I found out I was being made redundant the day after I took a tour of the Jazz Loft Project’s exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It’s worth a visit—and the accompanying book, also called The Jazz Loft Project, is worth picking up as well. I had a lot of fun conducting this interview.
Time can transform a given place into hallowed ground, the kind that’s spoken of in reverent terms. The Chelsea Hotel, Black Ark, Dischord House—they’re hard to contemplate without thinking about someone or something famous. The Jazz Loft is not one of these places. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a converted commercial loft in New York’s garment district played host to raucous late-night jazz jams, attracting musicians including Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans. Men-about-town like Norman Mailer and Salvador Dali dropped by to check out the scene, a tableau of hidden bohemia. All along, a former Life photographer and amphetamine addict named W. Eugene Smith compulsively documented the goings-on. His output, totaling 40,000 snapshots and 4,000 hours of recorded audio, includes everything from arty, experimental portraiture to jam sessions that could redefine jazz history.
But Smith never got around to organizing his work, and when he died in 1978, few people had seen or heard what happened at the loft. Now that’s starting to change, thanks to the Jazz Loft Project, a coordinated scholarly effort dedicated to documenting the building’s history. After years of archive-digging, the organization just released a book, The Jazz Loft Project, which presents hundreds of never-before-seen photographs from the collection. I spoke with Jazz Loft Project curator Sam Stephenson about digitizing thousands of hours of audio, the project’s impact on jazz scholarship, and Smith’s inscrutable motivations.
Paul Caine: How does an unfinished loft in New York’s Garment District end up as a cultural hub?
Sam Stephenson: Well, it was just a commercial building in a neighborhood that was zoned commercial from the beginning. In 1954, four people moved in, and it was just a shell—planks and bricks and no electrical work and no plumbing. Two musicians and two artists—a painter and a photographer—moved there in 1954 to use it as studio space. The photographer was Harold Feinstein, a longtime associate of Eugene Smith. The musicians realized that it was a good place to have rehearsals and jam sessions because there was nobody around. It was not a residential area, and there was nobody around at night to complain about noise. The scene just sort of sprouted in 1954. In 1957, Feinstein moved out and Eugene Smith moved in, and that’s really how it got started. If you look at a map of Manhattan, the loft is almost in the dead center of Manhattan, which made it easy for musicians to stop by if they were on their way to or from somewhere else. I think that’s an important part of the story because word spread pretty fast that this was a place for jam sessions after hours.
PC: Eugene Smith himself seems like a pretty interesting guy. He was living in the suburbs with a wife and kids, and then he just moved to the loft and started documenting. What happened?
SS: He was going through a personal crisis in his life. He was looking to get out of his house, where he lived with his wife and four kids and a live-in housekeeper and her daughter and a live-in photographic assistant. They were in this huge house out in Croton-on-Hudson, and he was expected to provide for the household. He was in the middle of the most obsessive project of his life, a massive study of the city of Pittsburgh, and he was sort of in a desperate situation artistically. The more structured obligations of a family weren’t fitting into his artistic ambitions, so he moved out and sort of abandoned his family. I think he felt more at home in [the loft] than he did in a traditional household.
PC: Some of Smith’s photography is very experimental. Did he see himself as a documentarian, or as just another creative presence in the building?
SS: I think probably both. I think something interested happened to him when he moved into that building. He came from a tradition of photojournalism, which is what he wanted to do from a very early age, and he was a combat photographer in World War II. Back in that time it was a heroic way of life—to go out into the world and document it with your camera and then come back to New York and report to middle America through the pages of Life magazine. What he did in the loft was very different. He didn’t go anywhere. He just started documenting right where he was. [Famed photographer] Robert Frank actually told me years ago—and he was well aware of Smith’s lost work at the time—that Smith went from a public journalist to a private artist in the loft. And I think that what you’ve perceived is accurate. He did experiment, and there’s not as much of a documentary journalistic mission with the work. Paradoxically, this may be his greatest documentary work.
PC: What’s also staggering is the sheer amount of footage: tens of thousands of photos, thousands of hours of reel-to-reel audio. What did Smith expect to do with all of it?
SS: That question pertains to his entire life and not just this project, although this project is the largest body of work in his life and career by far. When he worked for Life, the photo stories would be four or five pages with 12 images. He would make 5,000 photographs that eventually became a 12-picture layout. He was an extremist—excessive with everything he did. He had 25,000 vinyl records when he died. If he decided to do something, he dug the whole distance. I don’t know what his goals were, and after 13 years of studying him, I’m still trying to figure out his motivations. He made around 20,000 pictures in Pittsburgh, and he considered 2,000 of those pictures valid for his photo-essay. Another photographer once asked him, “What in the world are you going to do with these 2,000 photographs?” And he didn’t know. There’s nothing practical to do—you can’t exhibit 2,000 photographs and you can’t put them in a book. I’m still struggling with coming up with a valid answer to that question.
PC: Smith produced his jazz loft output over a period of years, and then the project seems to have slunk into obscurity. Why was it lost?
SS: That’s a great question. I think the reason it was lost was because his reputation was in tatters. He had left Life magazine where he had made a lot of money—and where they also paid for all of his expenses, which was easily as much as his salary—and he gave that up and left his family and moved into this ravaged loft building. People thought he’d lost his mind. The official photography world (which consisted of about eight or 10 people at the time) considered him to be a lost cause. Nobody wanted to hire him because they were afraid that a simple assignment would blow up into a giant odyssey, like what had happened in Pittsburgh. So when he started making the tapes, these photography world people saw it as a complete waste—he was gifted as a photographer, so why would he spend all his money? Tapes back then were expensive. The original reels still have pricetags, and they were each $2.95 or $3.95. That’s like $25 in today’s money, and there were 1,700 of them. So he was spending a lot of money on these tapes, not to mention the equipment. The photography world didn’t give much credence to the tapes, and I still run into that today. I’ll see someone in New York and I’ll get a comment like, “Are you enjoying listening to those cats meowing?” You know, snide quips. That was the reputation of the tapes, that he had just taped all these useless sounds instead of doing what he was gifted at, which was photography. I think the other reason is the sheer volume of the collection. There have been some people who have come across these tapes in the past and they were daunted by the volume. We were too. It took over $600,000 merely to transfer them to digital files. The University of Arizona [which held Smith’s recordings] would not let anyone listen to the tapes until they were properly preserved, and that really prohibited anyone from doing anything for a long time, because you couldn’t really do anything unless you had a lot of money. We were lucky enough to get some big grants early and that allowed us to tackle the project.
PC: How has your team gone about piecing together all the parts into a coherent narrative?
SS: I started working on this project four years before we’d heard any of the tapes. I picked through all the reels of tape and noted every name that I recognized—138 names—and I figured out who was still alive and I began tracking them down and interviewing them. And once we got the tapes transferred to CDs, we began listening to them one by one. The question of how we made sense of this comes up a lot. I came up with a metaphor that it’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces. When you open the box and dump the puzzle on the table, it looks like it’s going to be impossible. One by one you turn over the pieces and separate the corners, and with each new piece the next piece becomes a little bit easier to find. That’s how it’s done.
PC: What does the new material offer to jazz history buffs? Will any narratives end up revised?
SS: Specific revision will involve Thelonious Monk. I think that there’s a view of him on these tapes—a glimpse of him that doesn’t exist anywhere else. You get to hear him talking at length about his music. To be even more specific than that, there will be a revision of how his big band concerts came about. The way it’s been written ever since it happened, really, is that Hall Overton created these charts almost on his own, using Monk’s music. These tapes reveal that that’s not what happened. Monk was the creator. Everything that happened in the big band was Monk’s idea, and you can hear that on the tapes. You can hear Monk talking with Overton about these concerts and about the arrangements. That’s quite a big change in how those particular bands will be discussed. In general, one of the things I like to say is that if you take a jazz history angle with this project, then everybody’s important. Not just the great musicians, but also the ones who are mid-level or even low-level. It isn’t really about the greats, though there are greats in it, but this is really about everyone else. I think, in some ways, jazz history is just beginning. We’ve covered the greats over and over, but for every one of those there were 20 others, or even 100.
