Artist

Jones, Jim

Title

Blue Motor

Technique

lithograph

Date

1973

Type

print

Accession Number

2016.33.2

Owner

City of Burnaby

Collection

Permanent Collection

Gift of Bob Doull and Leanne Nash

Jim Jones was a member of different Toronto Jazz and Blues groups through the sixties and into the seventies, including Luke & The Apostles, considered to be innovators of Electric Blues. He was the bassist of the Artists Jazz Band and participated in group shows through the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto. “Untitled: Blue Motor” comes from a series of prints created by nine Canadian artists who were associated with a group called The Artists’ Jazz Band which was active from 1962 to around 1985. The prints were put out by the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in 1974, and originally came in a wood and masonite box with two phonograph recordings. The objective was 100 complete sets; we believe fewer than 50 were actually completed. The prints all relate to the theme of jazz. The Artists’ Jazz Band itself was a pioneering Canadian free-jazz group initially composed of Toronto visual artists associated with the abstract-expressionist movement of the late 1950s. Collectively self-taught, it was formed in 1962 in a studio over the First Floor [jazz] Club by Dennis Burton, who played saxophone, and Richard Gorman, who played bass – both were members only briefly – with Graham Coughtry (trombone), Nobuo Kubota, (saxophones), Robert Markle (tenor saxophone and piano), and Gordon Rayner (drums). It included on a casual basis many other artists and musicians, including Bill Smith, Michael Snow, the bassist Jim Jones, and the guitarist Gerald McAdam.