Drummer and former 821 Sixth Avenue resident, Frank Amoss, checks in with the following note:

Jack Reidling, one of the world’s finest pianists, passed away on June 23.  His memorial service was well attended by musicians and admirers from all over Southern California as well as from his home town of Fremont, Ohio.  The following quote was printed out and distributed.  I think it aptly applies to survivors and devotees of Chaos Manor.

By Hunter S. Thompson

-Frank Amoss

HERE is my new entry for Paris Review Daily.  It is a continuation of my previous entry about Sonny Clark.

-S.S.

Lou Tannen's Magic Store Catalog No. 12

The Jazz Loft Project continues to catalog audio. Recently, I heard the following items on W. Eugene Smith’s reel to reel recordings.   ~Dan Partridge

• Smith asking Carole Thomas to pick up a can of ammonia capsules from the drugstore: “…like they use on airplanes. They also snap me awake if I get very sleepy. And also, if we get airsick….” Presumably, Smith wanted these as pick-me-ups for his long sessions in the darkroom.
• A radio discussion with seven psychiatrists, shortly after they attended the Congress on Mental Health Conference in Montreal. One of the experts was Smith’s doctor Nathan Kline.
• Smith talking to “Tommy Johns” (Janda) about loft denizens, including Ronnie Free. He tells Johns that Free has moved to North Carolina, when actually Free was in Charleston, South Carolina at that  time. Free’s current trio played as part of the JLP presentation in Winston-Salem yesterday (Thursday) so Smith was actually accurate at the time I was hearing this recording.
• Comments on the radio from Elia Kazan from a show hosted by the National Theater Academy.
• Peter Lawford reading from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums on WNYC’s “Spoken Words.”
• Long John Nebel’s late night radio show featuring James “The Amazing” Randi. One of the recent Long John Nebel Show episodes featured a short debate about how many total satellites was too many at that time. The numbers were in the single digits. A recent web search suggests close to a thousand satellites orbiting the earth today. The segment featuring James Randi was a prerecorded interview with Long John Nebel which allowed the live guests to bolster themselves with coffee and to take a dinner break provided by show sponsor Carnegie Delicatessen. Both Long John and The Amazing Randi worked as magicians. During this prerecorded coffee break segment, Randi surprises Nebel by telling him of the weekly gathering of 30-40 New York magicians in a cafeteria in close proximity to  Lou Tannen’s famous magic shop on 42nd Street (120 W 42nd Street on the 12 floor, at that time). This important community gathering occurred on Saturdays at 3:30. It should be noted that Randi and Nebel were both friends of Smith. When I corresponded with Randi in 2005, he told me he helped Smith install a security system in the loft at 821 Sixth Avenue. If anybody remembers this Saturday gathering of magicians or Louis Tannen’s shop, please share your stories with us.

I had only two opportunities to chat with Dr. Billy Taylor.  The first time I called him about 821 Sixth Avenue.  I asked him if he knew Hall Overton and he said, “Of course.”  He didn’t remember taking part in any jam sessions at the loft but he fondly remembered Overton as a congenial colleague and comrade.  The second time I called him was in regard to my research on Thelonious Monk’s background in North Carolina’s coastal plains, a background Taylor shared.  Taylor was born in Greenville, Monk forty miles away in Rocky Mount.  Taylor told me that even though he and Monk moved north as kids (Monk to New York, Taylor to Washington, DC), they often acknowledged that they were “fellow Tar Heels,” sometimes mockingly, sometimes dead serious.  They knew North Carolina was an umbilical part of their heritage and make up, in a manner not unlike, say, Italy for Martin Scorsese or Russia for Bernard Malamud, two great artists born in Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively.  I always wondered if Taylor and Charles Kuralt talked much about their shared North Carolina roots when they were doing the CBS Sunday Morning show.  If anybody knows if that is part of a public record somewhere, I’d like to know about it.

A Blog Supreme has a number of pertinent Taylor links, and Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has a thoughtful comment plus a link.

-Sam Stephenson

ESP 1001: Ni Kantu En Esperanto

Many of W. Eugene Smith’s reel to reel recordings have blank labels.  Recently, I cataloged one of these reels that begins  with a recording featuring Alice McLeod (Alice Coltrane) in the middle of a conversation. She briefly mentions a time when a dog joined her at the piano and played some notes with its paw. This casual conversation continues with several other voices, one  mentioning dolphins and their “fantastic” communication, a topic that also shows up following one of the Thelonious Monk big band rehearsals that took place in the loft in 1964 and can be found on one of Smith’s reels. You can read about this Monk conversation  in the prelude to Robin DG Kelley’s excellent Thelonious Monk:The Life and Times of an American Original.

This Alice McLeod conversation soon ends when a second microphone is turned on and Julius Balbin recites his Esperanto translation of Babij Jar or “Babi Yar,” the poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. “Babi Yar” is an inspiration and a subject of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor (Op. 113, subtitled Baby Yar). Balbin survived his experience as a concentration camp prisoner of Auschwitz so his reading of this poem about the 1941 Nazi directed massacre at Kiev held some visceral power, even without understanding his Esperanto rendition of this poem.  It becomes clear while listening to this tape that Balbin reads this poem as part of a developmental rehearsal for the first ESP disk Ni Kanto En Esperanto. I also heard the voice of ESP label founder Bernard Stollman or perhaps Duncan Charters reading an explanation of the Esperanto language and demonstrating the Esperanto language. . At various junctures in this recording, Smith chimes in to direct the recording he’s engineering. They also refer to “Maceo”, who is likely Maceo Gilchrist who appears on ESP 1005: The Byron Allen Trio.  Kanto in Esperanto came out in 1963 so we know this recording was made before that record release and after Alice Coltrane moved into the loft at 821 Sixth Avenue.

“There is less noise around here on Sundays, or very late at night” says Smith, as they plan for a follow up recording session. Naturally, the activity of the wholesale flower district, where Smith’s 821 Sixth Avenue loft was situated, made for a high level of ambient noise except for late nights and Sundays.

We’re excited to find a second tape featuring Alice Coltrane. She lived in the loft for a month or so after returning from Paris and this may be from that era. Or she might have returned to visit and play a session or two after having her residence there. Hearing a recording that led to the inception of the grand ESP label is thrilling.  Since this reel isn’t labeled, then there might be others of equal importance in the remaining as of yet uncatalogued reels.  Another tape I recently cataloged, revealed the beginning of a jam session featuring Jimmy Stevenson and Warren Bernhardt from January of 1964. So these finds make us optimistic that the remaining collection of these recordings may yet yield the Ornette Coleman practice tape or the Diane Arbus photo meeting that oral histories have confirmed as taking place at 821. Or maybe some surprises like this one with Alice, Smith, and the ESP crew.

You can read more about Jules Balbin in this interesting profile by Alexander Kharkovsky ( which provided some background for this post). And a great interview of ESP Disk founder Bernard Stollman by Clifford Allen from allaboutjazz.com (2oo5).

-Dan Partridge

Daniel Kramer at CDS, Duke University, October 2010. (C) Arline Cunningham

Two weeks ago photographer Daniel Kramer and his wife Arline Cunningham visited us at the Center for Documentary Studies.  The purpose of their visit was for Dan to listen to Gene Smith’s loft tapes and hear himself chatting with Smith about Bob Dylan and photography and other topics in August 1965.  At the time of these loft recordings Dan had completed a year – 366 days – photographing Dylan.  Smith and his longtime girlfriend and professional associate Carole Thomas were attempting to launch a new journalism magazine, Sensorium, and Smith wanted to use a spread of Dan’s photographs of Dylan in the inaugural issue.

Dan had first met Gene Smith in Columbia’s Studio A in NYC on June 16, 1965 when Dylan was recording “Like a Rolling Stone.”  Dan told us:  ”I noticed Gene Smith in the room and I went up to him and I said, ‘I’m a photographer and I love your work, Mr. Smith.  Thank you for doing it.’  Gene said, ‘What are you doing?’  I said, ‘I’m photographing Bob Dylan.’  Gene said, ‘Me, too.’  Then he said, ‘Gimme your name.’  I didn’t have a pen and Gene said, ‘How can you walk around without a pen?’  So from that day on I’ve always walked around with a pen.”

Smith eventually enlisted Kramer to put together a spread on Dylan for the first issue of Sensorium alongside work by Smith’s friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, Red Valens, and David Vestal, among others.  In my work and travels on JLP over the past decade, I’ve learned that the kind of impulse Smith had to include an unknown young photographer in a new venture like this – a venture Smith was staking his life and resources on at the time – is an impulse only artists have.  Maybe I should rephrase that:  Others may have the impulse, but only artists act on it.  It felt right to Smith – he liked what he’d seen of Kramer’s work – and that’s the only thing that mattered to him.

Sensorium eventually failed.  The inaugural issue never launched.  Smith’s reputation, already suffering, was in more tatters.  But he didn’t turn away from Kramer.  They had a mutual friend in photographer Philipe Halsmann who told Kramer in private: “Gene has a lot of problems.  But he still has his power.  You can trust him.”

“Gene went to bat for me after Sensorium failed.” Dan told us.  ”He thought I could do it.  He thought I could finish my work on Dylan and he thought it was important enough for a major magazine spread and eventually a book.  I owe him a lot.”

Clay Felker, an old associate and correspondent of Smith’s, published Dan’s first Dylan spread in the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine.  A couple of years later Dan published his book documenting Dylan for 366 days.  It was a period when Dylan went from traveling with armfuls of suitcases to traveling with 18 wheel trucks.  (Here is a link to a recent edition of Dan’s original work from that period).

Daniel Kramer at CDS, Duke University, October 2010 (C) Arline Cunningham

Dan and Arline also spent a couple of days listening to Smith’s tapes with JLP Research Associate Dan Partridge.  They told many intriguing stories.  Dan and Arline spent a lot of time with Gene and Carole.  After Gene and Carole split up in the late 1960s, Gene showed up despondent, on Dan and Arline’s doorstep.  Gene walked in with a bottle of scotch and sat at their table and told his life story and drank all night.  Dan says it never really occurred to him to turn on a tape recorder – the moment seemed too intimate.  I wish he had.

In Dan Partridge’s office one of those days two weeks ago Dan Kramer was talking about things he wanted to do, current goals, and he muttered:  ”One of my problems is I don’t get out of the day everything that I should.”

The following day we were all huddled around a speaker listening to Smith’s tapes from August 1965 – me, Dan, Dan, and Arline – and suddenly on the reel we could hear Kramer, forty-five years ago, mutter to Smith, “One of my problems is I’m not…how can I explain this?  I don’t get everything out of the day that I should.”

Arline broke up laughing, and so did the rest of us.

Daniel Kramer, Sam Stephenson, Dan Partridge at CDS. October 2010. (C) Arline Cunningham

One day soon we’ll have a video clip of Daniel Kramer’s talk at CDS, edited by him for this blog.

-Sam Stephenson

There are many ways in which the TV show Mad Men overlaps with our decade-plus of research on the Jazz Loft Project.  This past Sunday night Midge, Don Draper’s Village girlfriend from the first season, reappeared as a Village heroin junkie with a junkie “husband” (most junkie couples weren’t legally married) willing to prostitute Midge for cash (photo above).  Yesterday on Slate’s weekly discussion of Mad Men Julia Turner mentioned that Alexandra Dufour had tipped them on LIFE magazine’s long 1965 piece on a couple living the junkie life in New York City, “The World of Needle Park.”  We’ve had this piece in our files for years.  The piece grew into a book by James Mills which became the source material for Joan Didion’s screenplay of the 1971 film, “Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino.

When JLP colleague Dan Partridge and I ventured to Port Townsend, Washington in 2005 to visit Virginia “Gin” Wald (in the loft era she was Gin McEwan) and her husband, the bassist Ted Wald, Gin told us all about the junkie street life she witnessed in NYC in the summer of 1961 with her boyfriend, saxophonist Lin Halliday.  She wrote about it movingly in letters to me afterward.  We edited her letters, with her editorial approval, for a blog entry a few months ago.  Gin said if we wanted to get a feel for her life with Lin then we should watch “Panic in Needle Park.”

Pacino played the junkie in that film.  On various buses and planes and rental cars (and I think we took a ferry from somewhere to somewhere on that particular Pacific Northwest trip in 2005), Dan Partridge and I tossed around actor names we thought could play Lin Halliday.  A year earlier we’d been in Chicago and came across film footage of Lin shot by bass player Dennis Carroll a few years before Lin died.  In that footage Lin looked not unlike he looks in the photograph of Lin and Gin made by their daughter which we posted in Gin’s blog entry.  He looked a little bit younger and healthier than that, but similar.  In the footage Lin is smoking cigarettes with all the compulsive mannerisms you’d expect from someone with serious addiction problems.  Only Lin seemed to have rounded off all the quick jerks, like a swimmer or flamenco dancer or puppeteer.  I’ve been in a lot of bars and pool halls and I’ve never seen anybody whip around matches and lit cigarettes quite like Lin.  Dan and I figured the actor who could do Lin justice is Johnny Depp.

-Sam Stephenson

Drummer Ronnie Free in 821 Sixth Avenue. Photo by W. Eugene Smith. Circa 1959.

Over the weekend we received the email below from bass player Greg Cordez.  We asked him if it was okay to publish his email here.  He said, no problem, as long as readers knew it was a casual note drafted during a breakfast of coffee and toast. – Sam Stephenson

Dear Mr. Stephenson,

My name is Greg Cordez and I’m a musician based in the UK/Europe. I’ve recently withdrawn from the freelance session world to study for a Masters degree in Jazz.  I play upright bass.

A couple of months ago I was working in Athens, Georgia, recording with the wonderful Jim White, and I stumbled across your Jazz Loft Project book on Jim’s bookshelf. The book literally fell open to the story of Ronnie Free. I was enraptured by his story and your telling of it.  It left an impression on me.

Anyway, as part of the Masters program I have to compose original music.  This has been my Achilles heel so far in my career.  It is my greatest fear.  I play bass in the band.  I’m not normally exposing myself through my compositions.  Part of the reason to take on the Masters was to run head-on into these types of problems.

I spent yesterday trying to compose, and trying to get something out.  Then I was reminded of the Ronnie Free story.  Somehow, a tune, my first one in 10 years of trying, emerged. I was quite excited about this and I scored it to play with on a quartet gig last night.  The gig was at quite a decent jazz club in Bristol.  I should have felt nervous about debuting a tune written hours before the show.  My tune was buried in the first set amongst some standards and the other musicians’ compositions.  People were still eating, etc. during the first set and it’s a safe time to try out new tunes. We played my tune and it got quite a surprising reaction from the audience.  It was requested that we play it again and we closed the final set with it.  This was the most pleasant surprise of my playing career.  I now hope to continue composing.  My aim is to play my compositions now and hope that my reticence and fear doesn’t get the better of me.

The tune is tentatively called ‘Ronnie Free.’  It is about the most respectful gesture I could come up with for Ronnie and yourself.  People came up to me after the gig and inquired about Ronnie Free.  They asked me who he is.  I told everyone to go home and google his name, and to look out for your book as well to get the full story.

I am going out on a limb here.  But I’m (really, really) hoping that you could help me contact Mr. Free.  His playing, his life, and your telling off it has been such a wonderful discovery and it helped finally get a tune out of me. It would mean a lot if somehow Mr. Free and yourself could hear it.  Or I could send the score.  It will probably be tweaked over time, but it would mean the world to me if Ronnie could hear it.

Would it be possible to get an email address to send it as an attachment? Or a postal address so I can send a CD recording to him?

If you are reluctant to give out any contact details, could you perhaps at least forward this email on to him.  I hope that I got the tone of this email right and that my sincerity somehow gets across.  My discovery of Ronnie and your writing has been a highlight of an already very good year for me.  I very hope that you can help me in this matter.

I look forward to any kind of response from you.

Regards,

Greg Cordez

“You know, Gene used to, in the darkroom sometimes, put a red filter on a TV set so he could watch some of the games, some of the football or baseball games.  And some people are just horrified at this, that it sounds a lot better if he was just listening to music.  But you know, when you’re living, you do normal stuff.” -Carole Thomas

On November 13, 1961 American boxer Davey Moore fought a rematch versus Japanese challenger Kazuo Takayama, successfully defending his title as the Featherweight Champion of the World. The bout took place in Tokyo, where W. Eugene Smith was on extended assignment via Cosmo Public Relations on behalf of Hitachi. During the broadcast, Smith made a recording of the scene in his Roppongi apartment, which doubled as his studio. Smith is audible directing some of his Japanese assistants in the darkroom, where they are listening to and maybe watching the event. He also checks in with them about the results, since he’s presumably working in an adjoining room.

Sadly, Davey Moore would die on March 25, 1963 from injuries sustained in a boxing match four days prior. The event made worldwide news and both Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan wrote songs about it. Dylan’s song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” was covered by Pete Seeger, a brief  roommate of Smith’s in the 30’s. Each of these songwriters have songs that show up on Smith’s recordings. And Dylan and Seeger might have also been in Smith’s loft, though we haven’t confirmed it.

A 21 year old Bob Dylan played Town Hall in New York on April 12, 1963. And he played “Who Killed Davey Moore?” Robert Shelton’s New York Times article seems to be  reintroducing Dylan to the masses almost 2 years after his landmark September 29, 1961 review of Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City. In the later article, Shelton compares Dylan to Holden Caulfield, Woody Guthrie, Rimbaud, and Yevtushenko. The following year is when loft veteran Daniel Kramer began photographing  Bob Dylan. We’re excited to have Kramer visiting us this month and speaking on the 13th. This recently cataloged tape, featuring Smith and Moore in Tokyo, seems to resonate  with some of our latest blog entries and a set of somewhat disparate events.

-Dan Partridge

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