Jazz Goes to High School

Friday we released another batch of images from the William P. Gottlieb Collection to Flickr. This set of images includes figures such as pop singer Frankie Laine (seen posing with a souvenir throw pillow bearing his likeness), blues icon Leadbelly, Latin Jazz legends Machito and Graciella Grillo, just to name a few.  Among these pictures is an image that, as one Flickr commenter points out, features the dramatic lighting and low angle of a classic Gottlieb portrait, but has as its subject an unknown student musician. The photograph was part of a Gottlieb story for Down Beat Magazine on Metropolitan High School, a vocational school for music in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. According to a 1969 New York Times article, the school closed forty years ago. The Lower East Side is a very different place today, but you can still visit Katz’s Deli, and Gottlieb’s images live on.