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Imagine a place, a time when jazz converged with literature and painting, in a gritty and vibrant setting where Norman Mailer might breeze by to talk philosophy while Thelonious Monk prepares for a concert in another room. Maybe Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims are jamming, or Salvador Dali’s dropped in to help plan a happening. Urban street-life regulars are there as well--this is no sanitized and disconnected sanctum of sterility, it’s a hive of creation among rot. Now imagine that that place and time has been virtually recreated, through photographs and film and interviews and audio recordings that take us into the world of this 1950s/60s New York City cultural underground. Don’t pinch me; I’ve died and gone to Night Lights heaven, and said heaven is The Jazz Loft Project.
A few years ago a two-CD set that included some jam sessions and reproductions of original loft renter David X. Young’s paintings gave a taste of this scene, but the Jazz Loft Project is a comprehensive restoration of 821 Sixth Avenue, the five-story building that included W. Eugene Smith among its tenants. Smith was a photographer who documented the loft not only through pictures, but through thousands of hours of tape recordings as well. Drawing on his work, as well as numerous interviews with those who passed through the loft in the 1950s and 60s (check out this timeline for a sense of all that was going there), the Jazz Loft Project has produced a book, a radio series, an exhibition (punch my ticket for the Chicago stop), and a website that give palpable evidence of jazz as the swirling smoke in mid-20th century Manhattan artistic life.
The website’s audio archive is one of its most instantly compelling areas. You can listen to Thelonious Monk preparing for his 1959 Town Hall concert, pianist Eddie Costa exploring “Stella By Starlight,” Rahsaan Roland Kirk running down “Yesterdays,” trumpeter Don Cherry playing “Solar” in a trio setting circa 1961, and Sonny Rollins performing “Three Little Words” in 1963 for a public-TV broadcast with his working group of the time, including pianist Paul Bley and bassist Henry Grimes. There are other, non-musical items as well (Smith liked to tape all kinds of things)--Nelson Algren and Norman Mailer discussing James Baldwin and civil rights on the radio in 1963 and Jason Robards reading from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” among them.
The Jazz Loft Project is the brainchild of Sam Stephenson, a Duke University instructor and researcher who’s been delving into W. Eugene Smith’s life and work for more than a decade now. The Project is off to a great start: the New York Times has recommended the book in its holiday gift guide, and Stephenson made an appearance yesterday on the Today Show. He and everybody else who labored on this project deserve high praise--this is the future of jazz history, and they’re already there. We are the lucky witnesses.
Jazz Loft Project research associate Dan Partridge talks about his work:
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