Basquiat
...recounts the story of the first time he was able to watch Basquiat at work. It was in February 1985. Just before Basquiat began painting, he did something rather interesting, as Farris Thompson notes
"Basquiat activated an LP of free, Afro-Cuban, and other kinds of jazz. Then he resumed work on an unfinished collage. Hard bop sounded. Jean-Michel pasted on letters and crocodiles. He did this with a riffing insistence, matching the music. Digits in shifting sequences, 2 2 2 2, 4 4 4, 5 5 5 5, further musicalized the canvas
He continued to work. Four styles of jazz free, mambo-inflected, hard bop, and, at the end, fabulous early bop with sudden stops accompanied the making of that collage."
Towards the end of the 1970s, Jean-Michel Basquiat whose nom de plume at that time was SAMO was producing graffiti on street walls around Brooklyn, New York. It was a slightly different style of graffiti compared to that of the graffiti that clothed the New York subway trains. Rather than simply writing SAMO (which meant Same Old Shit') he included slogans which were implicitly political and drawings that were primitive in style yet complex in meaning. It wasn't long before Basquiat gained recognition for his unusual style of art.
Just as music was an essential part of the subway graffiti art scene, music was a fundamental contributor to the art produced by Basquait. It was the exhilarating, frenetic improvised jazz sounds of the 1940s and 50s, with the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, among other be-bop musicians that inspired him.
Jazz has roots embedded in the African American lifestyle, and it was the lifestyle of the jazz musicians that Basquiat identified with. It was a constitutive part of Basquiat's work, as Farris Thompson states "understanding the art of Jean-Michel depends in part on understanding his lifelong involvement with music ...
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