Hit Me With Music: roots rock reggae
Autographed First Edition Books Available Now
Hit Me With Music: roots rock reggae + 3.75″ x 4.75″ Archival Ink Print
Hit Me With Music: roots rock reggae + 8″ x 10″ Limited Edition Print + 3.75″ x 4.75″ Archival Ink Print
In his new book, Jaffe reveals the world of the Wailers during their early years as an international act from 1973 to 1975, a socially and politically transformative period in Jamaican history. He also explores the start of Peter Tosh’s solo career in 1976 with the revolutionary album, Legalize It.
Lee Jaffe is a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician and poet whose photographs highlight the Wailers featuring Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer during the last three years that they performed together. Jaffe and Marley first met in the New York hotel room of Traffic drummer and songwriter Jim Capaldi, starting a close creative partnership and friendship with the reggae legend. He lived with Marley at 56 Hope Road in Jamaica for three years, and was a participant in the international emergence of reggae music. He became a member of the band, performing on stage and in the studio with Marley, as well as working with Peter Tosh, producing his iconic debut album, Legalize It. He later produced records for seminal Jamaican acts including Joe Higgs, Wailing Souls, Barrington Levy, and Morgan Heritage.
Throughout their time together, Jaffe’s portraits of these legendary performers are set against the backdrop of a politically and socioeconomically turbulent Jamaica. His detailed first-person accounts and stories are accompanied by his photographs, providing music fans with key moments that inspired some of Marley’s most beloved lyrics and songs. This book embodies the energy of reggae culture.
LIMITED EDITION 8″ x 10″ PRINT
ONLY 50 AVAILABLE
FREE PRINT INCLUDED WITH BOOK PURCHASE
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads
Autographed First Edition Books Available Now
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads Book + 5″ x 4.5” Archival Ink Print
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads Book + 8″ x 10″ Limited Edition Print + 5″ x 4.5” Archival Ink Print
A rare and poignant compilation of photography and written anecdotes by American photographer and artist Lee Jaffe that captures his close friendship, collaboration, and travels with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat as they traversed Japan, Thailand, and Switzerland in 1983.
Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens.
Basquiat and Jaffe connected over reggae music at a mutual friend’s art show. It was the early 1980s in New York, when the art scene was raw, complicated, and thriving, and Jaffe cultivated strong connections with cultural figures such as Basquiat, Bob Marley, and Peter Tosh. “For me, watching him [ Jean] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics,” Jaffe says. “With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place.” This beautiful volume presents snapshots of Basquiat: from the artist smiling on a bullet train to Kyoto and behind-the-scenes documentation of Basquiat creating artwork in St. Moritz, to poignant portraits that mirror his undeniable magnetism. These rare depictions of Basquiat come to life with Jaffe’s unforgettable experiences of their friendship, collaborations, and travels detailed in private written memories and anecdotes. This insightful and moving illustrated volume captures the soul of the unedited, ambitious, young artist during the height of his short yet unprecedented artistic career.
LIMITED EDITION 8″ x 10″ PRINT
ONLY 50 AVAILABLE
FREE PRINT INCLUDED WITH BOOK PURCHASE
Poor Man’s Counterfeit
In 1983, I returned to New York to make art again after living in Jamaica with Bob Marley. At that point, I had played in Marley’s band and produced Peter Tosh’s first solo album, Legalize It. My photograph of Peter smoking his pipe in an herb field had become the iconic album cover.
Over the years, a few of my closest friends from college had grown from small-time dealers to becoming the largest cannabis smugglers in North America, bringing twenty tons from Thailand on tankers every six months. Half-joking while we were recording the Legalize It album, they used to say to me that if our outcry were successful, it would put them out of business.
I had a devout Jamaican Rasta friend living in New York. He had massive dreadlocks and twenty-seven kids, a deceased wife, and two very much alive ones. He had had a crossover reggae/dance-pop hit in the US and used his royalties to buy a large, rundown house for himself, his wives, and all his kids in a tough neighborhood-Brooklyn’s Bushwick-and to open speakeasies selling the good herb, mainly in nickel bags to the local community. Maybe because I am “white” and involved with Jamaican music, he asked me, “Jaff-I, I know ya have de connections, mon. Set I up, mon. I need da supply of da bess herb. I know ya di right mon can set I up wit da bess, mos reliable resources…”
He was not wholly incorrect in his observation. However, my herb connection was not through Jamaica, but rather the close ties to my college friends-prolific smugglers.
After nearly a decade devoted to music, I was eager to concentrate on making paintings and sculpture and to open a new studio in downtown Manhattan-then the center of the Western art world.
Needing cash to finance my new SoHo studio and begin creating the large-scale works I had envisioned, two times a month a van would show up-courtesy of my college buddies-with twenty or so cardboard boxes, each containing ten-to-fifteen-pound bales of grade A Thai herb sealed in plastic. The best herb you could get at the time. My Rasta friend in Brooklyn would send two of his older kids to start collecting the herb from me, and a week later, they would bring me bags of money, filled mostly with five-dollar bills. My friends would not accept them as legal tender, leaving me the arduous task of devising ways to change tens of thousands of fives into twenties and larger bills.
One day, while separating the bills and extracting the fives, I came across an anomaly and was astonished by the ingenuity of what I was seeing. A counterfeiter had brilliantly turned a one-dollar bill into a five-dollar bill, making sense (sight) overcome essence.
Slowly, while examining the bill, I realized how he had cleverly done it. He had meticulously ripped one corner off four five-dollar bills and Scotch-taped them to the corners of a single one-dollar bill. Being that each five-dollar bill was missing just one small corner, they could still pass as legitimate. The newly created five-dollar bill was a masterful and engaging unique object with a fate of its own.
My doorbell rang. Jean-Michel was coming by. We had recently returned from our trip around the world, and would regularly stop by each other’s studios, only a few short blocks apart. I showed him my newly found object. I lit a spliff culled from the Thai bounty and passed it to him. He took a long draw, and the exhaled smoke floated around his eyes and danced towards the ceiling. “I’m going to Andy’s today. Why don’t I get him to sign it, and you can photograph it, and we can blow it up.”