A selection of new and recent things from the summer, in case you missed them, if you are interested:

Sam Stephenson radio interview by Jim Sintetos in advance of the Monterey Jazz Festival.  KRML radio in Carmel, CA.  September 6, 2010.

JLP segment by Richard Steele on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty-Eight program.  September 2, 2010.

JLP Wins Award for Innovative Use of Archives from The Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, Inc.  August 31, 2010.

Nicole Rudick on JLP in Aperture magazine.  Summer 2010.

JLP in Chicago.  (Chicago Reader. July 15, 2010).

JLP at the New Mexico Jazz Festival – Santa Fe New Mexican July 16, 2010 and the Weekly Alibi July 8-14, 2010.

Bondo Wyszpolski on JLP in Easy Reader, the alt-weekly of Hermosa, Manhattan, and Redondo beaches, California.  July 14, 2010.

Gene Santoro on JLP in American History magazine.  June 2010 issue.

Yesterday we learned that the Archivist Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, Inc. has awarded the Jazz Loft Project with its annual award for Innovative Use of Archives.  There will be a reception and ceremony at Columbia University on October 20.  We’re told that previous winners of the award include the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Ric Burns’ documentary on Coney Island, and Columbia University’s Mapping the African-American Past.  That’s good company.

This pleases us.  Archivists are a difficult lot to impress.  They naturally think in terms of decades or centuries.  Contemporary time means almost nothing to them.  JLP continues to receive a pulse of current publicity (click on the “news” section of our site) and we appreciate that, but this recognition by pros in the archival world is significant to us.

Without recapitulating my long JLP book acknowledgments, I want to stress that any innovative use of the JLP archives required long, complex collaborations and I should outline some of it here.  First and foremost, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University was a perfect home for this project. During the course of JLP, while dealing with the mind-boggling variety of material emanating from our oral history interviews, Smith’s photos, and especially Smith’s tapes, I could be heard saying, “We are one degree away from anything.”  So is CDS. Director Tom Rankin and associate directors Greg Britz and Lynn McKnight are to be lauded.  I don’t think JLP could have happened like it did anywhere else.  I can’t mention everybody who helped at CDS; so many played a role.

JLP Research Associate Dan Partridge is a centerpiece of it all.  Since 2003 he reported to work, donned headphones, and listened to Smith’s tapes daily.  He’s still doing it, he’s got about 7-800 hours he hasn’t heard, yet.  I’m confident that when human history ends Dan will be the only one to have heard everything.  Even Smith didn’t hear it all.  Sometimes Smith left the room, or the building, with the recorder running.  Unless somebody comes along with the time and resources and impetus to hear 5089 compact discs of sound, nobody will ever again hear what Dan has heard and cataloged.  He ought to get an honorary MA or doctorate from Duke as far as I’m concerned.

Kudos also to Lauren Hart, JLP Coordinator.  She joined the project two years ago just out of Hampshire College at a time of increasing chaos as we were organizing outcomes (the “innovative uses” we’re honored for here) and she shepherded everything, made sure it all happened, with the JLP website being her particular handiwork from conception to what you see now.

CDS Exhibitions director Courtney Reid-Eaton executed the JLP exhibition perfectly.  We had nearly 1000 people attend the opening at NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and CRE oversaw that installation for two weeks, as well as the installation in Chicago.  The staff at NYPLPA – Jackie Davis, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, and Sara Velez in particular and David Ferriero at the mid-town library, too – was essential, too.  NYPLPA’s public program during the exhibition, Hall Overton: Out of the Shadows was a highlight of the whole JLP for me (I can’t forget Sarah Ziebell and Cheryl Raymond for their roles at the library).  Many thanks also to Kim Rorschach and her staff at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art for their support and contributions.  We are excited about the JLP show being at their great venue next spring, a “home stand” for JLP, so to speak, after living on the road.

Aaron Greenwald at Duke Performances initiated a collaboration with JLP in 2006, plotting 18-shows in the fall 2007, Following Monk, commemorating the 90^th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s birth in nearby Rocky Mount.  Cornerstones of that series were Jason Moran’s seminal In My Mind, an adventurous homage to Monk’s original Town Hall show using Smith’s documentation of Monk’s Town Hall rehearsals in 821 Sixth Avenue, and Charles Tolliver’s re-performance of Monk’s original show.  Then, in February 2009, with support from Duke’s President Dick Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange, Duke Performances and CDS presented these two shows in Town Hall on the fiftieth anniversary.

CDS filmmakers Gary Hawkins and Emily Ladue worked with seven CDS students to document Moran’s Town Hall concert and make an inspired film of In My Mind. A few months ago I wrote a long blog entry about that terrific piece of work.

Our colleagues at WNYC: New York Public Radio became valued friends and they made a monumental impact on all of JLP.  The producer of the JLP series, Sara Fishko, did beautiful work, and Exec. VP and director of programming, Dean Cappello, was supportive on countless levels.  In addition to their wonderful radio series and sundry associated publicity and programming on behalf of JLP, WNYC also broadcasted Charles Tolliver’s February 2009 Town Hall show live and they publicized and recorded Jason Moran’s In My Mind.   Hawkins and Ladue made use of WNYC’s sound for their In My Mind film.  Countless other staff members at WNYC contributed to all this.  Four parts of their series were broadcasted on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition over consecutive weeks last winter.  We are deeply thankful for WNYC’s role in the whole project.  For the past five years Sara also was a full-time brainstormer, a sounding board, for me and Dan Partridge, as we trudged through the material and content together, and her husband Bob Gill added a few poignant and timely pieces of advice, too.

Critically and centrally, there was my editor Victoria Wilson at Alfred A. Knopf, and book designer Peter Anderson, and editorial assistant Carmen Johnson, and publicists Kathy Zuckerman, Lena Khidritskaya, and Nora Brennan, and many more.  In the New York Times Dwight Garner called the book “chaotic,” “soulful,” and “elegiac,” and “a singularly weird, vital, and thrumming American document.”  I was fortunate to work with a publisher that appreciated the strangeness of this story and allowed it to be at the fore, while still producing something classy and beautiful.  Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, and Edward Orloff of the Wylie Agency were integral from the start as well.

The website was designed and built by the Splinter Group of Carrboro, N.C.  Steve Balcom and Lane Wurster went beyond the call of duty.  Their work was honored by Communication Arts magazine as a “Web Pick” last December.  New viewers continue to find our site every day.  Steve and Lane also helped us throw a great launch party in Durham last December.

There are countless other key roles, many lauded on this site before, such as the Reva and David Logan Foundation, who tracked me down and called me at home after my 1999 DoubleTake magazine piece was published, the first JLP salvo.  The Logans became the primary benefactors of the project, as I described in more detail in a previous blog entry.  There was also Ben Ratliff’s March 2005 New York Times piece that in many ways “broke” the story of Smith’s tapes and provided great momentum.  John G. Morris, founding executive of Magnum Photos and Smith’s original estate executor, had visited us in October 2004 and tipped the Times on the story.

So, to say the least, a sketch of the “innovative use of archives” for JLP would look like roots, a trunk, and branches of a tree, plus leaves and fruit (and some dead leaves and dead fruit, some broken limbs perhaps, some bark chewed off by a goat).

This brings me to the home ground of Smith’s materials, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, our partner on JLP from Day 1.  We are grateful to them.  More than three decades ago they received two 18-wheel trucks of Smith’s materials shipped from New York City.  The shipment filled a high school gymnasium.  Among the debris were 1740 reels of tape.  CCP undertook the tedious task of making sense of that gymnasium, sorting and cataloging the materials and maintaining them in climate controlled conditions.  If they had not done what they did, the materials wouldn’t be available to us or anybody else.  Leslie Calmes and Amy Rule have done stellar work in that archive for many years.  Denise Gose and Dianne Nilsen in Rights and Reproductions have always been there for us, too.  I made my first visit to CCP in April 1997.  At the time I was naive, innocent, and had no idea what the next fourteen years would entail.

I’m leaving out many people.  The point is, it took a web of good people to pull off the “innovative use of archives” in this project.

Finally, Gene Smith was the one who created the materials.  Lo and behold we shouldn’t forget him.  Our “innovative use” was with his things.  He’s the real innovator here.  His family and estate, The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, were essential to everything.

To be honest, there were times JLP felt impossible.  There were times when a less ambitious approach seemed smarter.  But we made it.  A group of archivists in New York think so, anyway.

-Sam Stephenson

Tuesday afternoon I had a meeting at the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the Harvard’s Beth Israel complex and I spent that night at a hotel nearby.  Fenway Park was three blocks away.  The Tampa Bay Rays are my team because their AAA club is the Durham Bulls, who might be better than some bottom feeding MLB teams.  The Red Sox are a big spending rival of the Rays.  But if I’m three blocks from a game in Fenway I will find a way into that stadium most of the time.

After my meeting it was pouring rain and the Red Sox-Mariners game was postponed until Wednesday when I had to be on a plane to Chicago for a JLP event.  Disappointed, I retreated to my hotel room and decided to go through every Celebrity Playlist on iTunes and count the number of jazz tunes among the recommended tracks.  It was the second time I’ve done this, the first being several years ago.   Maybe it’s the kind of dreary thing you do when your baseball game is rained out.

There were 87 Celebrity Playlists on iTunes this week.  Among the roughly 800 tracks recommended by the celebrities, I counted just 27 jazz tunes.  17 of those 27 selections were accounted for by Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and William Shatner.  It figures.  Nothing against those three guys, but this is not an encouraging picture for jazz.

The rest of the celebrities were the kinds of names you’d find in any current airport Hudson News magazine stand:  LeBron James, Judd Apatow, Gucci Mane, the casts for TV shows True Blood, Breaking Bad, and Greek. Also, Zach Galifianakis, Demetri Martin, Holly Hunter, Chris Rock, Kate Hudson, Jack Black, and Garrison Keilor.

There were even some serious music names like Johnny Marr, Thom Yorke, Elvis Costello, Dave Mustaine, Rob Halford, Sarah McLachlan, Alicia Keys, and Rufus Wainwright.

From all this comes almost no jazz.  Of the 27 jazz tracks, the only one that was recorded after 1960 was a Michael Brecker tune picked by actor Kevin Kline.  There wasn’t a living jazz musician represented.

This information seems almost worse to me than the jazz sales figures.  But maybe not.  Maybe it was always this way.  There wasn’t any classical music on the list, either, except a few tracks picked by film composer Hans Zimmer (whose recent work on Inception probably motivated the iTunes staff to include him now).

But it bothers me that jazz is relegated to moth balls (even though I happen to like moth balls a pretty good bit).  Can it be made hip again?  What if Marcus Strickland and John Ellis played opposite each other at the Jazz Standard and they staged a brawl in the green room in between sets?  The brawl spills into the audience where a patron has his head smashed by one of those break-away chairs they use in pro wrestling.  A gun goes off somewhere.  Police evacuate and rope off the scene.  Residue of white powder is found in several locations in the Standard.  Ray Lewis and Jeremy Shockey are reported seen at the bar with posses and scantily clad women.  The man whose head was smashed turns out to be Harvey Weinstein and he files a lawsuit that drags on and on.  In the court proceedings it is revealed that A-Rod and Anne Hathaway were sitting together at Weinsten’s table.

A Hollywood publicist could make this work.  Strickland and Ellis would sell more records than they ever have, make a few iTunes playlists.

Ultimately, though, this discussion is sort of like the one I had with the medical experts at Harvard earlier on Tuesday:  The problem of primary care in America was decades in the making.  So it won’t be fixed overnight.  Maybe it’s unfixable.  Surely jazz has more hope than health care.

- Sam Stephenson

It was late in the year of 1961 when W. Eugene Smith and Carole Thomas traveled to Japan. Smith was hired via the fledgling  Japanese public relations firm Cosmo PR to produce photographs for a publication on behalf of the firm’s first client, Hitachi. This assignment, like Smith’s Pittsburgh project/expedition/ordeal, started out as a simple one that got complicated and ended up taking the better part of a year to complete. The end result appeared in 1963 as Japan . . . a chapter of image. There were also excerpts  of Smith’s photographs and writing (in partnership with partner Carole Thomas) that appeared in Life Magazine, Pentax’s Asahi magazine, and Hitachi’s Age of Tomorrow. (With thanks for this list to Jim Hughes for his W. Eugene Smith biography)

In addition to the photographic and written work, Smith also made a lot of recordings during this trip. Recently, I have been listening to this group of tapes and trying to gain some insight into Smith’s experience in Japan during this stretch. We still have about 30 reels of unheard W. Eugene Smith tape recordings from Japan to catalog. A couple of tapes I’ve listened to over the last couple of weeks offer some specific insight into Smith’s motives for making this set of recordings. In a lecture at Hitachi, Smith had a Q&A  session wherein he described his photo work there in terms of continuing “to weave in a rhapsodic symphony this impression of balance that I wish to try to give to the rest of the world.”  It’s clear that Smith more concerned with making a great photo essay than fulfilling his contract and getting paid. There’s an earlier tape where Smith speaks to this same goal of representing  with “truth” and “respect” not just the company, but Japan’s people and land. Also, a great line about how Smith insisted on a clause in his contract that specified that no images he made for this assignment could be utilized for the support or exaltation of war.

There are also recordings that capture the ambient sounds of the Roppongi neighborhood where Smith lived and had a darkroom during this time.  A conversation with one of his assistants starts off about “honey buckets” or fertilizer buckets and ends up with an inquiry into the different sources of early morning and late afternoon street songs from sellers of noodles, tofu,  and seashells (for miso soup). Smith expresses a wish to bring in all kinds of street singers to record their different sounds and we hope to hear  these on his tapes. We hope to write more about this once we’ve heard these tapes and maybe post or transcript some of the more interesting meetings or outings, like the one that produced a fragment of 1962 Roppongi nightclub jazz.

It was an interesting juncture in history and Japan’s history. As Carole Thomas told Sam in a 2003 interview:

“Tokyo at that time was in transition, so you’d have a skyscraper next to a shack, where the guy would come out in the morning in his pajamas and sweep his front sidewalk, in his pajamas, next to a building that looks like a skyscraper in New York City.  So visually that’s fascinating.”

Hopefully, we will find some more fascinating audio to augment this history.

-Dan Partridge

In coming up with the format for the JLP book,  Don DeLillo’s Underworld was an inspiration for the non-chronological sequencing.  To some degree I paid homage to DeLillo by getting baseball into the book.  The prologue to Underworld is a stunning work based around the 1951 Bobby Thomson “Shot Heard Round the World” game between the Giants and Dodgers, and the broadcast of the game is featured.  Smith taped the broadcast of Game 1 of the 1960 World Series between the Pirates and Dodgers and I thought of DeLillo when I chose to include a piece of transcript from that tape.

Now there is another connection, still fleeting.  According to Dr. J. Todd Moye on the Baby Got Books site, the DeLillo archives at the University of Texas contain notebooks of notes jotted by DeLillo after leafing through issues of LIFE magazine from 1951, which was one of Smith’s prime years at LIFE.  It may have been his pinnacle, publishing four major essays including “Spanish Village” and “Nurse Midwife.”  I’d like to see any notes DeLillo made about those essays.

-Sam Stephenson

Herminie No. 2, Ms. Allebrand's First Grade class, 1937-38

Above is the 1937-38 first grade class of Washington Elementary School in Herminie No. 2, Pennsylvania.  In the front row, center, is the future piano wunderkind Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark.  Not long after this photo was made young Sonny won a talent show playing piano in nearby Greensburg.  He stood at the piano, not tall enough to use the bench.  His family was jubilant.  Older brother Emory carried Sonny on his shoulders from the theater to the car.

I have a large accordion folder full of Sonny Clark material and I just started another one.  He’s been an obsession for several years.  Part of it is my feeling that his right hand touching piano keys made some of the most beautiful sounds in all of jazz.  Part of it is because Herminie No. 2 is a coal “patch” only seven miles from where my wife Laurie grew up and where her family still lives, about fifteen miles down the river from downtown Pittsburgh, a region that compels me.  Part of it is that Sonny is recorded on one of Gene Smith’s most harrowing tapes from 821 Sixth Avenue in late September 1961, a night Sonny overdosed in the loft, a tape I wrote about extensively in the JLP book.  Another factor is that I’ve befriended Sonny’s two surviving sisters and I want to put a human face on the stereotypical jazz heroin junkie story.  Sonny died of an overdose at age thirty-one in 1963.  Mystery surrounds his death and burial, some of which I’m not at liberty to reveal, yet.  One day I’ll write something extended on him, maybe a novel.  It’s high on my list once my Gene Smith biography for Farrar, Straus and Giroux is done.

Each time Laurie and I visit her family I do a little more Sonny Clark research.  In 2006 I was rummaging through the public library in Jeannette when the librarian asked, “What are you researching?”  I said, “a jazz piano player named Sonny Clark from Herminie No. 2.”  The librarian, Mary Dopkowski, said, “Hmmm, that rings a bell.  I think my mother-in-law went to school with him.”  Mary picked up the phone and called Betty Smith Dopkowski.  Twenty minutes later the photograph above was in my hands.  Betty is the girl standing to Sonny’s right.  Later I met another woman from the picture, Theresa “Terry” O’Neil Ubinger, who is the little girl in front of teacher Ms. Hillebrand’s right knee, and she helped identify her classmates, many of whom I’m hoping to track down.  I’m also studying Sonny’s high school yearbooks in an effort to find more.  You can see a previous blog entry I wrote about Herminie No 2.

The 1930 census shows the Clark family living next door to families from Italy, Austria, Poland, Russia, and the American south.  They were all drawn to this rural area by work in the Ocean Coal Mine No. 2.  Sonny’s father Emory Clark was a miner.  He and his wife Ruth Shepherd Clark grew up across the road from each other in a rural area outside Atlanta, Georgia.  He gained experience digging in the rock quarries of Stone Mountain.  He and Ruth moved to western Pennsylvania during WWI because there were opportunities in the mines and steel mills.  His first job was in the Jones & Laughlin mill in Aliquippa, which was fairly urban but notorious for KKK activity back then.

Sometime between 1920 and 1930 the family moved to Herminie No. 2 and Emory worked in the mine.  Emory died three weeks after Sonny was born.  His death certificate indicates “acute pulmonary disease,” either black lung or tuberculosis.  Experts on black lung disease have told me it would be unusual to contract the disease in a decade or less, so I’m leaning toward believing Emory had tuberculosis.  Sonny was named for his father’s brother who lived with the family for several years.  Sonny’s mother died of cancer in 1953 and the family dispersed.  Sonny followed an aunt and his older brother Alvin to Pasadena, CA.  Alvin was a garbage collector for the city and on his route was the home of Sirhan Sirhan, who confided to Alvin that he planned to kill Robert F. Kennedy.  Alvin was a witness in the eventual trial.

Why did Sonny become such a quintessential heroin addict?  I don’t know.  On Smith’s tape that night in 1961 Sonny can be heard muttering, “Bird, that nigger was crazy.  He invented fucking music.”  Thus, Sonny might be another case of Charlie Parker making drug addiction fashionable and tragic.  But the story is nuanced and complicated.  The unusually good Canadian magazine, Coda, covered the drug angle more directly than most of the other jazz magazines of the time.  In August 1962 Coda published a revealing paragraph about an unnamed junkie pianist that is, I learned recently, Sonny Clark:

One of the saddest sights these days is the terrible condition of one of the nation’s foremost, and certainly original pianists.  Having been around for many years, he came into his own in 1959 and no one deserved it more than he.  I feel that something should be done about drug addiction before we lose many more artists.  I saw him several times in the past three months and was shocked to see one of our jazz greats in such pitiful shape.  Unfortunately, the album dates that he keeps getting only help his addiction get worse instead of better.  Whether or not he licks this problem at this stage of the game remains to be seen.  In some cases people refuse help and the loss of a close friend was no help either.  If anything he took at turn for the worse and disappeared for 3 weeks.  However right now should he die it will at least be better than living a slow death with no relief in sight.

Sonny died five months later.  Today his Blue Note records outsell those of Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver in Japan and part of my journey there in March will be to figure out why that is the case.  In America Sonny registers nothing near the sales of Hancock or Silver.

To me, Sonny’s most beautiful piano sounds were made as a sideman.  Here are some records I recommend:

Grant Green:  The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark

Dexter Gordon:  Go

Serge Chaloff:  Blue Serge

Buddy DeFranco: Autumn Leaves and The Complete Verve Recordings of Buddy DeFranco with Sonny Clark

Sonny Clark:  Leapin’ and Lopin’

Below is a photograph I made of the former Washington school in Herminie No. 2 last month.

Herminie No. 2, former Washington school, July 2010

-Sam Stephenson

Last week a theme emerged in two blog entries featuring loft veterans:

In an excerpt from her memoir, pianist Jane Getz reflected on the mid-1960s and Charles Mingus, whose wife was a nurse:  ”In those days there were quite a few musicians married to nurses.  I wondered what significance this had; did all these Big Dogs need around the clock care?”

In an interview with me, saxophonist Wendell Harrison compared Thelonious Monk to drummer Edgar Bateman:  ”…sometimes the people who are the most creative need the most help.  Monk had the Baroness and his wife…I don’t think Edgar ever had that kind of support.”

Gene Smith’s first wife Carmen Martinez Smith was trained as a pediatric nurse.  His mother Nettie Caplinger Smith lived with him and his family well into his thirties.  She paid his bills and assisted in many other ways. Thelonious Monk lived with his mother, Barbara Batts Monk, into his mid-thirties and she cared for him to no end.  Smith also had a devoted live-in housekeeper whose daughter grew up to be a social worker.  There are many others who wandered into his life and took care of him in various ways.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s work at Johns Hopkins relating bipolar disorder and mental illness to creativity is convincing to me.  Smith’s characteristics and habits make him a textbook case.  Robin D.G. Kelley’s recent biography of Monk describes him similarly.

Wendell added another layer to the difficulty:  The greatest creators don’t just need domestic or medical help; they often need bureaucratic leaders who understand, encourage, and enable their gifts, and sometimes they never get that.  The most creative people are, by definition, constantly challenging standards and expectations and that’s often discomforting for others.  Here’s what Wendell said in reference to Edgar Bateman: “You see, in order to make it big you have to have the right politics and your politics have to jibe with your music.  Somebody has got to like what you are doing (my emphasis).  It’s just the way it is.  Edgar never had that.  He was as good as Elvin Jones, but he never had Coltrane like Elvin did.  He was as good as Tony Williams, but he never had Miles like Tony did.”

This seems universal to me, applicable to just about any field or profession or industry or way of life.  Some people such as Hall Overton seem to care not one iota for promotion and affirmation; for others it’s their motivation, their “Rosebud” (Overton died at age 52 of cirrhosis, so maybe alcohol was his self-care).

Like a nineteenth century Romantic, the theme of care giving shows up all over Smith’s work throughout his career:  a soldier holding an infant on the front lines of WWII, “Country Doctor,” “Nurse Midwife,” Schweitzer, a mental hospital in Haiti, a diseased community in Minamata.  There are also loft tapes with late night talk radio shows about health care, and much more.

There is another sort of connection between creativity and care giving that intrigues me:  Both come from impulses that, in their natural senses, you don’t turn off.  A natural caregiver doesn’t leave the hospital or clinic at the end of the day and stop being a caregiver.  It may explain why in mid-century studies of drug addictions, physicians were up there with artists in terms of frequency of addictions.  Many caregivers must improvise daily, be ready for anything, any patient, any flare-up, any mysterious malady.

My next institutional project, after my Smith biography, might be a national oral history project on primary caregivers – doctors, nurses, midwives – over the age of seventy-five.  They’ll be from all walks of life, from all corners of the map.  They’ll share a half-century of primary care giving.  Their point of view seems missing from the current health care debate.  In today’s brutal, paradoxical health care industry, a natural caregiver seems likely to either shun the profession and provide care on a private, volunteer basis (like Monk’s mother) or to be so stifled and demoralized by the industry they can’t do what their impulses tell them.

-Sam Stephenson

By Dan Partridge

Although the Jazz Loft Project book, radio series, and exhibition are all out there for viewing and listening, we continue to catalog W. Eugene Smith’s audio archive. If you are able to check out the Chicago Cultural Center version of our exhibition, you can hear the handiwork of Greg Lunceford (associate curator at Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs) who integrated several fascinating selections of loft recordings into the current show. Some of these selections are being heard for the first time, as they were pulled from new material we’ve recently discovered. In the following months, we plan to regularly present some installments on this blog that survey other interesting tapes and recent finds from Smith’s recordings. The following pieces represent selections I selected for a presentation as a kind of swan song to some of the more lyrical types of content that resonated with each other and Smith’s comments about a moon over Pittsburgh, with a nod to New Orleans.

Back in May, at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) 44^th annual conference in New Orleans, I was lucky to give a presentation on the Jazz Loft Project along  with Christopher Lacinak, the founder and president of AudioVisual Preservation Solutions (AVPS). Along with Kevin O’Neill and Matt Thompson (when they all worked for Vidipax), Christopher and this team consulted with us and engineered the digitization of the first 300 reels of audio tape from W. Eugene Smith’s archive, in partnership with the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. It was an honor to represent the Jazz Loft Project at this conference, especially along with Christopher, whose ongoing involvement as a friend of and adviser to the project is invaluable. Treat yourself to a look at the AVPS blog and twitter feed, if you get the chance.

In his part of the presentation, Christopher Lacinak showcased an image of a plank from the floor of 821 Sixth Avenue. Footsteps on these boards are often audible on the tapes Smith made in the loft building. Smith would sometimes drill holes in the floor to make way for microphone housing and cables. Lacinak explained the way that Smith would experiment with different speeds and techniques of recording, often on the same reel of tape. Since Christopher was generous enough to frame the project and explain much of the technical procedure, our work, and how that interfaced with engineering the audio; I was able to present a  of rhapsody  of recordings from the Jazz Loft Project audio archive.  As we were at  the ARSC convention, and celebrating this work, the selections I chose were mainly musical.

New Orleans born Danny Barker, who shows up at the loft at a New Year’s Eve party to usher in 1960 with a banjo melody that lulls, then accelerates in stages, to quadruple time. This song includes one of the few moments from this party when the revelers quiet down to listen to the music.

Roland Kirk playing a solo on multiple horns where he utilizes circular breathing to maintain one long note. On this recording, Paul Bley shows up and joins in on a song that started off with Kirk counting out the rhythm to fellow saxophonist Jay Cameron. You can hear a Roland Kirk tune on our Chaos Manor playlist but this was the first time this one had been heard in public.

Similarly, I excerpted a piece that extends beyond track 9 on playlist Chaos Manor that features Sonny Rollins and Hall Overton in conversation at the New School for Social Research, in New York on June 29, 1963. On tenor sax, Rollins demonstrates a harmonic series of eleven double tones, framing them in an imitation of American Indian chants. In addition to this demonstration, he discusses his use of different extended techniques with Overton. You can hear the beginning of this on the playlist.

A fragment of a wild tenor sax solo from multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Smith made what may be the only record of Listengart’s musical genius since he was likely never recorded anywhere besides the loft. It was probably not long, within a year or two after this recording was made, that Listengart was institutionalized and he never returned to the jazz world.

Sonny Clark, playing My Funny Valentine from the ashes of a group jam session, at the end of a tape. This session was most likely late summer, 1961. Clark overdosed and was revived in the loft by means of amateur CPR. If he hadn’t survived this overdose, he wouldn’t have made the sessions that he played on over the next year and a half before his untimely death in January of 1963, including the November ‘61 session for his last album, Leapin’ and Lopin’. What emerges is an example of how  theses late night jam sessions could produce moments of unexpected beauty that rewarded Smith for his obsessive recording and the depth of understanding he brought to the process.

And on that note, we feature Smith’s explanation of one page from his photographic and textual essay on Pittsburgh in the 1959 Photography Annual. Smith references a photograph of a dancing couple holding hands that he placed, stamp-like, in the upper right hand corner of this page titled “Of cathedrals, inclines and a sight of the moon.” Beneath it, he placed the photograph of a majestic nighttime Pittsburgh cityscape skyline featuring a full moon in the return address corner of the image. This photograph is juxtaposed with one of steelworker housing (presumably) with the shot-from-above picture offering no skyline. And steep stairs (“mighty climbs to workers homes are thoroughly characteristic”) that extend skyward, disappearing into the shadows of some trees, and likewise into that return address corner of the frame. Regarding this, here is my transcription of what Smith had to say to an as of yet unidentified interviewer:

Conflicts, contradictions, suggestions. On the next page the Love turned into a touch of a man in a woman at a dance, just holding hands. Which again, I just wanted, not as “a great photograph,” “a great statement..” I don’t care whether they saw the photograph or not up there in the corner. I just wanted them to kind of feel it. As we talk more about the city, and reportorially I wanted to say: Look the skies are clear, you can now see a moon occasionally in Pittsburgh without it being a depressing thing. And here, I think it’s where it’s kind of important a time to uh, to know enough about the background, say, to know that at one time: Can you imagine someone who has always been romantically involved with the moon? You know, and just loved it, rather on a farm or a city. Would they ever realize or take into their artistic consideration that a moon over Pittsburgh could have at one time meant real hardship, etcetera­, because a moon over Pittsburgh meant that work was not happening at the plants and therefore you saw the moon. You were immediately depressed because you knew it meant hunger, and hardship. And the whole, and the moon takes on a different connotation. But you’ve got to know that before you can utilize it in a layout, and before you can think about it. And so, the whole thing started developing from those first three pictures, you see. And so, Love kept developing, the other things kept developing in that way, and um, and so Thompson said the layout was a mishmash.

If you’re interested in seeing these W. Eugene Smith Pittsburgh photographs, check out the book Sam Stephenson edited Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project. In many ways, this work explains where Smith was coming from as he segued into his life in the loft at 821 Sixth Avenue.

-Dan Partridge

A friend owns a coffee and wine shop in Chapel Hill and recently he sold 140 tins of sardines after mentioning in his newsletter that Portuguese sardines are the best in the world and he’s now selling them in his shop.  People want to know what is good.  I noticed this when I worked in Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books in the mid-1990’s.  People want something other than the standard fare, and if you tip them off on writers like Margaret Laurence and Alistair MacLeod and Edward P. Jones and William Maxwell they eat it up and come back for more.

The same is true with jazz.  If more people were out there touting the contemporary scene there would be a bigger, more appreciative audience.  Jazz and the alt-rock audience is a match that needs to be made.  It’s already happening under the surface.  Mehldau plays Radiohead.  The Bad Plus plays Nirvana.  Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood tout Mingus and Alice Coltrane.  Joe Henry hires Mehldau and Brian Blade and Jason Moran and Don Byron for his albums.  Jeff Tweedy hires Nels Cline for Wilco.  Meshell Ndegeocello puts together a top notch jazz band and tours the European festivals.  Lucinda Williams sings about Coltrane.  Derek Trucks quotes Coltrane in his solos.  Branford Marsalis and Trucks ponder a joint project.

The next step is to get current jazz in front of younger audiences who are standing up drinking beers, not told to sit still and be quiet.  If you listen to Monk at the Five Spot or Bill Evans at the Vanguard you hear people talking and drinking.  More new steps would be if Merge Records produced jazz albums and if Pitchfork wrote more about jazz, as Patrick Jarenwattananon recently mentioned on his important new NPR blog.  It wouldn’t just be a service it would be a new market.  If Marcus Strickland or Jeremy Pelt played Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle or Durham’s Pinhook they’d set the places on fire.  I know this goes against efforts to make jazz “America’s classical music,” and for young musicians who matriculate in the finest conservatories it seems like a step down to tour hipster dives.  But the move is essential to building new and younger audiences.  It could work.

Two weeks ago on Jarenwattananon’s blog I learned about a new effort by Cicily Janus to promote the vitality of current jazz in a book called The New Face of Jazz. Janus interviewed more than two hundred jazz musicians and the book is a compendium of excerpts from her interviews.  I bought it earlier this week.  There will probably be a rush to criticize Janus (it’s already starting to happen) and there are things about the book I’d do differently.  But more people should be doing work like this.  I wish I had done it.  Here are some notable quotes from the book:

Frank Kimbrough, piano player:  “I got started in music when I was very young, maybe three years old, living in a small town in North Carolina.  My mother and grandmother were both piano teachers who taught at home, so as far as I knew everybody played piano.  They’d take me to church on Sunday morning, and when we got home I’d pick out the hymns and songs and improvise on them.  At the age of seven I began piano lessons, but I always continued to improvise.”

Ingrid Jensen, trumpeter:  “My mother was a classically trained pianist.  She provided me with a highly creative environment, and music was the center of all we had.  To her, music was something anybody could go to at anytime of day.  The piano kept her sane while raising three kids on her own without much support and holding down a teaching job.  This was a very important lesson for me.  Despite her initial image I didn’t see any pictures of women playing jazz until I was in my teens.  But it wasn’t that big of a deal, thanks to the highly supportive artistic environment I grew up in.”

Steve Swallow, bassist and alum of 821 Sixth Avenue:  “Several years ago I attended a concert of a piece by Messiaen, the Quartet for the End of Time. I’d heard it on recordings many times, and I greatly admired the piece.  I went to the performance and objectively it wasn’t a great performance.  As I listened to it I was in my usual analytical mode and enjoying it while standing back from it at the same time.  I guess there’s always a part of me that’s extracting knowledge from any music I listen to.  Then the piece finished and we all got up to leave.  I was leaning against the building, waiting, and I was completely, unexpectedly blindsided by an overwhelming sadness.  I burst into a deep bout of crying and staggered out of the building and disappeared around the corner to sob uncontrollably.  I realized that despite the objective stuff going on, I was having a very deep experience that caught up with me when the piece was finished.  From then on, I had great respect for the mysterious ways music can affect people.”

Jeremy Pelt, trumpeter:  “Despite what critics say or who’s bowing to them, jazz is at its healthiest point right now.  There are some famous figures that get a lot of press, and more times than not they’re the ones who are stagnant and give this perception of the art being stagnant.  But jazz has always survived because of the undercurrent of talent.  This is the reason it’s still flowering today.”

-Sam Stephenson

By Anna Mazhirov

During my time as a Duke/CDS Work-Study student this past year, Sam asked me to look into a particular Broadway performance that obsessed W. Eugene Smith.  Thus began an intriguing research assignment for the Jazz Loft Project about a revue called Mexicana, which opened at the 46th Street Theater in NYC on April 21, 1939.  Smith attended sixty-three consecutive performances of the show.

I was interested initially because this was a flamenco-heavy show and I consider myself something of a flamenco aficionado.  As a dance and theater student, I studied it but most of my experience has been as an enraptured audience member at various flamenco shows in Spain and New York.  The rhythm is elusive, the movements strong, almost grotesque, and the sounds empathetic to personal pain.  It is a decisive dance, in which you rip out and pull into yourself what you desire and throw and stomp out what you despise.  The earthy, bitter beauty of flamenco is why I don’t get sick of it, unlike the unnatural sweetness, in my view, of a light ballet. Perhaps this is why Smith did not get sick of it either.

My curiosity about Mexicana grew as I learned of the impact it had on Smith’s life.  I wanted to know what made him return sixty-three times and fall in love with a stranger, a dancer in the show named Marissa Flores who spoke no English.  He ultimately married the Mexican-American woman, Carmen Martinez, who translated letters between himself and the dancer and they named their first child Marissa.  In Mexicana Marissa had danced to the “Intermezzo” from Goyescas by Enrique Granados and so Smith purchased a vinyl record of Goyescas and compulsively listened to it, often while working in the darkroom.

In 1939 Smith was about the same age as I am now.  Imagining myself so inspired, I started piecing the elements of this show together.  At Duke, I found some photos and reviews of Mexicana online in digital archives.  I graduated in May and moved back to my hometown of New York and continued my research.  I discovered the mother load of Mexicana material at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.  There are dozens of photographs of the performers, costumes, and scenery, folders of newspaper clippings, playbills, and microfilm of critical reviews.  Hooray for yellowed paper that I can’t pull up on my iPad.  The dusty stacks have purpose beyond the romantic.

The process of accessing these materials, however, requires Smith-like devotion.  I had to visit three different desks, check my bag, and wait for my number to be called while wearing white gloves in a designated area.  Library procedures prohibited me from viewing more than one item at a time, from even filling out forms for more than one item at a time.  I had to do this with dozens and dozens of items.  This procedure became gratifying when I held several glossy photographs.

I was struck by the beauty of the female performers.  One reviewer, Richard Watts, writing in The Herald-Tribute, confessed that the “swell-looking girls,” particularly Marissa Flores and Carmen Molina, were the most interesting aspect of the show.  “They seemed to me remarkably attractive and pleasantly talented,” he wrote.  I do not doubt that this kind physical attraction fueled Smith’s infatuation with Marissa.  According to Jim Hughes’ biography of Smith, Shadow and Substance: The Life and Work of an American photographer, Smith took her and her friend to dinner after every performance.  Although his amorous advances failed, he memorialized his love by naming his daughter Marissa.  After wondering about this woman for months, I was finally able to look on a photograph and see her brilliant eyes and coy smile.  (JLP hopes to be able to get permission to scan and post this photograph soon).

Most of the reviews focus on the “visual beauty and colorful effects,” as John Cambridge wrote of Mexicana.  Thomas Dash called the revue “a luscious banquet for the optic nerve.”  I realized that the scenic designs, costumes, and flashing beauty of the girls could easily translate as background, detail, and foreground.  This must have been appealing to a photographer.  The 27 scenes with over 140 dancers, singers, players, and actors in hand-embroidered costumes, performing before brightly painted scenery, must have provided for great visual material for a visual artist.  But I suspect that Smith saw in Mexicana a deeper quality that he later tried to capture in his own work, the rhythms of the flamenco music and the corresponding dancing – the music made visible.

This was the first Broadway show to be produced by a foreign government, offered officially by the Republic of Mexico.  Part of the World’s Fair, Mexicana was a living cross-section of Mexican culture from the ancient Aztec traditions to the modern.  Celestino Gorostiza, director of the Department of Fine Arts of Mexico, explained it best when he was quoted in Michel Mok’s New York Post review:  “The important thing is that the performers capture some of the inherent sweetness and simplicity of our people so that Americans may get acquainted with them.”  Is this not what Smith tried to capture in his photographs throughout his career, an affirmative spirit that made the foreign familiar?

Gene Smith and Mexicana, Part 2 coming soon.

Postscript – July 30, 2010:  Having read Jim Hughes’ biography of Smith, Shadow and Substance: The Life and Work of an American Photographer, from cover to cover, I was stunned to receive a phone call yesterday from the author himself. He graciously corrected me on the point of whose love letters Carmen translated. Marissa’s friend, a singer from the show, fell in love with Smith over the course of their group dinner dates. It was this friend, and not Marissa, who sent Smith love letters from Mexico that Carmen then helped translate. I apologize for the mistake. -A.M.

Anna Mazhirov emigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union to Brooklyn in 1992. She attended NYC’s Stuyvesant High School.  At Duke, she studied English and Environmental Science and Policy, fiction and documentary writing. She won Duke University’s Benenson Arts Award and the Center for Documentary Studies’ John Hope Franklin Student Documentary Award to complete a nonfiction writing project about America’s largest Russian-speaking community, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She will continue writing and exploring documentary work.