August 2, 2019

Meet the 2019 Amelia Island Jazz Festival Artist

Peter Nixon: “It was an honor and a wonderful opportunity to be asked to be the Amelia Island Jazz Festival Artist of 2019, and a rare chance to meet distinguished musicians like Les DeMerle and Bonnie Eisele-DeMerle.

I love to listen to Jazz in my studio and find this a complete experience but it isn’t quite as exciting as seeing Jazz in a live setting. Hearing Jazz musicians on record, nonchalantly throwing around intricate musical ideas, is exciting on a cerebral level but a live experience is physical, almost visceral.

Live, you get the bonus of the romance associated with Jazz clubs. I still get excited by the nostalgically bohemian idea of going to famous venues like Ronnie Scott’s club in London; where being shown to a table, ordering food and wine and pre-performance conversation is a part of the anticipation of the evening’s entertainment. As a younger man, I often stayed for the post-midnight second sets where the musicians would both get mellower and also let loose.

Visually, there are stage lights reflecting off shiny surfaces; the stops and strings of the instruments and the expressions of the musicians as they concentrate on and get transported by what they are playing.

But no instrument is more complex, has more components, is more delightfully eccentric than the drums; a sort of Activity Center for the rhythmically advanced. During the performance your attention is initially taken with the lead musicians but invariably is drawn with fascination to the extreme physical exertions of the drummer. This is the source of the primal and the sophisticated in the music; the drummer is not just a rhythm-keeper but an intrinsic part of the music’s texture, both echoing, complimenting and sometimes leading the musical chase.

In my layman’s opinion, it seems a Jazz drummer needs the ability to drive forward like an express train but to have the dexterity to stop on a musical cue with absolute precision. I find myself at times watching these furious and thrilling physical performances with a mixture of a dropped jaw and a Cheshire cat grin, if that is physically possible.

This is the excitement I wanted to capture in the painting ‘ Elliptical Rhythms‘, the official 2019 Amelia Island Jazz Festival painting: the color scheme suggesting stage lighting and the multiple overlapping elliptical shapes of the stylized drum-kit and cymbals representing the circular melodies common to Jazz and the elliptical movements of the drummer as they propel their way round and round the kit. The cymbals are like multi-layered spinning plates overlapping like complex melodies and counter-melodies, the color the multi-faceted brightness of the music. The row of symbols at the base of the picture are drum musical notations. I thought it would be an apt visual device to halo Mr. DeMerle’s profile, which pulls together the revolving composition, with a light-catching upright cymbal.