Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Intimate Portraits of Bob Marley - Basquiat

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens.

“For me, watching him [Jean-Michel] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics,” Jaffe says. “With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place.”

Basquiat and Jaffe connected over reggae music. It was the early 1980s in New York. Jaffe had been a member of Bob Marley’s band, producer on Peter Tosh’s first solo album. and collaborated with art world figures Helio Oiticica, Gordon Matta Clark, and Vito Acconci. Jaffe is the author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads.

LEE JAFFE

Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that.

So I could be in his studio, and he could be carrying on a conversation, and there'd be music, and he wouldn't stop painting, which was really exciting. I mean, there's all this stuff going on, and then you're watching it, this masterpiece. And I played with Bob Marley. I played in his band, and I was living in his house for three years in Jamaica before he became this big thing. And we were struggling to find an audience, but I was a harmonica player, and I would sit with him while he was on acoustic guitar. And he'd be making up these songs. It just seemed like it was coming from some otherworldly place, this incredible inspiration. It was like, I would just be shaky. I'd be like playing harmonica, and I didn't know whether I should stop because it was just so brillian,t or I better keep going not to lose, not to interrupt his feeling. And watching Jean-Michel paint. It was like that. It was like Bob Marley making a song. I have to tell you, I felt like I was witnessing these cultural events, and I just happened to be there. I was just like, Wow, playing harmonica. I'm not the best harmonica player, but I'm okay. But I happened to be there.

For Basquiat, the context of Jamaican music at the time of the seventies and early eighties was definitely an influence. And then jazz, of course, which I don't think has been explored enough. When Abstract Expressionism was starting to happen in New York, many of those painters used to go to the jazz clubs to see, you know, Charlie Parker and then Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. And that looks like, to me, that had to be the biggest influence on Abstract Expressionism because that's what was happening in New York. They were going to hear that music, and that music was so innovative, the level of proficiency on these classical instruments and then this breaking down of Western classical musical tradition. And those musicians started to appropriate music from other cultures.

You can see how Jean-Michel was so influenced by those musicians. And there's a fantastic show in New York now called King Pleasure, which comes from the King Pleasure song. And it's all about scat singing. It's a pretty terrific show. Sir David Adjaye designed the space. It's pretty great.

Images courtesy of Lee Jaffe

Around 11 a.m. one morning in late March of 1984, Jean-Michel phoned and asked if I could come by Mary Boone Gallery. Mary was doing a small catalogue for his upcoming exhibition in May and wanted his portrait for the back cover.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: painting in St. Moritz, 1983

Jean-Michel Basquiat on the bullet train tokyo to Kyoto: 1983

bob-marley-lee-jaffe-the-creative-process-podcast-ST.jpg

Bob Marley reading the Bible in front of the house where he was born, in the tiny village of Nine Mile in the mountains of St. Ann Parish, Jamaica
The Chelsea Hotel was within walking distance to Max’s and probably the only hotel where the manager, Stanley Bard, wouldn’t hassle anyone about smoking herb. With our minimal budget we stayed two in a room. I booked a one-bedroom suite for Bob and myself, as it had a tiny kitchenette and we had brought along our own cook. I slept on the foldout couch in the “living room.”

JAFFE

Well, it was alive. It was alive, immediate. It was visceral. And that experience of arriving in Kingston and hearing the music coming out of this shack – I mean, I didn't know absolutely that slaves had lived there. I was just arriving in Jamaica. This was all new. I didn't know anything about it, although I had seen this movie, The Harder They Come, this Jamaican movie that was Jamaican-produced. Chris Blackwell the Island Records founder produced it with Jamaican director Perry Henzell. And it was very much about colonialism and Rasta. It was my introduction to Rasta culture. So I had had a little bit of an inauguration into that from seeing that movie, but still arriving and hearing this... It was one thing to hear it on a cassette, which was overpowering. I mean, when I first heard that cassette, and the first song is "Concrete Jungle", it was the first Wailer's album was before Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left. And they were just called the Wailers, not Bob Marley and the Wailers. And the first song was "Concrete Jungle." The impact. The idea of "Concrete Jungle." I mean, that's so crucial because it starts off:

No sun will shine in my day today
The high yellow moon won′t come out to play

...In this here concrete jungle...where the living is hardest.

I was like, Oh my God, this is like the most genius thing I ever heard. And it's so relevant now, sadly. I mean, we're 50 years from when I first heard that. It's crazy. That song can't be any less relevant now than it was then.

And it was a time of great political repression. People on the left were disappearing. There was group of artists and musicians and writers who were creating things against the military government in Brazil. When I arrived in Rio in 1969, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, they had been imprisoned. They were in exile. They were let out of prison on condition they would leave the country. They were living in England. It was dangerous to be an artist saying anything against the government. And it was the time of the Vietnam War, towards the end of the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, it's never really ended, but...

there were the assassinations of all the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and Martin, and then RFK in '68, which very much pushed me into - I mean, I wanted to travel, I wanted to find out what the world was like, but - it was kind of a last straw when RFK was assassinated because then it was like, there is no law. The United States has no law. If there's political opposition, you'll just die. And then I was in Brazil, and it was very palpable. There was no disguise. There was no veneer.

I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless you were on MTV. And unless you had this big budget for this video. And it started, artists were exploited from the beginning of radio. So I thought, Oh wow, now we're going to have file sharing, and we have the internet, and there's going to be all this information. This is going to transform the world. We're going to have this incredible end of poverty. And instead, we get Fascism. We get Bolsonaro, and it's really scary. On the other hand. listening to some of your podcasts, which I've been doing a lot recently. It's really pushed me to try to be optimistic because the pessimism is very oppressive. It makes me not want to work. So I'm really pushing myself to be consciously optimistic.

After I moved to Los Angles in 1986,
it was difficult for me to reach Jean-Michel.
I would call him weekly but couldn’t get through.
On my few trips to New York, I would stop by
his place on Great Jones Street and ring his
bell but he never answered.

I try to stop myself from thinking what
great art Jean-Michel would have made.
He had said he was interested in making movies.
Of course, they would have been amazing.

– Lee Jaffe

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Colette Gauthier. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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