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

The process of transferring and preserving Gene Smith’s 1740 loft tapes resulted in 5089 compact discs of recorded material.  Jazz Loft Project Research Associate Dan Partridge has been listening to these cd’s since 2003.  This week he counted the ones he hasn’t heard, yet.  The number is 1025.  So, he’s 4/5 done hearing everything.  When human history ends Dan will be the only person to have heard every one of Smith’s tapes.  Not even Smith heard it all.  Sometimes Smith turned on the recorder and left the room, or left the building.  Duke University should give Dan an honorary PhD when he’s done.

Dan gets to hear Monk and Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane and Zoot Sims and Paul Bley, stuff nobody’s ever heard before.  Yesterday he said he heard Smith’s cat Tabun birthing kittens.  Nobody’s ever heard that.  In the photo above, we aren’t sure which of Smith’s cats that is.  It doesn’t look full grown to me.  It could be a young Tabun, or one of Tabun’s kittens grown up as a teenager.  Or it could be a young Pending, or Brunhilda, or Tiger, or Quasimodo, or Al Most.  More research is required to get to the bottom of it.  When the JLP is packed up for mothballs, that research may be still undone.

-Sam Stephenson

A few weeks ago I wrote about Elif Batuman’s piece on MFA (Masters in Fine Art) writing programs in the London Review of Books. I drew some parallels between her critique of writing programs and what might be said about analogous jazz programs that have grown dramatically in numbers over the last thirty years.  Hall Overton did his jazz work in the derelict 821 Sixth Avenue because it wasn’t allowed in the hallowed halls of Juilliard where he taught the popular classical composition and theory course, Literature and Materials. Jazz wasn’t considered worthy of Juilliard in those days.  Now, almost all aspiring jazz musicians go to a university, MFA program, and/or conservatory like Juilliard.  What’s been gained and lost?

Now there’s a new piece on MFA writing programs by Chad Harbach in the literary journal n+1.  A long excerpt from his piece is posted on Slate under the title “MFA vs. NYC”.  Harbach draws a distinction between the MFA community and the community of agents and editors in New York City.  I find his arguments to be intriguing and convincing.  The creation of an industry that provides jobs for writers who can no longer support themselves purely from writing is analogous to jazz today where very few musicians can survive without a teaching job.  Musicians need places to teach, jazz programs need teachers.  Darwinian growth takes place.  But what happens to the creativity?  Some pros, some cons.

One of the most remarkable aspects to Batuman’s piece, two months later, is the relative lack of attention it received.  She’s a new star (rightly so).  Her book The Possessed was just listed by Dwight Garner of the Times as one of his top 10 books of 2010. It was listed as one of the Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year.  Yet in only two days since Harbach’s Slate excerpt was published, on Thanksgiving weekend, it’s already apparent that his piece on writing programs will get more attention than Batuman’s.  The Slate excerpt alone is enough to ensure that will be the case.  ArtsJournal also gave it a prominent link.

Batuman’s arguments about the roles of race and shame in writing programs are extremely sensitive and touchy to ponder in public (I’m currently seeking an outlet to do this, she’s agreed to participate with me on it).  I believe there are analogs in jazz.  Go to any jazz show in NYC these days and the audience will be nearly 100% white.  Most of the students in the jazz programs seem to be white (as they are in MFA writing programs).  I don’t know the numbers.  There are bound to be implications.

The big, melancholy question for jazz is, does anybody really care what happens?  Despite laments from writers and publishers over declining markets, creative writing occupies a hundred- or thousand-fold larger place in our culture today than jazz.  Two weeks ago, former Jazz Loft Project archivist Mike Fitzgerald passed through town and we had lunch.  Mike is now an archivist doing great things at the University of the District of Columbia.  He and I agree that jazz history is just beginning to be written.  The icons have been studied often (even though they should be studied more, there should be as many books on Monk as there are on Faulkner).  But the icons are just a tiny bit of the history and iconography distorts how the jazz story really went down, as I argued recently on this blog.  Jazz wasn’t created in seclusion behind a desk.  Almost all of jazz was made with others in front of others, unrecorded.  In October I visited Louise Sims, Zoot’s widow, in West Nyack, NY.  Nearly three decades after Zoot’s death she’s got a house chocked full of materials from his quintessential career.  She’s nearing 80 years old.  What happens to all that material?  Will Zoot’s biography and music ever be taught in schools?

-Sam Stephenson

p.s. You can read Mike Fitzgerald’s MA thesis (UNC-Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science) on the state of jazz archives in America by clicking here.

Last year at this time JLP Research Associate Dan Partridge did a quick sort through our database of Smith’s tapes looking for Thanksgiving related material.  I wrote a blog entry about it. Yesterday Dan did the same thing and found some new material (we estimate 700-900 hours of Smith’s tapes remain that Dan hasn’t heard, yet, out of roughly 4000 hours – he’s still listening every day).

Among the items Dan found this year were lots of radio and TV coverage of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963 and the funeral on November 25.  LBJ gave what appears to be his first speech as President on November 27 and Smith taped it.

Thanksgiving was on November 28 that year.  There was a high of 55 degrees in Central Park that day.  What a somber holiday it must have been.

There’s also some material that Smith recorded earlier in November 1963 that is haunting to hear today.  You know what is looming, but nobody on the tapes does.  On November 7 there were some feel-good pre-Thanksgiving cultural stories Smith taped from the radio.  There were typically elated, jingly advertisements for things like the new 1964 line of Ford automobiles.  There’s an unspectacular jam session with musicians we still haven’t identified other than a “Jimmy” and a “Ronnie” (probably Jimmy Stevenson, not Ronnie Free).

Navy’s Roger Staubach won the Heisman Trophy the week after JFK’s funeral and there’s radio coverage of the award on Smith’s tapes.

There are additional things recorded from the Thanksgiving periods of other years.  On November 13, 1960 Smith’s fifteen year-old daughter Juanita showed up at the loft (from the family home in Croton-on-Hudson) with her boyfriend “Johnny” and they talked about eloping after she turned sixteen three weeks later, with Smith’s tape machine rolling.

On November 28, 1961 Smith had a conversation in the loft with Eleanor Bach about astrology.  We wonder if she knew she was being taped.

Sixth Avenue, NYC. Fall 2010. Photograph by Dan Partridge.

All in all, it’s a pretty melancholy selection of clips.  To lighten this blog post I inserted the photograph above that Dan made from his iPhone in NYC recently.  He was standing near the front of 821 Sixth Avenue looking over at Superior Florist.  These pumpkins are huge.  It’s a good thing Superior delivers.

Superior, and this same sign, can be seen clearly in many of Smith’s window photographs from 1957-1965. Sam Rosenberg still owns Superior and runs it with his son Steve.  They’ve been extremely nice to us over the years, telling us stories about the seedy side of the Flower District back in the day, letting us up on their roof to make pictures, etc.  One day five or six years ago I was in Superior and there was a bouquet of flowers larger than any I’d ever seen, the size of a two-person love seat or bigger.  I walked over in awe.  I noticed an envelope clipped to a dowell inside it.  Jotted on the front was the word “Streisand.”

-Sam Stephenson

A note to NYC metro locals:  Tomorrow night at Rutgers there is a screening of the documentary film “My Name is Albert Ayler” by the Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin at Rutgers.  The 6pm screening is sponsored by the departments of English and American Literature.

Kasper is an old friend of the Jazz Loft Project (Ayler is pictured by Smith in the JLP book) and I was able to finally meet him in person yesterday in NYC.  This year Kasper’s wife is at Columbia where he said she will finish her PhD on water and politics in Niger.  What an interesting, achieving couple.

I admire the way Kasper used Ayler’s father and brother in the film.  It would be easy to turn Albert Ayler into some kind of cosmic marvel but Kasper’s film makes him human.  Kasper said Ayler’s family was pleased with the film, too.

-Sam Stephenson

Two weeks ago I drove down to Winterville, NC for a JLP event at the Coffee Shack.  There I met writer Mark Rutledge who works for the local newspaper in adjacent Greenville, the Daily Reflector, part of the Cox family of news and media outlets.  Mark wrote a good news story on the event.  Then on November 6 he published this thoughtful column about the vast collection of materials left behind by his late father.  He downplays the historical significance of this collection.  But it sounds eminent to me.

-Sam Stephenson

P.S. We scanned the old school clipping (thanks, Mom!) because Cox has a paywall for web access.  If one of their outlets without a paywall syndicates Mark’s column we’ll link it here.  Update:  HERE is the Sarasota (FL) Herald-Tribute link.

Here is a link to a recent AP story on Melinda Hunt’s inspiring work to identify the unnamed dead buried on Hart Island.  Her research overlaps with some of our JLP research.  A number of veterans of 821 Sixth Avenue dug graves on Hart Island while incarcerated on Rikers Island.  Among them were the pianists Sonny Clark and Elmo Hope.

On August 19, 1963 a group of musicians now called the Elmo Hope Ensemble cut an album entitled “Sounds from Rikers Island.”  It features Hope on piano, Lawrence Jackson on trumpet, Freddie Douglas on saxophones, John Gilmore on tenor, Ronnie Boykins on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums.  Earl Coleman and Marcelle Daniels also contribute vocals on a couple of tracks.  The premise of the band is that they are all veterans of the prison on Rikers; a few of their careers were stunted by doing time.  It’s an excellent recording reissued a couple of years ago by Fresh Sound Records of Spain.

The liner notes by Nat Hentoff are remarkable.  On this blog I’ve raved about Whitney Balliett’s jazz annals.  The only thing separating Balliett and Hentoff is volume; Balliett documented jazz farther and wider, Hentoff’s career moved on to politics and other topics.  But one thing Hentoff did better than his friend Balliett is cover the drug scene.  He did it with a similar style, using direct quotations to powerful effect.

In these liner notes Hentoff describes how Elmo Hope was clean from heroin for seven years until 1961 when he started using again.  The he quotes Hope at length:

“All that time I was off (drugs) I worked hard.  Everybody can tell you I worked hard.  But jobs were hard to get and harder to keep.  Some of the guys I worked for even seemed disappointed that I didn’t goof.  Yet I stayed straight.  But there were so many disappointments and so much scuffling and personal problems besides.  So I got my problem again.  I’m going to try to kick again.  It might be too late.  I might have to pay more dues.  But I know I can’t get back to where I ought to be if I don’t stop entirely.  Some guys wear the stuff well.  At least, they can function while they’re on.  Me, the minute I take the first taste, my troubles start.  And with all the other tensions going on, I know I’m going to fall apart if I don’t get off.  Music is the most important thing in life to me.  And yet I’ve been goofing that life away for nothing.

“These days I’m out on the street with no crib.  And there’s a new breed using now.  I sit in one of those basement apartments and I see guys around me who don’t even have a dream, man.  They’re real bitter people.  I don’t want to get like that.  But where do I go?  I need some analysis.  I need something to help me straighten out.  But with what money?  And if I stay with the habit, sooner or later I’ll get busted.  And then, I could get put away for a long time.  Now what sense does that make?  Putting a man away when, if you tried to help him, he could still create.  He could still be a credit to himself and everyone else.  The only crime I commit, man, is reaching for the bag.  And when I want to stop that, where do I turn?  And you can see, even with all this pressure, I’ve got something going.  I’ve got my own thing musically.”

Elmo Hope died less than four years later at the age of forty-three, his life and career and series of starts and one final stop too early.

One day I hope all of Nat Hentoff’s jazz writings from all the myriad sources – magazines, newspapers, books, liner notes – can be assembled in one volume, or a set of two volumes.

-Sam Stephenson

Last Monday night after The Bad Plus event in Durham we had a discussion about iconography in jazz and the Jazz Loft Project.  TBP appreciate the fact that the JLP tapes contain many, many hours of mediocre music – trials and errors, false starts, and just plain bad stuff.  That’s how it works.  That’s a bigger part of the history, in terms of time, than the spectacular moments that happened to be recorded.  But you rarely hear that larger story, unless you experience it yourself.  It makes it hard to pass along traditions to younger generations.  It’s hard to replicate this kind of deep experience in a classroom or workshop.  It’s like teaching sports by having kids watch highlights on ESPN Sportscenter.  Once the iconography is established the story changes.

For example, today’s story tells you that Michael Jordan “led” the University of North Carolina to the 1982 National Championship.  At the time, however, he was the 4th most important player on that team behind James Worthy, Sam Perkins, and Jimmy Black.  MJ went on to become the greatest player of all-time.  All you see now is the jumper he hit with 17 seconds remaining in the 1982 title game against Georgetown.  Often today’s story makes this jumper seem buzzer-beating but Georgetown had two possessions after that.  It would take a sustained effort, with witnesses, to convince any new fans (and many old ones) that MJ was the 4th most important player on that team.  The judge and jury of iconography has ruled once and for all.

Consider these lines which are found in the notes to the 3-cd set, Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961, released in 2005 by Riverside/Concord:

“This is it.  The breakthrough.  The pinnacle of spontaneous musical communication.  Three men breathing as one on a tiny bandstand.  Everything Bill Evans, Scott Lafaro, and Paul Motian had been working on for the previous 18 months led to this moment.”

Really?  It sounds like the trio just won the World Series.  The “moment” referred to here was the afternoon and evening of June 25, 1961.  Five sets were recorded that day.  The first four sets contained about twenty-five minutes of recorded music apiece.  The fifth and final set, less constrained, I suppose, by needs of clearing and reseating tables in the Vanguard in between sets, was longer – thirty-nine minutes.

So we’ve got about 140 minutes from this remarkable trio on June 25, 1961.  Is this really their greatest, most telepathic and magical moment?  I find that hard to believe.  It might be their best recorded moment.  What of the other tens of thousands of minutes – hundreds of thousands – that weren’t recorded?  What about the times the music didn’t come together?  What about the times Evans was strung out and a sub had to be called in for the gig?

One thing I love about this 3-CD box set reissue of these recordings (most of the music was released long ago as the LP’s “Waltz for Debby” and “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”) is the producers included much of the sound that occurred inside the Vanguard that day in between tunes.  It sounds to me like the club was maybe half or one-third full at times.  You get to hear people talking and clinking glasses during the music (”shhhhh” you’d be scolded today in the Vanguard).  Part of the bloom is off the rose right there.

Iconography in art may not be the worst thing in the world.  On the eve of these mid-term elections I can think of more disturbing things going on now.  I’m glad the Bill Evans Trio was recorded on June 25, 1961 and I’m glad commercial forces produced these CD’s.  I’d rather shell out twenty-five dollars for something good rather than something mediocre, that’s for sure.  In a few hours I’ll be driving down N.C. Hwy 264 toward the Coastal Plains with these tunes cranked as loud as I can stand it.

But in terms of story-telling, iconography is only one method.  It’s the one that sells tickets and merchandise, though, and it builds monuments.  I’m reminded of the lyric by Bob Dylan from “Visions of Johanna”:

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial.

Voices echo, ‘this is what salvation must be like after a while.’

Iconography is, in part, the result of our need for significance, something to tell us where we stand, to point us in the right direction.  The larger, infinitely complex and ambiguous human stories usually lose out to iconography.  That’s what makes Whitney Balliett’s jazz annals so essential. Fifty years from now Balliett’s work will be even more important than it is now.  He transcended the iconography and left us with a chronicle more various.

This also makes me think of a quote by Gene Smith from the 1970s:

“I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of living.”

-Sam Stephenson