The Jazz Loft Project is an entirely different animal. In 1957, Smith left his wife and four children and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue, in the wholesale flower district of New York City. For the next eight years he documented nearly everything that went on there. From inside and outside his fourth floor apartment window he shot a thousand rolls of film (40,000 exposures). And, having wired much of the building, he recorded 1,740 reels of audio tape.
Twenty years after Smith’s death, Sam Stephenson says that he “picked through all 1,740 of Smith’s reels of tape and I noted 129 names of jazz musicians chicken-scratched by Smith on the labels. I was hooked.”
The tapes (later converted to CDs), plus photographs and other archival material, had been shipped to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona from New York a few months before Smith’s death, from a stroke, at age 59.
How he’d got there
In the 1940s and ‘50s, Smith had been a notable and respected photographer for Life and other major picture-oriented publications. He’d been in Okinawa during World War II, was wounded and carried off the battlefield on a stretcher, but he developed a lifelong interest in Japanese culture. His fussy perfectionism is actually reminiscent of the novelist Yuko Mishima, of whom we’ll say more in just a moment.
He’d quit his high-paying job at Life in 1955 and then accepted an offer to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh, documenting the city for its bicentennial. The contract called for 100 images, but instead Smith remained for a year and took 22,000 pictures. He wanted the endeavor to include 2,000 of his negatives, but since he refused to concede editorial control to the potential buyers – Life and Look – the Pittsburgh project, as it came to be called, simply collapsed. And apparently so did Smith.
The building in which Smith ended up – 821 Sixth Avenue – was and would be the haunt of jazz musicians from 1954 until around 1964, and the roll call of names is impressive, starting with Thelonious Monk and Hal Overton, the latter’s collaborations and rehearsals with Monk forming a valuable chapter in this book. And the others? They include Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Teddy Charles, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Giuffre, Roy Haynes, Sonny Clark, Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, Pee Wee Russell, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, and Joe Henderson. And not just musicians. Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dali, Anaïs Nin, and Norman Mailer also dropped in at one time or another.
In 1960 or thereabouts, Smith mentioned that he was “doing a book on the building itself… out the window and within the building, because it’s quite a weird, interesting story.” For us, looking back, it’s a period of time that lingers, but just barely. Some of the principal figures are still alive; many others are not.
Music, and photography
W. Eugene Smith, who’d traveled the world on assignment, didn’t seem to want to live too comfortably, and so his jazz haven – with its colorful cast of characters who could come by at almost any hour of the day or night (where the music could pick up at two, three, or four in the morning) – may have given him the creative charge that he needed.
“I’ve learned more about photography from music and literature than I have from anything else,” Smith said in 1963, “as far as the idealistic stimulation for seeing.”
In late September of 1961, Stephenson writes of Smith, “He was forty-three years old and, as usual, broke. Whatever money he had was spent on cameras and film, darkroom supplies, recording equipment, vinyl records, books, alcohol, and amphetamines.”
“Vinyl records” should be underlined. “When he died, in 1978, he had only eighteen dollars in the bank but he owned more than twenty-five thousand vinyl records, mostly classical and jazz.” Among his favorites: Beethoven, Bartok, and Thelonious Monk (he compared his essay for the aborted Pittsburgh project to Beethoven’s late string quartets).
As for the photographs, The Jazz Loft Project contains 227 of them, and most images, whether of musicians at play or people on the street outside, receive their own page (the book also reproduces the front and back of different reel-to-reel cases, so that we can see the “chicken-scratches” for ourselves). But the thing is, they document an era and a scene, and they also evoke the passion, the energy, and the serious commitment of the musicians. Often grainy and always in black in white, they can be rough and sweet at the same time.
Naturally, the process for the photographer is highly selective: Memorable pictures rarely emerge of their own accord. As Smith said, “If you can go into the darkroom to print and… you can come out and have one good picture printed, that’s an evening. You’ve done something. You know, that’s a lot: to actually come out and make one good print.”
Smith – as the Pittsburgh project revealed – was something of a control freak, in modern parlance, in search of the perfect image, or maybe even sequences of images, but he was at times unable to corral everything into a tight, cohesive whole. As someone else noted, this Doctor Johnson found his Boswell in Sam Stephenson, whose previous books, W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project and W. Eugene Smith 55, seem to have him just warming up. Apparently he’s now at work on a major biography of the photographer.
As for the structure and narrative flow of The Jazz Loft Project, Stephenson has taken his cue from the rather chaotic nature of the times and the place itself, not to mention the music, and so the book is a kind of shuffle, drawers opened here and there, and the text is something of a collage stuffed with various snippets from the audio tapes or from the reminiscences of people Stephenson interviewed. Not everything, by any means, pertains to jazz, and yet it all feels like one big rambling but rousing jam session when you get to the end of it.
For example, Smith recorded – on May 8, 1960 – part of Edward R. Murrow’s “Small World” program on CBS. It was a discussion on art and culture and is particularly notable because it has Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima speaking about the brutality and elegance in works of art.
Smith recorded other literary endeavors as well – from the radio, from television, from spoken word long-playing albums. The book contains two pages excerpted from an audio tape made when James Baldwin was on TV in 1963. There’s also a transcription of a recording in which Smith is trying to reach Oona Chaplin in Switzerland by telephone. She’s not in, and so the conversation, as we have it, is simply between Smith and the overseas operator. Who can say why Smith recorded this, but these sorts of things add flavor and perhaps a jazz-like element of surprise and spontaneity into this book. It is, at times, a curious mélange, but it works, and it does what it should – which is to make us curious about learning more of this very distinctive and brilliant photographer. Fortunately, the current exhibition and its accompanying catalogue by Brett Abbott can make that happen. ER
