I spent Friday in a darkroom at N.C. State University with Raleigh photographer David Simonton.  We experimented with some of Gene Smith’s darkroom methods.  David is a deep thinker and natural teacher.  I’ve interviewed a number of Smith’s assistants, including recently in Japan, but I told David to start from a blank slate.  He did a masterful job.  First thing in the morning we sat around his kitchen table and he pulled sections from about 8 different books dating back to the 1950s, a few of which I’d not seen.  Then we moved to State’s Craft Center to make prints and the last part of our day was spent working with ferricyanide on prints.  For me, it was a first step toward writing well about technique in Gene Smith’s Sink. There are more steps to take.  I want the writing to appeal to experts as well as mainstream readers.

Thus, I have a question:  What is your favorite writing about photographic technique?  Could be how-to, from a biography, from a novel, anything.

Many thanks for any responses, here or to me directly.

-Sam Stephenson

Yesterday I arrived in Guam.  The tsunami scare two nights ago in Saipan was a new experience.  All is good now.  But as everyone knows it is a scary situation in Japan.  I made many new friends in my 18 days there and I’m sick with fear for them.  But looking back I’m not unhappy that I was able to make it out when I did.  In Saipan we were ordered to the top floors of our hotel for 90 minutes while we sweated out the tsunami threat.  Then things returned to normal.

My internet connection wasn’t the best so I wasn’t able to post any Saipan photos until now.

View from my hotel's open air lobby, Saipan. Hill 500 in the background.

Above, Hill 500 was named by the American soldiers because the hill is 500 feet high.  Covered in clouds to the left of Hill 500 is Mt. Tagpochau which is 1200 feet high.  Photos of and from these sites are below.  When the American troops invaded the beaches from the west, with Gene Smith following, the Japanese were well fortified on the tops of both Hill 500 and Mt. Tagpochau, with guns that ranged to 1500 meters.  What resulted, of course, wasn’t pretty.  Today, though, Saipan is quite stunning.  There are 50,000 residents, down 40% from a peak before their garment industry was healthy (before NAFTA and other trade agreements – Saipan is a U.S. territory).

View from top of Hill 500 looking back toward my hotel. Tinian is the island in the background.

Much of the warfare on this island took place in the space you are seeing in the photo above.  The Japanese were well entrenched when American troops invaded the beaches from the west (the right side of the photograph above).

By the way, I’ve learned this history from an unusual and rich source in the form of Don Farrell, who grew up in Billings, Montana and has lived in the Northern Mariana Islands for 35 years, teaching school, working in the local government, and becoming the leading historian of the region.  More on him later.  He may end up being the focus of my next Paris Review piece.  Don looks like a cross between a ZZ Top guitarist and Colonel Sanders.  He likes to pop a few cold ones and he’s an experienced horticulturalist, if you know what I mean.  He’s a dogged historian and natural storyteller.  They don’t make ‘em like Don at the universities, although they should.  He would fit in well at CDS.

Hill 500 looking in the other direction.

Mt. Tagpochau, 1200 ft. elevation. I was trying to imagine hiking up this mountain with people shooting at you in 90 degree, humid conditions.

View from top of Mt. Tagpochau looking down into "Death Valley."

It turns out my internet connection is slow here in Guam, too.  The hotel is working on it.  I’ll post more Saipan photos when I can upload them faster.  My goal on this WWII battlefield portion of my journey has been to learn something that would allow me to write better about Gene Smith prowling around these areas with his camera during combat.  I keep thinking of a boy from landlocked Kansas, by WWII in his early to mid-20s, lugging his equipment around these tropical islands for 18 months.  I’m not sure, yet, how these impressions will make it into my book.  But they will.

-Sam Stephenson

In the fall I posted this picture and asked this question and I didn’t hear anything definitive.  Maybe there’s not enough information.  But I’m trying again.  I’d be grateful for any suggestions anybody has.  Next Saturday I’m heading to the Pacific for 4+ weeks walking in Smith’s footsteps.

- Sam Stephenson.

Sonny Clark made some of his most affecting musical expressions as a sideman.  Here are a few recommendations with him as leader and sideman.  *Indicates two starting points.

Buddy DeFranco: 1954-56. Verve. Inexplicably, the music recorded by clarinetist DeFranco with Clark has been out of print, for the most part, for decades.  Do what you can to find some of these 39 tracks, particularly “You Go to My Head,” in which DeFranco and Clark engage in a stunning dialogue of simultaneous solos.

Serge Chaloff: Blue Serge. 1956.  Capitol.

Larance (aka. Lawrence) Marable: Tenorman.  1956.  Jazz West.

Clifford Jordan: Cliff Craft. 1957. Blue Note.

Lou Donaldson: Lou Takes Off.  1957.  Blue Note.

Sonny Clark: Cool Struttin’. 1958.  Blue Note.

Sonny Clark: My Conception. 1957-1959.  Blue Note.

*Sonny Clark: Leapin’ and Lopin’. 1961.  Blue Note.

*Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark.  1961-62.  Blue Note.

Dexter Gordon: Go and A Swinging Affair.  1962.  Blue Note.

Stanley Turrentine: Jubilee Shout.  October 1962.  Blue Note.  With old friends from Pittsburgh, the brothers Stanley (saxophone) and Tommy (trumpet) Turrentine.  Clark’s last recording session.

Sonny Clark: There are a few recordings of Clark in a trio format, each having some essential moments, such as the tune “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” from the 1957 Blue Note recording with Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums, and the extraordinary “Nica” on the 1960 Time/Bainbridge recording with George Duvivier on bass and Max Roach on drums.  But generally I enjoy his playing more in other formats.

-Sam Stephenson

Here is a blurb from today’s Winston-Salem Journal.  WSNC (90.5, FM) will be broadcasting the JLP radio series throughout the month of January.

-JLP Staff

Here is a nice blog notice by designer and artist Elizabeth Avedon – “Buy the book – it’s incredible!” – and more good company for Smith and JLP.

-JLP Staff

TARBABY.  ”The End of Fear.”  Posi-Tone Records.  Eric Revis – bass, Orrin Evans – piano, Nasheet Waits – drums, Oliver Lake – alto saxophone, JD Allen – tenor saxophone, Nicholas Payton – trumpet.

I first heard about this record from this piece by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times a couple of months ago.  Then I saw this piece by Doug Ramsey a few weeks later.

Last week when I heard Orrin Evans play a brilliant solo version of Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” at the Deems Taylor Awards in NYC, with Revis in attendance, I recalled these write-ups and finally bought this album.  Tarbaby is a collective trio consisting of Revis, Evans, and Waits.  The horn players on this record make guest appearances and all three sound fabulous.

Revis is the longtime bass player in the Branford Marsalis Quartet.  On that band’s remarkable, multiform 2006 release, Braggtown, named after a neighborhood in Durham, NC near where Marsalis lives and near the historic African-American church where the album was recorded, Revis contributed the most “out” tune ever recorded by Branford or anybody in the Marsalis family (that I’ve heard), a 14-minute “new music” marvel called “Black Elk Speaks.”

Revis has a huge, old school tone and he errs on the side of playing less notes, not more.  Yet, he’s not conservative at all.  ”Black Elk Speaks,” the name coming from the 1932 book about a Sioux medicine man, demonstrates his preferences for history and adventure.  On this Tarbaby record he contributes a tune called “Brews” that makes me think of Andrew Hill in it’s spare tension and groove.

Tarbaby achieves the tenuous, rare blend of tradition and invention that all successful artists in any field seek.  If they could stick together as a full-time working trio for a couple of years, I bet they could rise to the top of the art form, if they aren’t already there.

To connect Tarbaby to the Jazz Loft Project, Waits’ father Freddie Waits was recorded by Gene Smith in loft sessions from September 1963 and April 1964.  There’s one tape where Gene and “Fred,” as the elder Waits introduces himself, meet each other for the first time and they have a conversation about Thelonious Monk and Hall Overton.

-Sam Stephenson

Today’s Guardian from London puts the JLP book in good company.  This is especially pleasing since O’Hagan has long been one of our favorite cultural writers, along with his Guardian colleague Carole Cadwalladr.

Also of interest on O’Hagan’s list is New Topographics which is authored by Britt Salvesen, former curator and director of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which is where the W. Eugene Smith Archive resides, of course.  Britt now runs the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

-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

All Roads Lead to Newton Grove. By Pamela Monk Kelley. 2010.

All Roads Lead to Newton Grove is a new book on the Monk family history by Pamela Monk Kelley.  Her grandfather, Theodore Babe Monk, and Thelonious Monk’s father, Thelonious, Sr., were brothers.  They were born and raised in Newton Grove, North Carolina.  Thelonious, Sr. moved to Rocky Mount for work in the growing railroad town.  Pam’s father Conley F. Monk moved to New Haven, CT many years ago.  Pam still lives there with many family members, working as an educator.

Pam’s book has rare and previously unpublished recollections from family elders concerning Thelonious Monk’s father.  As Robin D.G. Kelley (no relation to Pam) first disclosed in his great biography of Monk, Thelonious Sr. was confined to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane (known as Cherry Hospital today) in Goldsboro, NC for most of his adult life.

All Roads Lead to Newton Grove has a previously unpublished photograph of Hinton Cole Monk, the pianist Thelonious Monk’s grandfather who was born into slavery in Newton Grove in 1852.  There is also a photograph of Monk’s widow Nellie Smith Monk standing on the porch of the white Monk plantation house, which is still there today.  After Monk died Nellie began attending the family reunions in North Carolina.

The book has moving discussions of the intermixing of the races in the Monk family and the resulting variances in skin colors.  In 2009 a member of the white side of the family, Matthew Monk, contacted Pam and a heartfelt reunion took place.  Matthew is a descendant of Archibald Monk, the original white patriarch, slaveowner and landowner.

There has been talk of a big, integrated Monk family reunion in Newton Grove in the future.  The North Carolina Museum of History and Department of Cultural Resources has been interested in aligning the reunion with their upcoming four-year commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  Sherman’s March went right through the Monk plantation site (Hinton Monk would have been thirteen) and the Battle of Bentonville was about less than ten miles away.

Pam’s sister, Edith Monk Pue, an ordained bishop, recently moved back to Dunn, NC, which is fifteen miles away from Newton Grove.  Pam had a book signing in Dunn over Thanksgiving weekend.  There’s a photograph of Thelonious at the piano on the cover of her book (image above).  Knowing the historian that Thelonious was musically and personally, I believe he would have liked what Pam has done to honor the family history – the whole family, not just the famous musician.

You can buy All Roads Lead to Newton Grove by clicking here.

Here is my 2007 piece on Monk’s North Carolina background in the Oxford American magazine.

-Sam Stephenson