The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965
by Sam Stephenson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sam StephensonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-11-24
ISBN: 0307267091
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965
Book Review: A treasure chest of the past
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a magnificent book that captures human life and creativity as played out during a thin slice of the past in a tiny nook of the globe. No other book I know is quite like it. It is special.
About 1954, two people with loft space in a then 100-year-old five-story building on Sixth Avenue, near 28th, in the Flower District of Manhattan, began to allow jazz musicians to practice and jam there. For the next decade or so, the decrepit building was a favorite private late-night haunt of many jazzmen, many who never were "somebody" but some who were (for example, Chet Baker, Art Blakey, Sonny Clark, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Roland Kirk, Theloneous Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Pee Wee Russell, and Zoot Sims). In 1957, W. Eugene Smith - at a nadir in his personal life - left his family and moved into the building. From there, over the next eight years, he recorded - both with his cameras (40,000 pictures) and with tape recorders (1700 reels) -- a wide spectrum of the life that occurred in the lofts, out front on Sixth Avenue, and in the world at large as broadcast over New York radio and television.
After Smith died, those 40,000 pictures and 1700 reels of tape were part of 22 tons of Smith's materials that were delivered to the University of Arizona. Sam Stephenson spent years sifting through the materials, tracking down and interviewing some of those whom Smith had recorded decades earlier, and then putting together this documentation of Smith's documentation. It is an extraordinarily rich, eclectic, and fascinating book - an assemblage of the raw events of time as it unfolded within and in front of one building in Manhattan circa 1960 (somewhat like what I imagine Walter Benjamin imagined).
THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT is comprised primarily of the following: an account of the building and its unique place in the jazz world of New York City; an account of W. Eugene Smith, his quirky genius, and his time at 821 Sixth Ave.; black-and-white photographs that Smith took of jazz musicians playing and relaxing in the jazz lofts; black-and-white photographs Smith took from a fourth-floor window of street life below him on Sixth Avenue; and transcriptions of numerous verbal exchanges that Smith caught on his tapes, including conversations among people within the building and all sorts of broadcast communications, both radio and television.
As one would expect, the photographs are of exceptionally high quality. Smith truly was one of the great American photographers of the 20th Century. ("Iconic" has become a dreadfully over-used and trivialized word, but Smith's photograph from the rear of his two small children walking into a garden of sunlight - the concluding photo of Edward Steichen's famous photography collection "The Family of Man" - is iconic even in the old sense.) But the book is so much more than a book of photography. It is a record of the past that begins to approach the past itself. In his "Jazz Loft Project", Smith seems to capture and preserve in amber the transitory happenings - both significant and insignificant, sublime and mundane - from half a century ago. To now review those amber-enclosed artifacts is curiously intoxicating and exhilarating.
Bassist Jimmy Stevenson was one of the lesser-knowns who once made 821 Sixth both a home and a jazz practice spot. He left the jazz world in the 1970s and in 2003 the author, with luck, found him selling wind chimes by the side of a road in California. Here is what Stevenson said about Smith's archives: "You can't imagine somebody calling you up out of the blue and telling you that they've got tapes--many, many hours of tapes--of you talking and playing music forty-five years ago. Hearing these tapes is like somebody playing back your memories for you, only these are memories you forgot you had." When I see Smith's photographs of 1950s New York street life and read transcripts of broadcasts of the 1960 World Series or ongoing developments during the Cuban missile crisis, I too - to a much lesser but still far from negligible extent - am confronted with memories that I forgot I had.
There is much more in and to THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT than I have been able to touch on in this review, and I can scarcely begin to convey my enthusiasm for it. I note that other reviewers have complained because the book does not include any audio excerpts from the tapes that are part of the 821 Sixth Avenue archive. I too would love to hear well-selected excerpts of those tapes and I hope that someday I will be able to do so. But even without any audio, THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT is a treasure. Likely it would be especially valued by connoisseurs of jazz and/or W. Eugene Smith, but I wholeheartedly recommend it to one and all.
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Summary of The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965
In 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer, walked out of his comfortable settled world?his longtime well-paying job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York?to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City?s wholesale flower district. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh.821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz?Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them?and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.
From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.
Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.
Sam Stephenson discovered Smith?s jazz loft photographs and tapes eleven years ago and has spent the last seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith?s materials for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout.
W. Eugene Smith?s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of The Jazz Loft Project, no one had seen Smith?s extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tale(s) . . .
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2009: Like the American Renaissance of Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Melville bursting out of the Massachusetts countryside a hundred years before, the legend of the New York jazz scene in the late 1950s and early '60s, when singular geniuses like Monk, Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, and Evans might be gigging on the same night--sometimes on the same stage--only grows with time. Now, in The Jazz Loft Project, we have a rare and remarkable window into that moment. The project is the fruit of two obsessed men, W. Eugene Smith, the brilliant photographer who shot thousands of pictures and recorded thousands of hours of music and talk at his Midtown apartment and studio, which served as an open-door meeting place and jam session site for hundreds of musicians and artists; and Sam Stephenson, the documentarian who has spent even longer archiving and investigating the riches Smith left behind. Among its many wonders, what their book does best is put the creations of those bebop geniuses in context: giving life to the forgotten players who jammed with the future immortals, revealing the casual crosspollination among artists, musicians, and writers (and between blacks and whites), and reminding us of the world outside the loft, with baseball, UFO stories, and civil rights on the radio and the daily commerce of New York's flower district on the street below. --Tom Nissley
Look Inside The Jazz Loft Project Click on thumbnails for larger images
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(Photos credit W. Eugene Smith. Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith)
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