What is Kindred Cool?

Kindred Cool is a jazz-based photography project created by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. This series of portraits uses the friendship of Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden as inspiration to document the diversity of the contemporary jazz society.

Each portrait created for Kindred Cool is composed of three individuals, representing the trio of Bearden, Ellison and Murray, who, among other things were bonded by jazz. The subjects of Kindred Cool are considered to be ‘jazz friends’ 

Individually, these three intellectuals, Ellison, Bearden and Murray, have influenced the zeitgeist of their respected disciplines - visual art, literary fiction and the art of the essay. Bearden, Ellison and Murray possessed a decades-long friendship that was well documented in scholarly writings, essay collections and witnessed throughout fine art literary circles. They were complicated men with strong convictions and shifting notions of government, Blackness, Americanness, craft and process. Kindred Cool takes a look at the current conversations on art, race jazz and politics throughout the African diaspora.

Not only jazz musicians are included in Kindred Cool, but visual artists, dancers, professors, writers, DJ’s, producers are also part of the project. Some of the individuals photographed for Kindred Cool are pianist, Ellis Marsalis; hip hop artist, Ladybug Mecca; pianist, Brian Jackson; trombonist, Dick Griffin; jazz-poet Louis Reyes Rivera; photographer, Gerald Cyrus; WBGO jazz radio personality, Sheila Anderson; producer and author, DJ Spooky; jazz pianist, Vijay Iyer; percussionist, Will Calhoun; singer and actress, Rhonda Ross; Columbia University jazz studies professor, Farah Jasmine Griffin; among many others of the ‘jazz society.’

Kindred Cool is also a traveling exhibition, as well as a photographic work in progress. It will debut at MoCADA on August 3, 2008 and travel to the McKenna Museum in New Orleans in 2009.