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Can you imagine having Count Basie, Art Blakey, Roy Eldridge, Art Farmer, Bud Freeman, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Griffin, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Krupa, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Rushing, Pee Wee Russell, Horace Silver, Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young, and many others on 1 picture?

Well the picture of that great day in Harlem in 1958 was taken by the legendary Art Kane.

In August 1958 he was hired by Esquire magazine to come up with a photo to open an article about jazz. He figured he would contact every major jazz musician in New York to show up on 126th street in Harlem at 10am to take a group portrait. Getting jazz musicians anywhere together at 10am seemed impossible, but to everyone’s surprise 57 musicians showed up. It was Art Kane’s first professional photograph.

Andy Warhol said about Kane: “I think of Art Kane as being strong, say, like a pumpkin sun in a blue sky. Like the sun, Art beams his eye straight at his subject, and what he sees, he pictures—and it’s usually a dramatic interpretation of personality.”

“A Great Day in Harlem” is also one of the best documentaries about jazz music directed by Jean Bach in 1994. It is filled with anecdotes, history and clips of classic performances. The documentary compiles interviews of many of the musicians in the photograph to talk about the day of the photograph, and it shows film footage taken that day by Milt Hinton and his wife.

Well still not curious to see the picture? It can be seen in an interactive form at www.harlem.org, a web initiative since 1995 with the simple premise to explore jazz history through a single photograph…