The Los Angeles Central Avenue Jazz Festival was looking for an image that could capture its long standing tradition while appealing to ever broader audiences. In the process of creating my award winning image “Giant Steps”, I was inspired to create an art series exploring Los Angeles as a mecca for Black musical genius. I began to research the story of particularly jazz music in LA and in the process discovered a new dimension of my hometown and my own connections to the larger threads of the Black experience. 

John Coltrane “Giant Steps” has long been a personal favorite of mine, but it wasn’t until I began to work on this project that I really understood to broader impact of the music. This is one of my favorite elements of the artistic process, the unpredictable connections; like jazz you must begin somewhere and play until it feels complete, never knowing exactly where that place of completion is. 

Considered by some to be John Coltrane’s most iconic record, Giant Steps features what have become known as “Coltrane Changes”, an arrangement of chords set with key centers a major third apart, which became definitive parts of the jazz lexicon. 

I also think of Giant Steps in some ways as an homage to Los Angeles itself. It’s where people, Black and otherwise, come to make to make their big dreams come true. Everyone is taking a step towards their “somewhere”. 

In each one of the paintings, I’ve included buildings or areas that served as the roots and the landing place for the talent and the music, mostly around South Central Los Angeles. The series highlights buildings like The Vision Theater, and also includes the Golden State Mutual Life building, a business that supported a lot of Black artists in Los Angeles. Golden State Mutual Life Insurance was the largest Black-owned insurance company in the Western United States and the first to offer insurance regardless of race or ethnicity. They themselves reflect a giant step not only in business but in social justice, providing marginalized communities with opportunities for growth. 

Many of these stories were new to me. While I knew that they were places of cultural significance, I didn’t know why. Even looking at the original album cover I noticed it was shot from the same perspective in which I shot and painted my figures; I hadn’t consulted the cover before creating the design concept. At every step throughout I made a connection that affirmed how important it is to know the stories of your place and your people. 

I had considered the threads of culture weaving their way from cities and towns in the South out through the Great Migration and into the cities of the North and West that would become cultural hubs for Black Americans, but I had not expected to find myself interwoven into this story. I discovered that my own ancestor, Wesley Prince, was a musician who played in the Nat King Cole Trio and often performed the song “Central Avenue Breakdown”, written in 1940 by Lionel Hampton, a tribute to the major stream of the jazz scene in Los Angeles. 

As I ride around Los Angeles now, as the first official artist of the Central Jazz Festival, and see billboards with my image adorning the skyline in the same area my great-great uncle played, adorning his community with Black excellence, I can’t help but feel the threads of past and present tightening around me and pulling me ever forward towards my own heights.