The Musicians

The musicians was inspired by a lifelong passion for music. Sempe began the book in 1974, a time when he felt the sadness of passing things, the year Duke Ellington died. Each work was labored over in scores of versions-the final portrait of Ellington (page 52), with its easy sense of a grand and immediate prescence, was actually begun and redone at least 100 times. "I'm just a working stiff" says Sempe, whose drawings in pen and ink and in mixed media make a brilliant and triumphant collection.
Sempe's musicians toil too, through every mood of the human comedy. "i am not interested in exact details," says Sempe. What is fascinating is spirit. It is the spirit of these "charming madmen", as one critic has called Sempe's musicians, that endures and is memorable.