The Light - a portrait of Larry Adler playing ay Ronnie Scott's during the1998 Birmingham Jazz Festival.
(oil on canvas, 4' by 6')

Although this painting shares a common subject matter with much of my work it should be seen as a one-off, a labour of love if you like. It is of someone I greatly admire, not just as a musician, but as a role model and political icon. In my younger days I remember seeing Larry Adler on the news campaigning for the Labour Party at election time. His relationship with the British left began when, in 1949, he was forced to flee the McCarthy witch hunts and settled in Britain, having been blacklisted and summoned to appear before the Senate Un-American Activities Commission, something he refused to do.

In his own words, "The only way to get off that blacklist was to go before the Committee and shop your friends. There was no way I was going to do that."

It was in Britain that he wrote and performed the Oscar winning theme tune to Genevieve. However, as he was blacklisted over there, someone else had to take the credit and recieve the award. So unforgiving was his native land of someone who simply stood up for his friends and what he believed in that Adler only got to recieve the Oscar that was righyfully his in the late ninteen nineties.

The reason the painting is as it is, is to emphasise that for me Larry Adler, performing at the age of eighty-four, is the light, a shining example to people today, who all too often regard politics as a matter of pragmatism rather than principle.