"In the brief but intense period when he made them, the jazz photographs of Ave Pildas were seldom seen and scarcely noted. From 1962 to 1964, he took his camera into the nightclubs, after-hours spots and festivals in Cincinnati and Pittsburg. Up until now, those images have been entirely forgotten, languishing in a loose-leaf binder full of negatives and contact sheets, secreted in a storage space in his home. His willingness to revisit those times and places give us a unique window on the music from two cities that were considered secondary markets in the business of jazz. The towns were part of a midwestern jazz circuit:Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh; sometimes Louisville and Indianapolis. With Pildas’s photographs as evidence, many a present-day jazz fan would give almost anything to be able to spend just one night in those supposed backwaters."
