Jazz Loft Project
Encyclopedia
"This is gold as far as the history of the music goes. This is one of the missing pieces of the jazz puzzle.” -trombonist Roswell RuddRoswell RuddRoswell Rudd is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer....
The Jazz Loft Project, directed by Sam Stephenson at the Center for Documentary Studies in cooperation with CCP and the Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging the works of photographer W. Eugene Smith
W. Eugene Smith
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.- Life and work :...
. From 1957 to 1965, Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,740 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 at the Center for Creative Photography
Center for Creative Photography
The Center for Creative Photography , established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona campus, is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American photographers including those of Edward Weston, Harry Callahan and Garry...
(CCP) at the University of Arizona, following Smith's death in 1978. Efforts to transfer Smith's original reels to digital sources yielded 5089 compact discs of recorded sound from the loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue, NYC.
The project is 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 musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene. Smith wrote 139 names of jazz musicians on his partial, haphazard tape labels: famous stars like Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer considered "one of the giants of American music". Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser"...
, Zoot Sims
Zoot Sims
John Haley "Zoot" Sims was an American jazz saxophonist, playing mainly tenor and soprano.-Biography:He was born in Inglewood, California, the son of vaudeville performers Kate Haley and John Sims. Growing up in a performing family, Sims learned to play both drums and clarinet at an early age...
, Roland Kirk, Bill Evans
Bill Evans
William John Evans, known as Bill Evans was an American jazz pianist. His use of impressionist harmony, inventive interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire, and trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic lines influenced a generation of pianists including: Chick Corea, Herbie...
, Chick Corea
Chick Corea
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and composer.Many of his compositions are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis' band in the 1960s, he participated in the birth of the electric jazz fusion movement. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever...
, Roy Haynes
Roy Haynes
Roy Owen Haynes is an American jazz drummer and bandleader. Haynes is among the most recorded drummers in jazz, and in a career lasting more than 60 years has played in a wide range of styles ranging from swing and bebop to jazz fusion and avant-garde jazz...
, and Lee Konitz
Lee Konitz
Lee Konitz is an American jazz composer and alto saxophonist born in Chicago, Illinois.Generally considered one of the driving forces of Cool Jazz, Konitz has also performed successfully in bebop and avant-garde settings...
, along with underground legends like drummer Ronnie Free
Ronnie Free
Ronnie Free is an American jazz drummer. His recording credits date back to the 1950s, and has collaborated with several notable session musicians, including Mose Allison, Oscar Pettiford, pianist Sonny Clark, and Woody Herman.- External links :***...
, bassist Henry Grimes
Henry Grimes
Henry Grimes is a jazz double bassist, violinist, and poet.After more than a decade of activity and performance, notably as a leading bassist in free jazz, Grimes completely disappeared from the music scene by 1970...
, drummer Edgar Bateman, multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart, and saxophonist Lin Halliday, as well as many unknowns. Research on the preserved tapes so far indicates that at least 300 different musicians are represented. Monk was recorded in private collaborations with Hall Overton
Hall Overton
Hall Franklin Overton was an American composer, jazz pianist, and music teacher. He was born in Bangor, Michigan...
, a loft resident, and full band rehearsals for now-famous concerts at Town Hall
The Town Hall
The Town Hall is a performance space, located at 123 West 43rd Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, in New York City. It seats approximately 1,500 people.-History:...
, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
in 1959, 1963, and 1964. As of summer 2010, nearly four hundred people have been interviewed as part of the project.
The tapes also contain many Smith obsessions and oddities, such as recorded street noise in the flower district, late-night radio talk shows, telephone calls, television and radio news programs, and many random loft dialogues among musicians, artists, and other Smith friends and associates. In addition to his photographs of the loft jazz sessions, Smith made thousands of photographs out of his fourth-floor window of life in the flower district. Smith’s tapes, photographs, and the oral histories of surviving loft participants provide a unique portrait of an intriguing place and time. The project culminated in late 2009 with a book, a radio series in collaboration with WNYC
WNYC
WNYC is a set of call letters shared by a pair of co-owned, non-profit, public radio stations located in New York City.WNYC broadcasts on the AM band at 820 kHz, and WNYC-FM is at 93.9 MHz. Both stations are members of National Public Radio and carry distinct, but similar news/talk programs...
Radio in New York, and a traveling exhibition which opened at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in February 2010 and will move to the Chicago Cultural Center in July 2010.
Quotations
"This is gold as far as the history of the music goes. This is one of the missing pieces of the jazz puzzle."-trombonist Roswell RuddRoswell RuddRoswell Rudd is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer....