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The Jazz Loft Project
Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965
by Sam Stephenson
The Jazz Loft Project
Description
Ordering Information
About the Jazz Loft Project
Photo Gallery
Radio Series
Exhibition
Press Coverage
Description
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).
Sam Stephenson, director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies, has been studying the life and work of Smith since 1997. He has authored two books on Smith, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project (W.W. Norton & Company in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2001) and W. Eugene Smith (Phaidon 55, 2001), and curated a traveling exhibition of Smith's work organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Ordering Information
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies
288 pages
180 photographs
Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-307-26709-2
$40.00
Publication date: November 2009
The Jazz Loft Project is available from your local bookseller or by ordering online from Amazon.com
About the Jazz Loft Project
From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. The tapes have not been played since they were archived, following Smith's death in 1978, at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona.
The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with CCP and the W. Eugene Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith's tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants. The transferred recordings reveal high sound quality and extraordinary musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene. More >>
The project will culminate in a book published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., a radio series in collaboration with WNYC Radio in New York (late 2009/early 2010), and an exhibition that will open at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (February 2010) and travel to the Chicago Cultural Center, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, among other venues.
Photo Gallery
Radio Series
WNYC's Jazz Loft Project Radio Series, scheduled to run locally and nationally in late 2009/early 2010, will draw on remarkable discoveries contained in thousands of hours of tapes found in the W. Eugene Smith archive. In collaboration with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, WNYC will present a far-ranging series that combines several elements: interviews with surviving musicians who lived and played in the jazz loft; jam sessions; rehearsals; sounds of life in the loft; and commentary from some of the most esteemed scholars and experts in the field. The "field" in question is not only jazz, it's the culture of postwar America, and especially urban culture.
For updates to radio series broadcast schedule and more information >>
Exhibition
The Jazz Loft Project exhibition, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, this exhibition will evoke the jazz loft at 821 Sixth Avenue through images, sound, and ephemera.
The exhibit will open at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in February 2010 and run through May 2010. Other venues include the Chicago Cultural Center, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
For updates to exhibition schedule and more information >>
Press Coverage
Featured in the fall 2009 issue of the Paris Review
The Jazz Loft Project selected as Pick of the Week by Publishers Weekly, September 21, 2009
The Jazz Loft Project was featured on the Today show!
Sam Stephenson was interviewed by Ann Curry on Friday, November 13th.
Click below or visit the Today show's website to watch the segment.
New York Times
November 15, 2009
"The most chaotic and soulful gift book this year. . . an elegiac stew of sight and sound, and a singularly weird, vital and thrumming American document."
Read the article.
Video interview with Sam Stephenson
November 17, 2009
Courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
banner image:
Thelonious Monk and his Town Hall band in rehearsal, February 1959. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith. Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith.
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