Jazz Loft Project

The Jazz Loft Project documents the multi-year work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, who held the American jazz scene in a New York loft 1957-1965 in picture and sound.

The Jazz Loft Project

Between 1957 and 1965, the American photographer W. Eugene Smith lived in a New York loft on Avenue of the Americas ( Sixth Avenue ), which became known as the Jazz Loft. Since there are only a few sample areas were in the city that did not require hours of rent, the building 821 Sixth Avenue is one of the most important meeting of the jazz world was soon. Smith named the place in which he tended with a room with plasterboard walls, " a very special piece of America." He then brought in many rooms and corridors of the building microphones and took approximately 4,000 hours to 1,740 audio tapes on; in and around the building also occurred on the 40,000 photographs of Smith, to the many musicians of that jazz scene are recorded. The tapes were housed after Smith's death in 1978, at the Center for Creative Photography ( CCP) at the University of Arizona, where they discovered only in 1998 and subsequently evaluated in twelve years of archival work of Sam Stephenson, Lecturer in Documentary Studies at Duke University, in a were shown to exhibit and published in the book the Jazz Loft Project 2009.

The Jazz Loft Project organized by the Center for Documentary Studies in cooperation with CCP and the heirs of W.Eugene Smith; it served to prepare and cataloging Smith's tapes, the study of the tapes and the photographs and obtaining interviews with the surviving participants of the sessions, such as Bill Crow. The surviving recordings offer surprisingly good sound quality, a musical and cultural documentation of the former New York jazz scene. Smith listed 139 names of jazz musicians on the tapes lids; among them were well-known artists such as Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Roy Haynes and Lee Konitz, and also Ronnie Free, Henry Grimes, Edgar Bateman, Eddie list Gart and Lin Halliday as well as many unknown musicians. The research showed the number of 300 different artists on the tapes. Thelonious Monk was documented in its cooperation with Hall Overton, so their samples with a Big Band for Monks Town Hall concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in the years 1959, 1963 and 1964.

The traditional bands also contain some curiosities of W. Eugene Smith; he held also the road noise in the so-called Flower district, nightly radio talk shows, phone calls, television and radio news, as well as many dialogues between the musicians, artists, friends of Smith and other stakeholders. Thus, a dialogue of Monk and his arranger Hall Overton has been handed in their samples:

In addition to the many photographs of the jazz sessions in the loft Smith took thousands of street scenes laid out his window on the fourth floor. So, from Smith's tapes, the photographs and the oral traditions of the parties in the sense of oral history, a unique portrait of this place and of this era. Over 250 contributors to the loft sessions were to interviewed in summer 2007. The project learned in 2009 with the publication of a book, a radio series in cooperation with the transmitter " WNYC Radio" in New York and a traveling exhibition in 2010 his previous peak.

Appreciation

Sam Stephenson called Smith's work as " the most ambitious research project on modern jazz that was ever made ​​," (...) " recordings and bands now give us an idea of a subculture of the world away from the stages and clubs, the night lives of musicians and artists that previously remained closed to us. Very authentic, because most musicians did not know that they were taken. "

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