K. Abe — 阿部克自 — found jazz in 1945 at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, of all places, listening to American forces broadcasts in English. He played guitar at US military camps while at Waseda; in 1952 he took a job at BOAC, the British airline — a salaryman’s post that came with air travel. From about 1953 he designed and shot record jackets; by the early 1960s he was based in New York, photographing the music’s canon: Ellington, Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Toshiko Akiyoshi. Japanese accounts credit an Abe portrait as the source for the 22-cent Ellington stamp the US Postal Service issued on Ellington’s birthday in 1986. In 2005 he became the first Japanese winner of the Milt Hinton Award, jazz photography’s highest honour. He died on the morning of September 17, 2008, aged 78 — Japanese Wikipedia says pneumonia, a colleague’s memorial tongue cancer — and his ashes were scattered, as he asked, in New York’s East River.
Cover of 『ジャズの肖像 ポートレイチャーズ』 (Portraitures), the posthumous collection of K. Abe’s photographs, edited by Hitoshi Namekata (Shinko Music, 2017, ISBN 978-4-401-62285-6). Used as a stand-in because no free-licensed photograph of Abe himself could be found on Wikimedia Commons or elsewhere. Book cover and photographs copyright the rights holders (Shinko Music / the K. Abe estate), all rights reserved — this is not a Creative Commons or public-domain image.
Sources: 阿部克自 — Wikipedia (Japanese; dates, Naval Academy, BOAC, the Ellington stamp, the East River) , R.I.P. 阿部克自 (K. Abe) — JazzTokyo (the September 17 morning, the Waseda guitar years, the stamp commission) , 特別写真展『ジャズの肖像』開催―ジャズ写真家 阿部克自 生誕75周年記念 — ARBAN , ジャズ・フォトグラファー阿部克自の写真集『ジャズの肖像 ポートレイチャーズ』が12月発売 — amass (the Milt Hinton Award, the book’s subjects)
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