The Jazz Loft Project Documenting an Underground New York Loft Scene From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. The tapes have not been played since they were archived, following Smith's death in 1978, at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona. The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with CCP and the Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith's tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants. The transferred recordings reveal high sound quality and extraordinary musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene. Smith wrote 139 names of jazz musicians on his partial, haphazard tape labels: famous stars such as Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Roy Haynes, and Lee Konitz, along with underground legends---drummer Ronnie Free, bassist Henry Grimes, drummer Edgar Bateman, multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart, and saxophonist Lin Halliday, as well as many unknowns. Research on the preserved tapes so far indicates that at least 300 musicians are represented. Thelonious Monk was recorded in private collaborations with Hall Overton, a loft resident, and in full band rehearsals for now-famous concerts at Town Hall, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall in 1959, 1963, and 1964. More than 300 of the loft participants have been interviewed as part of the project. The tapes also reveal many of Smith's obsessions and other oddities, such as recorded street noise in the flower district, late-night radio talk shows, telephone calls, television and radio news programs, and random dialogues among musicians, artists, and friends and associates of Smith. In addition to his photographs of the loft jazz sessions, Smith made thousands of photographs out of his fourth-floor window of life in the flower district. The tapes, photographs, and subsequent oral histories of surviving loft participants provide a unique documentary portrait of an underground crossroads where urban American life and music legends left their tracks. The project will culminate with a book published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. (November 2009), a radio series in collaboration with WNYC Radio in New York (late 2009/early 2010), and an exhibition that will open at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (February 2010) and travel to the Chicago Cultural Center, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, among other venues. Project Director Sam Stephenson has been studying the life and work of Smith since 1997. He has authored two books on Smith, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project (W.W. Norton & Company in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2001) and W. Eugene Smith (Phaidon 55, 2001), and curated a traveling exhibition of Smith's work organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He is also working on a biography of Smith, to be written when the Jazz Loft Project is completed. Dan Partridge, the Jazz Loft Project research associate, has worked with the project since 2003. Lauren Hart is the Jazz Loft Project coordinator. For more information about the Jazz Loft Project, call 919-660-3668. Gene Smith's Sink (A Public Space, Issue 3, Winter 2007) Documenting an Underground New York Loft Scene (Document, Winter/Spring 2005)

The Jazz Loft Project, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham, NC 27705
jazzloftproject.org | 919.660.3668 | 919.681.7600 fax | lauren.hart [at] duke.edu