Fred Seibert's Blog

Andy Schwartz at Frederator from Fred Seibert on Vimeo.

I have an incredible life and I’ve met some amazing people. Including Andy Schwartz, a writer who’s a friend of my wife’s who’s met many more amazing people than I have. This afternoon he came by to discuss the photographic estate of the incomparable music photographer David Gahr, who recently passed away at 85. Andy shows a few of David’s photographs in the video above, and together we plotted to build the public Gahr legacy that David was always too modest to do himself.

So I was visiting Laika in Portland the other day. I stay at the Hotel Lucia where they paper the halls and rooms with hundreds of photos by the Pulitzer winning photographer David Hume Kennerly. This one outside my room works like many great political photos seeming to perfectly capture the personalities of Bill and Hillary Clinton during Monicagate.

Photographs of Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1998
by David Hume Kennerly
at Hotel Lucia, 7th Floor, Portland, Oregon

Color photography by Francis Wolff

“Blue Note Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff”

The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I began my careers producing jazz records, and as I moved through I never lost the jazz taste. For years I worked with Mosaic Records, and was proudly associated wtih helping them establish Mosaic Editions, formed to distribute the legacy of Blue Note Records founder Francis Wolff.

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Primarily known for his classic black & white documentary jazz photography, Blue Note founder Francis Wolff was able to achieve the same aura with his switch to color in the late 1960s.

Blue Note Records was formed in 1939 by two German immigrants to the USA, producer Alfred Lion and photographer Francis (Frank) Wolff.

Mosaic Records is the brainchild of Charlie Lourie and producer Michael Cuscuna. Early on they focused on the music of Blue Note Records –Michael literally wrote the discography– though neither of them had ever met the legendary founder Alfred Lion.

A few years after they started the business Alfred, retired down South, started a phone relationship with Mosaic, giving them tips and an occasional session photo. When he died, his wife Ruth called Charlie and Michael and offered them custody of Francis Wolff’s personal Blue Note photo archive, which was stored in her bedroom in a trunk, having never been touched since Frank’s death in 1971.

Every Sunday for months, Michael, Charlie and yours truly would painstakingly go through the negatives and contact sheets to archive the stuff. We launched Mosiac Editions to distribute the best work, and eventually Mosiac lublished the two books of Frank’s work referenced above.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with animation.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

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In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. In the early 80s he and BlueNote executive Charlie Lourie started the pioneering Mosaic Records as the first company specializing in boxed set reissues of classic performances, available only by mail order. Michael and I became reacquainted when I ordered their first set (The Complete BlueNote Recordings of Thelonious Monk) and he asked me to get involved with helping them out of the hole. It turned out their ’sure thing’ idea wasn’t having many takers and they were worried about shutting down. My partner Alan Goodman and I turned them down two years in a row with a lot of unsolitcited advice about what they could do better –we were broke and our company was barely alive itself– even if we were talking through our hats. Everything we knew about direct mail cataloging was from being mail order customers ourselves and from a direct mail how-to book I’d read the first chapter of. We loved Michael and Charlie, and we admired what they were trying to accomplish at Mosaic, but we were just too low on bandwidth.

Three years in our company was doing a little better and Mosaic was doing a lot worse; Michael and Charlie successfully prevailed on us to finally help. We knew no more, but full of the arrogance of youth we lugged out Alan’s first generation portable computer and invented the first Mosaic 12-page brochure on our summer picnic table. Alan wrote every word (I supervised “strategy” — what else is new?), our friends Tom Corey and Scott Nash designed the thing, Jessica Wolf supervised the production and we mailed out the first Mosaic catalog ever in the summer of 1986.

We waited for the order phones to ring, and lo and behold, in the first three weeks Mosaic’s business had increased 10 fold. They were in business forever. Alan’s still writing the brochures, I’m still getting the free box sets and lobbing in ideas from the side. What a world we live in. I’ve never been prouder of any project I’ve worked on in my life.

Do you like jazz? Order one of the Mosaic sets. They are still the standard by which all others are judged.

Endpaper from The World of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons

Jerry Beck’s quick snap and reflection on the Hanna-Barbera building facade in Los Angeles reminded me of how great it felt to work in that place and what it meant to me.

When I first started traveling to LA in the late 70s I’d get a chill going past the building, wondering what kind of magic went on behind the concrete screens. Just the name in plain black type up top screamed out to me. Working there in the 90s we worked like hell to make the building special; putting up those giant posters of the classic characters was a great rush. One of the happiest days of my life was when Bill Hanna came into my office (originally his) and exclaimed, “Wow! It really looks like a cartoon studio now!”

The last picture I have of the renovated Hanna-Barbera building, 1994-95.

(Of course, that was before the neighborhood association threatened to sue, not to mention the purists in the building who wanted to keep the original post-office-beige color.)

A vital city needs to keep changing, as does a industry and its architecture, and most studios completely disappear, but props out to Jordan Reichek for all the hard work he did to keep it up. It’ll still be nice to get a sense memory of the place, more than we can say for a lot of other homes of great work in the town.

Cartoon Network’s got a little tour of some of the classic moments inside the studio. And here’s a couple of post-cartoon views of the building before it’s latest, and last, renovation.