Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Vicki

Fankham. I'm taking you back 65 years to when an aspiring photographer tried to capture

the biggest names in jazz in one immortal image.

He arrived to the street and turned the corner onto the street and at that point he was absolutely

flabbergasted to see in front of him. The biggest names in jazz, his absolute heroes, Count

Basie, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and he told me that his knees started shaking and

that he almost turned around and left thinking, like, jeez, I don't belong here with these

people.

That's Jonathan Cain talking about the jazz drummer Eddie Locke, arriving to take his place

in jazz history. In 1958, Jonathan's father, the late Art Cain, was a magazine art director

who really wanted to be a photographer. So when he heard that the men's magazine Asquire

was planning a big issue devoted to jazz, he had a brain wave.

He pitched his idea for a jazz group portrait and they said, wow, what a cool idea. Yeah, let's

do it. Okay, Cain will book a studio, a big studio and my father at that point said, no, this

photograph has to be on location and it should be on location in Harlem where jazz has its

home in New York City. At that point, the folks at Asquire started to get nervous, you know,

they would go wrong with a live environment location shoot with a group of jazz musicians.

The location was number 17, East 126 Street, a beautiful, brownstone townhouse with steep,

rail steps leading up to a grand front door. The shoot was scheduled for 10am, early for

jazz musicians who'd been up all night. So they put the word out and at that point, they

really had no idea like who or how many musicians would show up. If they got maybe 20, maybe

25 people, but they just didn't know. So on the morning of the shoot, my dad showed up probably

...