• A Festival's Founder Illustrates His Passion For Jazz - Part 2

A Festival's Founder Illustrates His Passion For Jazz

By Alice Rawsthorn

When legions of jazz buffs descend on the Swiss farming town of Willisau for its annual jazz festival, they discover the streets filled with posters dedicated to Cecil Taylor, Dexter Gordon, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, the Kronos Quartet or whoever else is playing that year.

Ever since the first festival in 1975, the posters have been the same size, printed in the same workshop and designed by the same man, the Swiss graphic designer and founder of “Jazz in Willisau,” Niklaus Troxler. Some are illustrative. Others have especially created typefaces. Many are visual puns depicting images in letters. All of the posters sparkle with Troxler's twin passions for jazz and design.

Troxler has become a cult figure in both the jazz and design worlds. This spring his posters for the festival were celebrated in an exhibition and concert at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center. With Cecil Taylor on the bill, the concert was a benefit performance for Common Ground, a nonprofit organization supporting the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and it sold out.

Over the years, many graphic designers have fused a personal passion with their work, particularly in music. Take Reid Miles, who designed the covers of the records of the American jazz label Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s. Or the British designer Barney Bubbles and his psychedelic album sleeves for Hawkwind in the 1970s; and Peter Saville's artwork for Joy Division and New Order since the early 1980s. Yet few designers have fused the personal and professional as completely as Troxler, whose working life is dominated by the festival, for which he orchestrates every detail, from booking musicians to balancing the budget.

“I think every designer has a fantasy that they can somehow merge their enthusiasms, and have their life and work become one,” said the graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner of the Pentagram design group in New York. “For most of us this is hard to pull off. I know some designers, for instance, who decide they want to open a restaurant. They design a logo and menus, and then discover that running a restaurant is hard. So goodbye restaurant. To succeed takes a kind of generalized fanaticism, which is actually pretty rare. Troxler has it like few others.”

Born in Willisau in 1947, Troxler discovered jazz in his teens. “I'd listen to it on the radio,” he recalled. “My first interest was in more traditional styles, then Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and soon Miles Davis and the avant-garde.” In 1966, when he was 19, he organized his first jazz concert. Yet Troxler was also interested in graphic design, particularly in the posters of Herbert Leupin and other Swiss designers. After leaving school in 1963, he trained as a typographer and, four years later, enrolled at Lucerne Art School to study graphic design. After graduation, he worked in Paris for a few years, before returning to Willisau in 1973 to open his own design studio.

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c.2007 Alice Rawsthorn. Originally published in the International Herald Tribune. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate