[attach id=280326 size="medium"]One of the photographs taken by Sergio Muscat during the Malta Jazz Festival, currently on exhibit at Palazzo de Piro.[/attach]

“Like his music, a fine photograph of a musician reflects his soul. I’m very interested in photography and in how the camera can capture personality…” – jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993).

A photographic exhibition entitled Fringe – Capturing the Malta Jazz Festival, currently showing in Mdina, focuses on the soul of jazz. The exhibition, by photographer Sergio Muscat, chronicles happenings at one of the most eagerly-awaited jazz events on the island, the Malta Jazz Festival.

Muscat’s jazz photographs aim to capture the entire physicality of a musician’s performance in one telling story.

For Muscat, seeing the music (the performance) is as important as hearing it.

But unlike Wassily Kandinsky’s abstracted paintings of musical improvisation, or Piet Mondrian’s rhythmic depictions of the sound of jazz, Muscat is not after representing the music genre through his preferred artistic medium. He is more interested in the artist’s performance as an activity that develops over time. Capturing the real soul of the jazz musician requires Muscat to become synchronous with the performer’s own movements. Snapping the picture is, therefore, a refined exercise in clockwork body movement and camera control.

Capturing the real soul of the jazz musician requires Muscat to become synchronous with the performer’s own movements

This performance by the photographer is also the technique used in Muscat’s recent Soul Searching series: a body of work which also incorporates the gambled gestures of the camera in movement as a means to capture the artist’s personal memories of a place. Muscat’s recent interest in such temporal afterimages has its roots in an internal search for the very soul of the viewer-viewed relationship – a pursuit for the absolute human experience befalling the photographer and the photographed.

One therefore needs to view this body of work not as a document of the many prominent jazz musicians who have graced our shores over the many years that the Malta Jazz Festival has been organised, but rather as a collection of fragments of outstanding performances executed by a duo of artists – the jazz musician and the photographer.

Like a duet, these works require the input of both performers equally and, if one were fortunate enough to have been present during one of those incredible starry nights at Ta’ Liesse, one can truly relive the magic of the moment through each one of these works.

Fringe – Capturing the Malta Jazz Festival can be viewed at Palazzo de Piro, Mdina.