• A Festival's Founder Illustrates His Passion For Jazz - Part 1

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

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Troxler continued to put on concerts, and in 1975 he upped the ante by staging a four-day jazz festival. “The first festivals were all in the avant-garde style,” he said. “We had all the great masters of free jazz - Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, Sam Rivers and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. People came from all over the world.”

Having designed the posters for all of his concerts, since the first one in 1966, Troxler continued to produce them for the festivals, working from his attic studio in a wooden chalet. These days he executes other design projects, too, mostly for Swiss arts organizations, but the festival and its posters always take priority.

The blank canvas of the poster has long been a rich medium for graphic designers. Switzerland has a fine history of modern poster design: from Herbert Matter in the 1930s and Joseph Müller-Brockmann in the 1960s, to Wolfgang Weingart in the 1980s and, now, Ralph Schraivogel. “Today, when information is carried much more effectively by other means, such as e-mail blasts, posters have become pure acts of vanity or love,” said Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “In Troxler's case, it's definitely love.”

Troxler belongs to the Swiss poster tradition, despite seeing himself as an outsider. “I never wanted to look like a typical Swiss graphic designer,” he said. “My influences come more from Pop Art, different art styles and, of course, the music. I always wanted to get sound into my posters, and also movement and rhythm.” He begins each poster by searching for metaphors of the music, then expresses them in illustrations or typography - never photography, which he considers cliché.

For “A Tribute to Thelonious Monk” in 1986, Troxler traced Monk's profile in lettering. “I wanted to visualize Monk's favorite composition, 'Round About Midnight,'” he recalled. “First I drew portraits of him, then, finally, I did it just with type.” A 1989 poster for Cecil Taylor features the top of a finger, which alludes to “the radical playing of Taylor - fast until the end, to total pain.”

Troxler often creates new typefaces for his posters, like the alphabet of rubber stamps he made for Jazz Italia in 2000. He also enjoys writing words by hand, as he did with last year's poster for Marty Ehrlich. To reflect Ehrlich's interest in politics and social issues, Troxler daubed the information about the concert in white paint on a carefully selected front page of The New York Times.

Graphic purists have criticized Troxler for being too eclectic in style, but for his admirers that's part of his appeal. “I love the poster series because it so neatly recapitulates the design history of the last few decades,” said Michael Bierut. “You see the influence of Push Pin eclecticism, California new wave, Swiss post-modernism and post-punk grunge, all passed through the unique prism of a guy working in a really small town in Switzerland.”

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