Giovanni Piesco’s photographs of Tristan Honsinger

September 9th, 2023

…..I was contacted recently by the Amsterdam-based photographer Giovanni Piesco, who informed me of the August 5, 2023 passing of the free jazz cellist and performance artist Tristan Honsinger. He was 73 years old.

…..I don’t claim to know a ton about Honsinger other than that he collaborated with the pianist Cecil Taylor and the guitarist Derek Bailey. He recorded several times with Taylor in the years 1988 – 2003, notably The Hearth, a 1988 album that the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings cites as a “particularly brilliant example of Taylor’s adaptive capabilities and his partners’ own contributions,” and which the esteemed critic Gary Giddins called “a romantic effusion, occasionally discursive and consistently beguiling.”

…..Critics and fans of Honsinger describe him as a brilliant virtuoso, a “bony, frenetic, bemusedly Stan Laurel-like [who],” according to The Guardian’s John Fordham, “travelled the world’s jazz and improvisation roads for more than four decades, leaving vivid memories of his virtuosity and inventiveness wherever he went. Maybe along the way, he even inadvertently helped tighten the rules whereby writers could justify hauling out the word ‘inimitable.'”

…..So, clearly Honsinger was an eccentric, accomplished, unique individual. But this post isn’t meant to dig into Honsinger’s career in depth. For that I recommend you start with a visit to Fordham’s obituary of him in The Guardian (which you can read by clicking here). This post is more about sharing my discovery of Piesco’s photography through his soulful bond with Honsinger, as he tells in his own words within this photo exhibit.

Joe Maita

Editor/Publisher

All photos © Giovanni Piesco/taken at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam from 1995 to 2019.

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I met him for the first time in the café De Engelbewaarder on the Kloveniersburgwal 59 right in the heart of Amsterdam. It hosts jam sessions every Sunday afternoons. David Murray, Archie Shepp and Woody Shaw, among the musicians who played there.

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Sifting through my photographic archives these days of Tristan’s departure, I found material of some of his performances and a series of portraits, both caught on different occasions. As for the former, they concerned his appearance in music, theatre, dance, opera, poetry, spoken words and visual art. Dadaistically, perplexing, playful, sober, unpredictable, all of them wildly combined together.

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From these portrait photos emerges a mystical note mixed with a secret of a life that is not at all ordinary. Each encounter was a surprise, full of radiant and intuitive elements on which to reflect.

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We were backstage after a performance, the creative tension and the music still vibrating in the concert hall, the charge of a pure, sincere and completely natural energy to be absorbed with both hands.

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Born in Casoria, Naples, Italy, Giovanni Piesco’s photography portfolio constitutes a moving kaleidoscopic vision of the human race. All the faces in the ‘People’, ‘Untouchable Caste’ and ‘Portraits’ sections of his website reflect, through their eyes, a deep sense of humanity. They are inundated with smiles, laughter, crying, caring, love, hate, lust, blood and transpiration – full of the ironies associated with life and death – and become animated through the photographer’s eye, culminating in a Dantesque view of the world.

-Jon Eiselin

Click here to visit Piesco’s website, filled with countless photographs of musicians, politicians, places and events from around the world…

Watch a 2019 cello performance by Tristan Honsinger