We were sad to hear that talented jazz drummer Edgar Bateman, Jr. passed away last week at the age of 81. We were fortunate enough to meet him and record a brief interview with Edgar in November at the home of his gracious son, Edgar Bateman, III. In the short time we spent with him, Edgar recounted how he first became interested in playing the drums:

My sister started drumming before I did. In fact, my mother belonged to an organization called the Elks. And they started a drum corps. And I was kind of sickly when I was young so I wasn’t allowed to participate in stuff like that. So my sister was going to drum practice, you know, and she came home one day and was showing me the stuff they were learning on the snare drum. And we got an oatmeal box. Well, that’s how it started.

Edgar Bateman, Jr. appears on W. Eugene Smith’s recordings made at 821 Sixth Avenue in the first three months of 1964. One of these recordings is now featured as track 7 on our Chaos Manor playlist. It features Bateman playing “Yesterdays” with Roland Kirk, various horns; Jay Cameron, baritone saxophone; Edgar Bateman, drums on January 4, 1964. Along with Kirk and Cameron, Bateman played in the loft with the likes of Paul Bley, Eddie Dehaas, Jimmy Stevenson, Roland Alexander, and Ira Jackson. These sessions came between 1963 recording dates with Eric Dolphy and Makanda Ken McIntyre and a March 1964 session with Walt Dickerson.

Read more at Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math

In 1998 when I learned about W. Eugene Smith’s tapes at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, I spent a few days picking through all 1740 reels.  I noted 138 names of musicians chicken-scratched by Smith on the labels.  CCP had the right policy that we couldn’t play the tapes until they were properly preserved, which didn’t happen until we were fortunate with some large grants in 2002.  So all I had in the beginning were the 138 names (and Smith’s photographs).  I was a subscriber to the JazzLetter, a self-published periodical by the great jazz chronicler, Gene Lees, and I was on his email list, too.  One day Gene accidentally sent an email to his entire list exposing every email address on the list (it was the early days of email).  I peaked at his list and saw the names of Bill Crow and Dave Frishberg, who were also on my list of 138.  I emailed Gene and asked him if I could email Bill and Dave, not being sure if it were appropriate since Gene hadn’t intended to expose those addresses.  Gene, who had no reason to know me at all, replied, “If my accident helps your research, then by all means, do it.”  He also gave me Art Farmer’s mailing address in Vienna and I was able to correspond with Art before he died a year later.

I never met Gene Lees and I bet he forgot about his early influence my research.  I reminded and thanked him a time or two later.  I always thought I’d meet him in person one day soon but it never happened.  I regret it bitterly.  His long JazzLetter piece on Bill Evans (”Re: Person I Knew”) made a big impact on me when I was just starting to learn about jazz, plus another piece on Dizzy Gillespie, “Waiting for Dizzy.”  I recommend this obituary by the similarly outstanding chronicler Doug Ramsey.  Make sure to read all the responses to Doug’s post, too.

HERE is the New York Times obituary.

-Sam Stephenson

Last week bass player and former resident of 821 Sixth Avenue James “Jimmy” Stevenson died at age seventy.  He was one of the youngest participants in the loft scene, having moved into the building at age twenty-two in the summer of 1961.  Originally from Detroit, James was the oldest of twelve children.  We were told by his son Star Stevenson, his nephew Tom Stevenson, and his ex-wife Sandy Krell that he died peacefully, surrounded by dozens of family members and loved ones.  Up to his last day he was singing and talking and enjoying his time.

I knew about Jimmy (as he was known in the loft) from an early stage in the project but I didn’t know much more than his name. Gene Smith had made an iconic photograph of him playing piano in the loft.  Smith used the image in his 1969 Aperture monograph and in his legendary 1971 exhibition at the Jewish Museum.  Smith’s tapes also had Jimmy’s name written on many labels.  But Jimmy wasn’t a part of the official American jazz annals and I had no idea who he really was or his role in the loft story.  Another obscure musician, saxophonist Ira Jackson, also from Detroit, was the first to tell me that Jimmy was a Detroit native.  In 2002 a volunteer for the project, Natalie Bullock Brown, submitted a random post to a Detroit jazz website asking anyone for information about Jimmy.

Months passed and we forgot about Natalie’s post on the Detroit site.  We kept trying to find Jimmy by conventional means, which was proving to be painstakingly difficult.  Musicians from the loft hadn’t seen or heard from him in years.  Then in early 2003 we had a wonderful surprise.  Tom Stevenson randomly came across Natalie’s post.  He had been doing research on his grandfather (Jimmy’s father) also named James Stevenson, who had had a local TV show in Detroit in the early 1950s.  Tom’s google search for “James Stevenson” yielded Natalie’s post on the Detroit jazz site.  He was elated that somebody was interested in his uncle.  Tom put us in touch with Jimmy and Sandy.  It was a breakthrough in the project.  A major, unknown chapter in the story opened up.

Jimmy moved into the fifth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue in the summer of 1961 with Sandy and their baby son, Jimmy, Jr.  He had friendships with many Detroit musicians such as pianist Alice McLeod (Coltrane) and saxophonist Joe Henderson, both of whom sublet loft spaces from him in late 1961.  As we learned from more interviews and from Smith’s tapes, which by 2003 we were just beginning to understand, Jimmy was the host of some the loft’s great jam sessions.  There were so many sessions with so many different musicians that Gene Smith took to simply writing “Jimmy Jam” on reels recorded in Stevenson’s space.  Some of the musicians who played there were Ronnie Cuber, Sonny Clark, Lin Halliday, Roy Brooks, the McKinney brothers from Detroit, Booker Ervin, Clarence Sharpe, Eddie Listengart, Paul Plummer, Pete Yellin, Jane Getz, Gil Coggins, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Steve Swallow, and on and on.  On April 7, 1964, in a session with musicians such as Chick Corea, Joe Farrell, Joe Hunt, and countless others Smith wrote “Jimmy’s Last Jam.”  The next day Stevenson moved out and Smith took over the fifth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue.  It had been a long and substantial “career” for Stevenson in the building, an era that would have been almost entirely forgotten if it hadn’t been for the obsessive compulsions of Gene Smith.

In 2003 when I visited James (as he was known in his post-loft years) and his second wife, Suzanne Roach, they had a business selling wind chimes in a tent on the side of the road near Forestville, CA, a couple of hours north of San Francisco.  I made a date to meet James there during a two-week trip to visit other loft veterans in California in the summer of 2003 and I spent an afternoon with him.

In 2004 James and Suzanne visited us for a week at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS).  He listened to loft tapes and told us many stories.  He told us about driving to up-state New York for a duo bass and piano gig with Sonny Clark one night and they were stopped by cops who gave the African-American Clark a hard time because he didn’t have a photo ID.  James had been driving, so why did it matter so much that Clark didn’t have an ID?  Clark had with him several vinyl records he’d recorded on the Blue Note label and he held up one of them to the police – one with a big picture of himself on the cover – and he said, “This is me.”  Both James and Sonny ended up in jail, for no reason.

On December 12, 2009 I got two voicemails from James, one in my office and one on my cell phone.  Both messages were exuberant and warm.  It was a tone of voice I came to expect from him in the six and a half years I knew him.  Every time I talked to James he always asked about Jazz Loft Project Research Associate Dan Partridge, who began working for the project shortly after my 2003 California trip and who organized the tape listening sessions when James and Suzanne visited CDS in 2004.  In these two messages on December 12 he told me to give Dan his best regards.  I forwarded one of those messages to Dan.  In neither message did James indicate he was ill.  My wife and I had been traveling for the holidays and I planned to return James’ call after the New Year, but by then I’d gotten word from Sandy that he was on life support and would die in a few days.  A day later I heard from Star and Tom, both of whom indicated James had lived the life he wanted to live, without any regrets.

James is one of the numerous people I never would have met if it hadn’t been for Gene Smith’s tapes.  When James visited CDS to listen to the tapes in 2004 he made a statement that is one of my favorite passages in the Jazz Loft Project book:  “Hearing these tapes is like somebody playing back your memories for you, only these are memories you forgot you had.  But these aren’t just memories, this is real!”

Here is the obituary from the Santa Rosa (CA) Press Democrat.

- Sam Stephenson

Last week while we were in New York City and got word that 85 year old pianist Dick Katz had passed away.  It was a sad day.  Here is a link to his New York Times obituary by Ben Ratliff.

Dick was one of the first people I interviewed as part of the Jazz Loft Project in 1998.  His tremendous respect for loft resident Hall Overton impacted my research.  In my first piece of writing on the Jazz Loft Project which appeared in DoubleTake magazine in 1999 I quoted Dick on Overton:  “Hall should be a famous figure today.  But he had absolutely no capability or willingness to promote himself.  He was satisfied hanging out at that loft and playing music without getting any attention.  But he had an enormous impact on many of us.”

In December of 2000 I interviewed Dick again in his studio and he talked about the kind of jazz he enjoyed:  “My criteria that it must sound new to you.  If it feels new it’s succeeded.  Even if a guy has played something fifty times or a thousand times before, you don’t know that.  It doesn’t sound like a routine.  That’s why Zoot Sims was so great, or Errol Garner or Monk.  They could play the same thing over and over but it never came out the same even though it is the same.”

- Sam Stephenson

Saturday brought the news of Art D’Lugoff’s death.  It seems like each day brings news of another death from the vintage post-war New York City jazz world.  The founder and owner of the legendary Village Gate, at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, Art was born in Harlem in 1924 and raised in Brooklyn, according to the obituary in the Times.

I never met Art but I had two occasions to chat with him on the phone earlier this year.  I’ve been doing extensive research on the life, work, and death of pianist Sonny Clark, a veteran of the scene at 821 Sixth Avenue who died of an overdose in January 1963.  Bassist Butch Warren told me that there was a memorial gig thrown at the Village Gate in Clark’s memory, so I called Art to ask him about it.  He didn’t remember much about the Clark memorial, but we ended up talking for close to an hour about all sorts of things.

Without question one of the privileges of the Jazz Loft Project has been the opportunity to have conversations with people like Art.  For him it wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it might have been a waste of his time.  For me, nearly a half century younger than him, it was a brief but poignant glimpse into a former New York City culture that generated an urban vernacular of profound uniqueness.  Many—if not most—of the residents of New York during the heyday of the Village Gate were one generation (or less) removed from another homeland.  They could be from the rural African-American South or Ireland or Italy or Eastern Europe.  They retained family and cultural traditions from their heritage, but the New York cauldron produced something entirely new.  These culture-seekers from different backgrounds were all of a sudden inside the same basement club at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, smoking cigarettes, drinking Rheingold beers or Teacher’s Scotch, digging the same tunes.

The Village Gate features into the story of 821 Sixth Avenue in a number of ways.  In future blog posts we’ll hear more about the remarkable odyssey of loft resident and drummer Ronnie Free.  One night in 1959 or early 1960 Ronnie had a gig at the Gate as a member of Mose Allison’s trio, playing opposite Horace Silver’s band, and Carla Bley was checking hats that night.  It was a pivotal night in Ronnie’s life.

The seminal new club in New York, Le Poisson Rouge, is located in the same space as the old Village Gate.  Art D’Lugoff was a consultant when the club got off the ground.

–Sam Stephenson, Jazz Loft Project Director