" data-original-title="" title="">Marilyn Monroe from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. During the earlier part of this period, as the first-call photographer for studios wishing to document the making of a movie, he was, according to Popular Photography magazine, "the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion picture still."

But before he hit paydirt in the movie business, Willoughby (1927-2009), an avid jazz fan, spent much of his time photographing jazz musicians performing in and around Los Angeles: onstage, backstage, in their dressing rooms—and not forgetting their audiences. He was certainly one of the men who invented the photojournalistic jazz still. Willoughby's East Coast contemporary, Francis Wolff's preferred working style was to merge into the background, becoming an unseen observer. Willoughby did that too, but was also adept at engaging with his subjects, encouraging them to give something more of themselves to the photograph.

A collection of Willoughby's jazz photography, Jazz in L.A., was published in Germany by Nieswand Verlag in 1990. The German Art Directors Club gave it the Most Beautiful Book award of the year. If that award is still alive, then Jazz: Body and Soul, another luminously photographed, sumptuously designed collection, is surely a contender in 2012.

Willoughby's gift for reportage shines throughout this new book, and nowhere more brilliantly than in a 15-page chapter of photographs taken during a midnight performance by the tenor saxophonist