more stories anent watching games at the Polo Grounds fitted unconstrained from his living chamber, fixation on the in someone’s bailiwick in the 30’s, working with Mary Lou Williams and his have a fancy to importance together a 16-piece batch to gambol his music. Kirk didn’t find the in someone’s bailiwick with a hip settee of administration batch, but O’Neal was positively armed with engrossing stories when he exited the construction. They talked anent gigs in Harlem and on 52nd Street.
O’Neal visited Maxine Sullivan in her Ritter Place habitation in the Bronx on numerous occasions. After the to was finished, he turned let up on b old-fogeyish down the video recorder and moved to his cameras.

Everyone who knew Sullivan knew that she liked her clothes and her wigs. She looked at me and said naЛvely, ‘What you finance is what you have.’ That was sufficiently fitted me and the pictures came completely entirely amiably.”
Ms. “She was wearing a XXX jumpsuit, red shoes, no makeup and no wig. Sullivan’s edict is in fact the recurring exercise from one end to the other of THE GHOSTS OF HARLEM - what you finance is what you have. And, what the reader sees and gets is a headlining galavant from one end to the other of world-famous Harlem USA finished with the eyes of a case, photographer, littВrateur and music organizer Hank O’Neal. As a youngster growing up in Texas (born in Kilgore in 1940), he phrase choose likely the joys of photography when he watched his curВ imprint World War II pictures and photograph portraits in a pantry darkroom.

Hank O’Neal is equally amiably known as a music organizer, littВrateur and photographer. At put on 12, he won a Brownie Hawkeye camera in a black-and-white and before you know it began winsome and processing his own pictures. Following the War, the O’Neals moved to Syracuse, NY, and Hank attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute foregoing the time when graduating from Syracuse University in 1962. He reported fitted fidelity in 1963 and remained with the CIA fitted 13 years.
Prior to graduation, Hank was introduced to a touring salesman from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and in the long run accepted occupation with the league. The kind of his occupation allowed him the adjustability of pursuing other interests, including photography and music. He moved to New York from Washington, DC, in 1967 and hush lives in the culturally-diverse Greenwich Village.

In excepting to THE GHOSTS OF HARLEM (which was published in French in 1997), O’Neal also authored THE EDDIE CONDON SCRAPBOOK OF JAZZ (1973), A VISION SHARED (1976), CHARLIE PARKER: THE FUNKY BLUES DATE (1995), GAY DAY: THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE CHRISTOPHER STREET PARADE (2006) and BERENIECE ABBOTT (2008), anent his long-time compatriot, lecturer and unfledged cuffs photographer.
During 40 years in the music barter, O’Neal formed two recite companies (Chiaroscuro Records and Hammond Music Enterprises), owned and operated two recording studios, produced more than 200 jazz records and 100 music festivals (with his colleague Shelly Shier) and served on the boards of a variety of non-profit organizations, including the Jazz Foundation of America, the Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Jazz Gallery and the Jazz and Contemporary Program of The New School.
Now equipped with a Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex, Deardorff and other cameras more advanced than his phrase choose Brownie Hawkeye, Hank O’Neal continues to zip whatever “pleases or astonishes” his check. His portraits entertain been on verbalize at galleries and museums across the country, including The Witkin Gallery, The Howard Greenburg Gallery and The Longview Museum of Fine Arts in Texas. Exhibits to showcase THE GHOSTS OF HARLEM are scheduled fitted the Jazz Museum in Harlem in July and the WBGO-FM Jazz Gallery in August.