With life drawing you pay someone to sit in front of you and stay very, very still. However, it's difficult to stay still for a long time without your face muscles going all slack. Consequently, models look pissed off or brooding, or worse, inanimate and the drawing comes off wooden.

The challenge of drawing musicians in motion is capturing the expressiveness and exuberance of live performance. Or faking it well. (Hands, for example. I'm just making these up. They were a blur.) I think the results have more energy than if the subjects were posed.

The blue blueswoman above is Pat "Mother of the Blues" Cohen whom I saw at New Orleans jazzfest in 2002.

The sketches were drawn at Col. Brooks, a bar in northeast DC that has Dixieland jazz performed by the Federal Jazz Commision on Tuesday nights.