Recently JLP received an email from saxophonist Wendell Harrison of Detroit.  He was one of the surviving participants in the 821 Sixth Avenue scene that we hadn’t tracked down and interviewed, yet (there’s still plenty of work to be done), so we were very happy to hear from him.  Last week I caught up with Wendell by telephone.  Below is an excerpt from his comments and memories.  Go HERE to read about Wendell’s work in Detroit today. – Sam Stephenson

Wendell Harrison:  “A writer from Detroit, W. Kim Heron, called me and said I was listed as part of your Jazz Loft Project.  I was delighted to know about it.  I remember that loft scene well.  In fact, the loft you are talking about was part of a circuit of lofts back in those days.  I got all my gigs at those lofts – with Grant Green, Hank Crawford, Sun Ra – it all came from the lofts.

“I’m sixty-eight years old now, so I was one of the youngest cats in the lofts when I moved to New York from Detroit.  I was in my late teens when I moved there around 1961.  I was in awe of guys in their 30’s – Miles, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane – who were already so highly developed musically.  But I was able to get some footing on the scene in the lofts.

“Jimmy Stevenson in your loft was somebody I knew growing up in Detroit.  There were musicians from Detroit all over New York.  In fact, when we were in high school we all knew we were going to New York when we graduated.  We all started jam sessions back in Detroit at places like the Unstables and the Minor Key or at somebody’s house.  We’d play and get high.  We smoked plenty of herb back in the day (chuckles).

“The McKinney brothers from Detroit were all in New York and they were a big part of the loft scene.  They were legends in Detroit.  In fact there’s a street in Detroit named McKinney’s Way in tribute to the late great Harold McKinney, pianist, composer and producer. His brother Ray McKinney was a bassist who had a loft on 6th Avenue across the street from your loft and his brother Earl McKinney was a drummer.  I remember walking out of one loft and across 6th into the other loft. It was up around 32nd or 33rd steet.

“I also lived in Bernard McKinney’s loft down on 89 East Broadway, below Canal Street near the Manhattan Bridge.  He was a trombonist and changed his name to Kiane Zawadi and he got into Hindu traditions and vegetarian food.  He encouraged a lot of us to eat meat less.  He baked his own bread, wheat and rye, and made a lot of salads; beans, soy beans.  He got up early in the morning.

“The same crew went from loft to loft in those days.  Bennie Maupin, Henry Grimes, Wilbur Ware, Lex Humphries, Clifford Jarvis, Donald Green and Charles Green, Roger Blank, Thaddeus Griffin, Arthur Hopper, Reggie Workman, Charles Tolliver, John Hicks, Joe Henderson.  There were many more.  You can’t name them all.  Gary Bartz, Archie Shepp, Oliver Beaner, Ali Jackson, John Gilmore, Pharoah Sanders, Edgar Bateman.  Ah, Edgar Bateman, do you know about him?  He was an unbelievable musician who never really made it big.

“The lofts were an essential part of the scene.  It was kind of the bottom of the industry.  The lofts had a lot of musicians who wanted to hone their crafts and become proficient.  It was a referral service. If you were good enough you could get gigs out of those lofts and make it.

“We liked to go back to the lofts after gigs.  We’d get high and really open up.  In the clubs you had to deal with cover charges and pressures, and they said they don’t want us to bother anybody.  Sometimes we weren’t even free to walk around the club.  There were more people who were really into the music in the lofts.  If they weren’t really into the music they wouldn’t know about the lofts so they wouldn’t be there.

“There were some crazy things that happened.  At 89 East Broadway we had a rooftop and sometimes we’d jam on the roof.  One night my step-brother James Lockett, saxophonist, was on the roof and the phone rang down stairs.  He went down to pick up the phone and when he returned to the roof somebody had walked off with his sax.  He was depressed.  Sonny Rollins went up to him and said, “Hey, James, don’t worry about it.”  Then Sonny went out and returned with a brand new Selmer saxophone and gave it to James as a gift!

Rollins released an album in 1966 called “East Broadway Run Down,” perhaps a reference to the loft Wendell is talking about.

Wendell continues:  “One time Dave Garroway from TV (Garroway was the original host of NBC’s Today Show) came over to 89 East Broadway and he said he was going to come back with Steve Allen and they were going to film a TV show on the loft scene.  But it never happened. Some of the guys were paranoid about it.  They thought Garroway was from the FBI.  If they’d come back and filmed the sessions the loft scene might have become more famous.”

Over the telephone, I played Wendell a few tracks from Gene Smith’s tapes on which he appears.  The sessions were from August 1963 and musicians included were Wendell, trumpeter Don Cherry, saxophonist Paul Plummer, Earl McKinney, and others.  Cherry can be heard leading the musicians through several tunes, including “Solar” by Miles Davis.  Wendell listened and responded:

“Man, this is great listening to this.  That’s Jimmy Stevenson on bass, or at other times it sounds like Ray McKinney.  That’s Earl on drums.  He’s playing some hip stuff.  He’s in a nursing home now here in Detroit.  I could hear my voice talking at one point.  This is how we learned tunes.  Don is trying to pull it together.  He’s trying out the changes, experimenting, and getting us to follow along.  There was constant experimentation like this.  Everybody was trying to get away from the status quo.”

I asked Wendell to name some of the musicians from the loft circuit who stood out in his memory, perhaps some musicians who were obscure to most people.  He immediately became excited talking about Edgar Bateman.

“Aw, man, Edgar Bateman was incredible.  He was my favorite drummer.  He played his entire drum kit backward.  It was a mirror image of how everybody else set up the kit.  He played the bass drum with his left foot and the hi-hat with his right.  He had the whole kit turned around.

“Edgar had a hump back, and he wore a cape and top hat all the time.  We called him Bat Man. He was a very, very creative artist.  He was ultra-hip, slick, very witty.  He refused to play traditional music.  He had his own style that was highly developed and thought out, always surprising.  Sometimes musicians who are that good – you’d rather listen to them than play with them.  Roy Haynes is another one.  He’s an incredible artist, but he’s always doing something you don’t expect, so sometimes you’d rather just sit and listen to him and enjoy him, rather than play with him.

“Not everybody liked Edgar because he was hard to get along with. He wouldn’t talk sometimes.  That’s why he never made it big.  He was a natural introvert and very dedicated to his style.  He wouldn’t compromise.  Sometimes it came off as arrogant.

“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.  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.

“Edgar was the Thelonious Monk of drums.  He had Monk’s stubborn, quiet demeanor and Monk’s commitment to his own style. But sometimes the people who are the most creative need the most help. Monk had the Baroness and his wife.  They understood him and allowed him to do what he did, even if it meant not getting any gigs sometimes.  I don’t think Edgar ever had that kind of support.”

After Wendell and I said goodbye and hung up, I had a new version of a pleasant thought that’s recurred over the years:  If Gene Smith hadn’t made all those tapes, I wouldn’t have met Wendell Harrison. – S.S.

——

For more on Edgar Bateman on the JLP site, click HERE.  From there you can also link to Ethan Iverson’s tribute to Bateman.

By Harvey Overton

We are proud to present A Death in the Family, a poem about Hall Overton by his younger brother Harvey.  We have two versions here; a video of Harvey reading the poem made by JLP Research Associate Dan Partridge in Chicago in 2002, and the text of the poem below.  Harvey was born in 1921 in Bangor, Michigan, the second of the three Overton sons.  For several decades he taught in the humanities department at Western Michigan University before retiring to Chicago where he still lives today – S.S.

A Death in the Family by Harvey Overton from The Jazz Loft Project on Vimeo.

From Harvey Overton’s volume of poems, Hanging Out in Space – Album in Black and White (1992)

A Death in the Family

Seduced from the detritus of boyhood
by a siren ear,
your untutored hands startled octaves;
your gift enlarged under the masters
of counterpoint,
you set notes for searing strings,
a lapidary engraving chambered sounds.

You also heard another voice who spoke
to you
in hot and cool and blue through keyboard
riffs in clubs of smoke and saxophones,
and there, booting the tempos of your
joie de vivre,
you chimed chords with celebratory horns.

Then in your metered years,
after the accolades, in haste to measure
scores against your measured time,
you waited for your temptresses
to collect their dues.

That night the chain stitch pulled,
unraveling arteries,
that night physicians cried,
and in the waiting room we turned
our faces to the wall to say
too soon, too soon.

—

* For a video of a JLP program on Overton at NYPL for the Performing Arts last spring, click here.

* For Sara Fishko’s JLP radio series episode on Overton at WNYC, click here.

By Anna Mazhirov

(Gene Smith and Mexicana, Part One can be read here)

Having read all of the reviews of Mexicana seven decades later, I’m left wondering, as many critics did in 1939, whether the Mexican government’s endeavor to produce the show was naïve or wise.

What was wise is obvious. The production was a means to stir warm sentiments in the hearts of Americans towards their southern neighbors. Celestino Gorostiza, who oversaw Mexicana as the director of Mexico’s Department of Fine Arts, said in an interview that the Mexican government produced the show as a “gesture of friendship, sympathy, and good will.”  Thomas Dash of the Daily News Record, among other reviewers, noted this aspect of the show’s ambitions. I wonder, though, if this sincere effort was heavy handed.  Looking back at all the evidence today, I cannot say.

Gene Smith strove to tell something honest of people, something that transcended the political context. This was likewise the aim of Mexicana. Brooks Atkinson celebrated the show’s mission in the New York Times, “For this is World’s Fair time, when interest in foreign nations extends beyond armies, navies, and trade to the native arts which tell the real truth about human beings.” Mexicana must have told Smith some truth, powerful and constant, for him to see it sixty-three times in a row.

What might have been naïve was expecting New Yorkers (and I admit to sometimes fitting into this category of the jaded) not to see kitsch in an overabundance of childlike candor. Many critics complained about the revue’s length and repetitiveness. Because of the variety of acts, singing, dancing, and pantomime, some unfairly labeled the production as vaudeville.

The representation of the many sides of Mexican culture might have bordered on tedium. The opening scene, “Ecos de Ayer” (Echoes of Yesterday), tracks the development of Mexican music from ancient to modern in a sequence of dances: Primitive Dance, Dance of the Reindeer, War Dance, “Areito” (a dance of the Aztec nobles), and War Dance between Aztecs and Spaniards. Other scenes try to cover the scope of Mexican folklore. “Yunuen” relates the tale of the fisherman who defeats the lake monster, saves the village, and wins the belle. The popular legend, “La Mulata de Cordoba,” tells of the beautiful girl who, being able to vanish from the men she teases, gets condemned to be burned at the stake as a witch and then uses magic to escape on a painted caravel. “Un Velorio” (The Wake)* attempts to account for the pagan and the Christian in Mexican ceremony, showing the fiesta following someone’s death and the supernatural guests from heaven and hell who vie for the deceased’s soul. Other scenes include, “Patio de Vecindad” (In the Tenement House), “A Wedding in Tehuantepec,” caricatures of a baseball player and Ghandi, and “La Cucarachita.”

But perhaps this mélange, this straightforward effort to tell all, is what upheld the Mexican government’s mission for the show. Michael Mok of the New York Post wrote that Mexicana was, “one of the most disarmingly naïve entertainments ever presented on a Broadway surfeited with professional artifice.” John Anderson wrote in the New York Journal-American that, “At the 46^th Street Theater are to be found Mexicans in their true color, without falsification or hokum. These people love art. And they mean “Mexicana” to be art, not mere merchandise.” I can imagine that the production’s hot paints, primordial vigor, and naturalness could have been jolting to Americans (even New Yorkers) of 1939.

I’d venture to say that this raw sincerity appealed to Smith and yet the piece that left the biggest impact on him was the clean, highly technical, traditional Spanish dancing of Marissa Flores and her partner, Jose Fernandez.

Most of the reviews praise the show only within the category of kitsch. Few saw anything elevated about it as a whole, but only single out individual talent. Sidney Whipple of the World-Telegram noted that “by far the most artistic performance of the production, however, was given by Jose Fernandez and Marissa Flores dancing on their heels to the rhythm of castanets.”

Marissa and Jose danced two dances in their “Spanish Suite.” The first was a Bulerias to the guitar playing of Vincente Gomez, who New Yorkers already knew and loved. It is an upbeat dance, requiring speed and skill to maintain the complex rhythm, often played at 240 beats per minute. Because a Bulerias requires elaborate tapping of the toe, heel, and ball of the foot, one reviewer recognized it as a sort of Mexican tap dance. The second dance was an arrangement of the intermezzo of Granados’s “Goyescas,” using two-voiced castanets. Usually, the higher pitched hembra pair is held in the right hand, while the larger macho pair is held in the left. One fragment of a news clipping I found stated that the “Goyescas” dance, “for grace and reticence and subdued eloquence is a masterpiece.”

We cannot know if it was with the wisdom or the naiveté of Mexicana, or both, that Smith fell in love with. But it seems this production had much to offer the steadfast, open-hearted viewer. As one spokesman said, “In Mexicana, we have tried to present Mexican bewitchment in a kaleidoscope of color and grace, of legend and mystery.”

* One of Smith’s most famous photographs was The Wake from his classic 1951 photo-essay, “Spanish Village.”

At age sixteen in late 1964 the pianist Jane Getz was the youngest musician known to participate in sessions at 821 Sixth Avenue.  Her name comes up on two chaotic tapes in Smith’s collection from that period.  Pianist Paul Bley, saxophonists Clarence Sharpe and Jay Cameron, and drummer Vinnie Ruggiero are the other musicians confirmed on these sessions.  We can discern these additional first names from the dialogues:  Richie, Bruce, Bob, Jerry, John, Freddie, and Ricky.

Jane told me she was five-foot-two and under a hundred pounds at that time, as now.  In the JLP book I quoted her this way:

“I just went up to the front of the line and said, ‘I’m here.  Can I sit in?’  I thought I was as good as anybody in the room, and I kind of projected that.  People were taken off balance, but I knew what I was doing.”

Jane told us she was working on a memoir; we were tantalized, so she shared a draft.  Although she has few particular memories of 821 Sixth Avenue, much of her story overlaps with various JLP angles and topics.

Over the next three weeks we will present three excerpts from Jane’s memoir, selected and edited by JLP Coordinator Lauren Hart with Jane’s approval.  The first installment, below, serves as an introduction.  The second and third installments will be longer (Part 2 here, Part 3 here). – Sam Stephenson

RUNNING WITH THE BIG DOGS, PART 1

By Jane Getz

Jane Getz in Los Angeles, 2010

The noonday sun was starting to turn the city into a furnace as I boarded the Greyhound. It was San Francisco in the mid-sixties. I was sixteen, carrying a fake I.D., five hundred bucks and a mother lode of hope. I saw no reason to wait. I knew what I wanted to do. For that I didn’t need a high school diploma or an education.

Back then I had only one desire, one goal: to be a legit player on the jazz scene. I’d paid enough dues playing piano around L.A and San Francisco, so I was taking the big leap. New York. It was time to test the waters.

Approximately three days after motoring across the Bay Bridge the Greyhound glided through the Holland Tunnel. I looked out of the window as it headed for Port Authority. Wow! A place I never dreamed existed.

The old ivy covered brownstones—many of which had steps leading down to tiny basement apartments were connected. Everything was touching everything else. Even the people—who were scrambling like little ants—were elbowing, jostling, and sideswiping each other. And the smell; there was a sweet, fruity, kind of rubbery odor, with just a hint of smoke wafting through the city.

As the bus bounced over the potholes, I could feel the kinetic energy engulfing me. Damn. This was it! The Big Apple. The jazz Mecca. New York, New York. So fucking hip they had to name it twice!

Disembarking from the huge, smoking, sputtering Greyhound, it hit me. I was here—bag and baggage. I took a deep breath, walked out of Port Authority and hailed a cab. I directed the driver to a residence that was infamous on the jazz scene, the Alvin Hotel. An old dilapidated building full of whirring fans and junkies, where drug deals were going down twenty-four seven.

The first night at the Alvin it was hard to sleep with all the loud whispering going on outside my door. But I finally tuned it out. I was in New York for one purpose and one purpose only—to run with the Big Dogs. And of course, to do that I’d have to become a mid-sized dog myself.

The third day after my arrival I hit pay dirt. Walking through the lobby of the Alvin, I happened to glance into a phone booth near the front desk. Inside the enclosure was an alto player I’d once jammed with in San Francisco. His name was Pony Poindexter. He was just starting to dial a number. I rapped on the glass.

“Pony! Hey man, it’s me Jane.”

He hung up the phone and opened the creaky glass door to give me a big hug.

“Wow baby, I was just callin’ Cedar Walton.” As he looked me over, a light went on in his eyes. “Hey, maybe you can make this gig with me.”

I had scored! Open Sesame. This was an opportunity and I was going to jump on that sucker full force. The gig didn’t pay much bread, but at that point I didn’t care. Maybe Pony wasn’t Miles Davis or Wayne Shorter, but the cat could play, and better yet, he was always working.

A few days later I found myself in Pittsburgh, on stage with the Pony Poindexter quartet. A week later the four of us hit Boston. Then we headed for New Bedford—a town full of fishermen, souped up cars, and people who spoke Portuguese. A curious place.

In order to save money Pony decided he’d drive us to our gigs in this old wood paneled station wagon that he’d borrowed from a buddy. There we were, four of us and our gear, crammed like rats inside this ancient gas-guzzler tooling up and down the East coast. It was amazing that no one freaked out or had a major temper tantrum, but there was an unspoken agreement that the music was more important than our little creature comforts. Almost…

Pony Poindexter was another trip. He either blabbed non-stop about the sorry state of his finances or, for a change of pace, maiming or killing all the ofays (white folks) in the world. At first I was very uncomfortable, not only about the subject matter, but about what stance I should take. I mean, if I was a bona fide member of his band, was I still an ofay or was I truly one of the brothers? Then I had a flash. I hadn’t really seen Pony maim or kill anyone personally, so what the hell, he was probably just mouthing off. Beside that, I knew his whole book now; I had all the tunes memorized so it would be a hassle for him to get another piano player closer to his specifications. After awhile, I knew Pony’s little routine wasn’t personal, so when the cat got into his rap, I spaced out or read a magazine until I fell asleep.

After New Bedford, the band had a few weeks off so I went apartment hunting. I’d been to a couple of cribs uptown I liked, so I chose the Upper West Side as my designated search area. After inspecting a bunch of hole-in-the-wall apartments with fallen plaster, chipped paint, rusted pipes, and ancient, yellow-crusted tubs and toilets, I finally found one that was halfway decent. Yeah, I had to pay a few bucks more, but Pony assured me he had a lot of prime gigs coming up. I was taking it on faith.

I now had a three-room crib on Ninety-first Street between Amsterdam and Central Park West—Spanish Harlem.

I bought a piano and a day bed from the Salvation Army. Then I found an old castoff, threadbare, Persian rug rolled up on the curb waiting to be picked up by the garbage man. I carted it up to my crib.

Soon, I discovered I had an upstairs neighbor by the name of Jerome Richardson who, besides being one of the heavies on the jazz scene, did lots of studio work. One day Jerome invited me up to his crib. I was completely floored. I stood there in awe. Jerome had what I considered to be just about the hippest thing ever: adult furniture.  I didn’t know anybody that owned a couch, let alone a couch that didn’t have the stuffing coming out of it.  Even cooler, Jerome had real pots and pans, matching silverware, and carpeting throughout. I thought of my floors all splintery and scuffed up. Now this cat had his shit together.

Sometimes I would run into Jerome sitting on the front stoop. He would always smile and ask, if I was getting enough gigs, then promise he’d keep me in mind if anything came up. I thought he was just jiving me, so I was surprised when he actually came through.

“Guess what?” He said one day, inviting himself in and sitting down on my Salvation Army bed that doubled as my couch.

“What?”

“I think I just got you the gig with Charlie Mingus. I just talked to the cat on the phone and he’ll be calling you in a couple of minutes. Don’t go anywhere, baby.”

Before I could even give him some show of thanks, he was in the wind. As he bounded up the stairs to his crib, a giant wave of fear rolled over me. I felt like a deer, frozen in the headlights.

Charlie Mingus. Damn! That cat was one huge dog. Then I started to wonder; was I burnin’ enough for that gig?  Maybe I thought I was better than I actually was. Maybe I was a musical imposter. I felt like a beautifully made-up ugly chick who knows how to look at herself in the mirror from just the right angle. Someone adept at the art of self-delusion, whose cover was about to be blown.

I sat there in a state of anxiety for about forty minutes. Then the phone rang.

“Hello.” I answered.

“Hi is this Jane?”

It was the Big Dog.

“Yeah.”

“Well this is Charles Mingus. Jerome Richardson gave me your number. I’ve got a gig in San Francisco tomorrow night. Can you make it? I got about twenty tunes to show you. Yeah, Come over in maybe say…an hour?”

The next moment, Mingus was rattling off his address to me.

I looked at my watch. It would be tight but I could do it. Damn, It was one thirty now. I could make it from Ninetieth to Twentieth by two thirty. I was already lacing up my boots as the conversation ended.

“I’ll be there,” I said cementing the deal.

“Later.” The supernova at the other end hung up.

I put down the phone, ran over to my old upright piano and reeled off a few frantic scales. Then I went into the kitchen, grabbed a banana and bounded out the door to the subway station.

I felt hot and clammy as I rode down to Mingus’s pad. When the train stopped at Twenty-first Street, I bolted up the subway stairs and sprinted the three blocks to Mingus’s crib. It was a well-kept, white, three-story building with trees in front. Cool pad. I pushed the buzzer.

Mingus buzzed me in and I took the elevator to the second floor. I’d tried to meditate during the subway ride but it didn’t help. I was scared.

I stepped out of the claustrophobic little box trying to orient myself. Then I saw him standing in a doorway. Mingus was a few feet away from the elevator, waving. I looked, then I looked again. Wow!

The word that came to mind was BOOMING. This cat was booming. His voice, his essence, his appearance, his entire being! Yeah, this was one hell of a Big Dog. Barely acknowledging my presence, Mingus ushered me in and sat me down at his piano. Then without further ado, he got out his music. Oh yeah, he was beyond any social amenities.

I quickly realized the music itself wasn’t all that hard; it was the interpretation of his music that was difficult.

“Play it like the Duke,” Mingus ordered.

Being a musical child of the sixties, I didn’t I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I was into Trane, Sonny, Wayne, Miles…the cats. Not wanting to seem musically illiterate I nodded, trying to imitate the knowing look I’d once seen Miles gives to Red Garland. After running through his book, Mingus abruptly dismissed me, giving me my marching orders. I was to meet him in front of his crib tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock sharp, bags packed, ready to go.

I tried to sleep that night, but my brain was spinning with snatches of melodies and chord patterns. I finally fell asleep from sheer mental exhaustion, only to be awakened a few hours later. Hearing the familiar buzzing sound, I flung the covers back, jumped in the shower, fed my face, did a cursory check of my bags, and ran out the door.

As I went down to the subway station, I said a silent prayer asking for God’s help and protection. I mean, you never really know when you’re going to need some roadside emergency service from the Biggest Dog ever.

—–

Running With the Big Dogs, Part 2

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.

It started Thursday night with a dinner at the Four Seasons in honor of the Reva and David Logan Foundation (whose critical contributions to JLP are described here) hosted by CDS Director Tom Rankin and Associate Director Greg Britz.  92 year old David Logan was the honoree, as were his sons Dan Logan and Jon Logan of Alexandria, VA and Berkeley, CA respectively.  Dan’s daughter Liz, an editor and culinary authority in Chicago, was also there.  Lanny Silverman and Greg Lunceford from there from the Chicago Cultural Center (CCC).

As Courtney indicated in her previous blog post, the exhibition at CCC is different from NYPL, but very effective.  Lanny and Greg deserve kudos for their efforts on JLP’s behalf at CCC from the first day they expressed interest in this project.  I miss many aspects of Courtney’s NYPL installation -  for one, the more prominent tape box banners with period color and design and Smith’s manic handwriting – that left you more worn out and awed by Smith’s achievement.  But photography purists might enjoy the extra breathing room given to Smith’s original prints more at CCC.  Also, CCC’s creative use of audio is what we’ve longed to do and didn’t fully achieve in the space at NYPL (Lunceford deserves a lot of credit at CCC), and the room itself it a wonderful spectacle at CCC.  In both shows optimal use was made of the space and resources.  If you saw the show in NYC, it’s a terrific, new experience here.  When the show comes to our home town of Durham, N.C. (Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art) next spring it’ll be another new experience.

At the opening reception in Chicago Dan Logan introduced me to Bill Michel, the inaugural director of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Creative and Peforming Arts at the University of Chicago, which broke ground in May with a $35 million contribution from the Logans.  They plan to open the center for the ‘12-’13 school year and we had an initial brainstorm session about how JLP might be a presence there.

Of special notice, Hall Overton’s niece Joyce Overton and her husband Randy Madonna attended the opening.  Joyce works in development at North Park University in Chicago and Randy is a former minister and longtime social worker at Cook County Hospital.  I’ve known Joyce’s father Harvey Overton for years.  He is a poet and retired humanities professor who lives in Chicago but was unable to make it downtown for the reception.  By all indications the Overton family shares the exceptional, warm, generous traits exemplified by Hall.  Later this week we will post a video of Harvey reading the poem he wrote about his late brother.

Finally, on Friday I learned from Indianapolis photographer Mark Sheldon that the free brochures available at the JLP show at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts from February to May are now being sold for $12 on Ebay.  That leaves me at a loss for words.

-Sam Stephenson

Exhibitions are about many things: art, objects, stories, and SPACE.

We sometimes bring shows to CDS that were organized elsewhere, and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of making them work in our galleries. Presenting work in our space adds our voice to the story the work is telling.

Sequence tells a story. Placement of objects adds emphasis, magnifies, or softens.

Dense text, no text, didactic, descriptive, narrative, lyric…sound.

The idea is to move the viewer through your interpretation of the story, without them noticing how (or that) they are being led. The installation, while an integral part of the viewing experience, shouldn’t draw attention away from the subject at hand; the work, the story.

I was fortunate to spend two weeks in New York, working with Barbara Cohen-Stratyner and wonderful staff at the NYPL for the Performing Arts, on the debut of the Jazz Loft project exhibition. It was fantastic; I was folded in as part of the crew. I helped uncrate the works, laid out the sequence, moved and cleaned display cases, set the ephemera, put up captions, helped solve problems. I was invited to have my hands in the installation as if I were working in my own space.

Last week I arrived at the Chicago Cultural Center to find the works all laid out and the crew from NFA SPACE (Contemporary Art + Exhibit Services, Inc.  http://www.nfaspace.com), drilling, leveling, and hanging the show. I got to weigh in on a few things, but Greg Lunceford, CCC exhibitions designer, had everything moving forward without me.

The room here seems huge, not as intimate as NY, and the ceilings are high. In this interpretation, the banners (of the tape boxes) are not as important, but they look great filling the space above the walls, drawing your gaze up to the amazing ceiling. The walls are freestanding, so it’s not possible to have the very linear presentation that was so effective in NY; but there’s a separate room where folks can comfortably spend time with the audio tracks on computer monitors.

Greg invested in the show in a way that has made it his – well, the CCC’s. I felt at a loss with not as much input, but also excited at his interpretation of the materials. I miss the banners being right down in the space, but the CCC equipment and the location of the gallery, enables the use of ambient sound in a way we’d imagined (dreamed of, hoped for), but were not able to execute in the NY show.

So, an exhibition that travels is new in every space. If you loved the Jazz Loft project in New York, check it out in Chicago. If you didn’t love the Jazz Loft project in New York, see it differently in Chicago. It opened to the public on July 17 and there’s a public reception Friday evening, July 23. I’ll be there celebrating with Sam, Lauren, Dan, AND Greg; and then I’ll start thinking about what might be possible at the next venue, knowing that there are some things I can’t even imagine.

View photos from the installation in Chicago on our Facebook page.

There are two new blog entries revealing a fascinating connection between Charlie Parker and Edgar Varèse plus 1957 jam sessions involving Varèse that could have taken place in Overton’s loft in 821 Sixth Avenue.  Alex Ross mentions it here after the ICE blog mentioned it here.  Musicians listed in these sessions include Teo Macero, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Frank Rehak, Ed Shaughnessy, Charles Mingus, and Overton.

Overton hosted sessions with some of these same musicians on a regular basis.  For example, his fellow 821 tenant Dick Cary kept a daily diary and on April 21, 1955 he jotted,  “Thelonious Monk and gang upstairs.”  Upstairs was Overton’s studio.  Two days later a concert at the 92nd St. Y included these musicians:  Overton, Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Teo Macero, Eddie Bert, Kenny Clarke, and Monk.  It’s likely this was the “gang” Cary referred to.  It matches up with other information we have for this period.  The Varèse sessions in ‘57 included four of the same musicians plus Hal McKusick and Ed Shaughnessy, both known to frequent Overton’s studio.

The man was everywhere, and nowhere, always preferring the background.  A major research project on him would be fruitful.

Unfortunately, a basement flood in the New Jersey home of Overton’s widow Nancy in the 1990s ruined most of the professional belongings he left behind.  A few tantalizing pieces survive:  scores, the datebook for the last year of his life, and a dozen reels of tape including the only complete performance of his Huckleberry Finn opera (conducted by Dennis Russell Davies at Juilliard in 1971) and some sessions with Teddy Charles, Ed Shaughnessy, and others.  His datebook for 1972 (he died in November that year) is meticulous, so we dearly miss what might have been found in the 1950s and 60s editions.

By the way, Gene Smith didn’t move into 821 Sixth Avenue until 1957 and his tape work didn’t become obsessive until 1959.  So it is unlikely that we’ll find the Varèse sessions if they did occur in Overton’s loft (we still have about 800 hours yet to hear).

-Sam Stephenson