Hal Masonberg is a live music photographer/videographer & feature filmmaker currently residing in Barcelona. Hal’s photography/videography work specializes in capturing intimate portraits of improvisational music and musicians from jazz artists to jam bands. Hal’s film work traverses both narrative and documentary. Before relocating to Catalonia, Hal lived and worked his trade for 30 years in Los Angeles where he was an official photographer for both LeRoy Downs’ celebrated Just Jazz Series as well as the Grateful Dead-honouring Skull & Roses Music Festival. More recently, Hal has worked as an official photographer for the Voll-Damm Festival de Jazz de Barcelona and is a regular photographer at Barcelona’s oldest and most-renowned jazz club, Jamboree.
Hal discovered his love of improvisational music at the age of 12 when he purchased his first Grateful Dead album, Europe ’72. Hal’s love of the Grateful Dead and their ever-changing, deeply adventurous and conversational approach to live music brought him in contact with a world of seemingly endless musical genres, including one of the most influential and expressive: jazz.
It was during the making of Hal’s second feature film, the L.A. underground jazz music documentary JAZZ NIGHTS: A CONFIDENTIAL JOURNEY (2016), that Hal finally combined his two greatest passions: music and cinema.
“The opportunity and desire to intimately capture the music-making and personal journeys of musicians led me to continue this passionate marriage of two of my favorite art forms by expanding this exploration into the expressive fields of both still photography and videography… I’m personally drawn to the human stories, how we interpret them and pass them on. To capture those simultaneously fleeting and timeless moments when “the music plays the band” and we are all at our most vulnerable, introspective and joyous…”
The ability to capture the “feel” of the music and how musicians and audience respond to this deeply expressive and communicative art – especially when creative risk and a sense of adventure are at play – has allowed Hal to seek a more intimate and, oftentimes, more cinematic/storytelling approach to his photography work.
“I want my photos to do more than record a moment. I want them to tell a story. Live music at its most organic is a ritual. It’s a ceremony that, once engaged, can foster empathy, community, empowerment and resilience. It’s at the heart of activism, cultural movements, of personal and societal evolution. It is, in essence, a musical conversation about life. It embraces the entirety of the human story itself, while also reflecting a singular, unrepeatable moment in time. It is, quite simply, a fundamental and endlessly exquisite part of the human experience.”
We hope you enjoy this ongoing journey as much as we are.
Hal’s feature documentary about the L.A. underground jazz scene, JAZZ NIGHTS: A CONFIDENTIAL JOURNEY, was the winner of the Audience Award at the 2017 Copenhagen Jazz Film Festival.
Hal’s jazz photography will be on exhibit in Barcelona at the Centre Cívic Can Deu through the entire month of September 2024. There will also be a screening of JAZZ NIGHTS on the evening of September 19 as part of this exhibit.
Find out more about JAZZ NIGHTS here.
