Background on 'The Jazz Loft'

New documentary

THE JAZZ LOFT ACCORDING TO W. EUGENE SMITH is a feature length documentary. The film makes use of a remarkable archive of material created by the legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith in and around his loft-home. It is believed to be the largest ever audio/photo resource documenting a single place over several years –The Jazz Loft Tapes and Photos.  Our production is the first film to use this extraordinary collection.

 

A brief synopsis

Between 1957 and 1965 in New York, dozens of jazz musicians jam night after night in a dilapidated Sixth Avenue loft building, not realizing that much of what they play and say to each other is being captured on audio tape and in still photos by the gentle and unstable genius, photographer W. Eugene Smith, who lives and works there. Meanwhile, Thelonious Monk stops by for three weeks of rehearsals; Young Ronnie Free (drummer) gets hooked on hard drugs; loft-resident Hall Overton, Juilliard instructor, classical composer and maverick jazz arranger, teaches the likes of Chuck Israels and Steve Reich; Smith begins to tape-record even more, including his own phone calls; the 50s give way to the 60s; the city, the music and the world change; everyone gets evicted.

More on the story:

Smith, a renowned photographer at Life Magazine in the 1940s, pioneer of the photo essay, left a conventional family life in a suburban community in 1957 and traveled by truck with all his belongings to a downscale, beat-up, ex-industrial five-story walkup in New York’s Flower District.  

There he found what some refer to as “The Sixth Avenue Community,” loft dwellers who were taking full advantage of the economic and social changes in post-war cities by inhabiting run-down spaces at bare-bones prices.  .

The Jazz Loft, 821 Sixth Avenue, where Smith began his new life in 1957, had become a refuge for musicians looking for a place to play after their gigs all over Manhattan.  Located between 28th and 29th Streets, the building was “on the way to everywhere from everywhere.”  So jazz players would stop by on the way home and hang out for hours. Eugene Smith had his tape recorders running as jam sessions, conversations, human dramas and radio and television programs were filling the days, months and years.  Working in his darkroom in the loft night after long night, Smith also made tens of thousands of photos of his life there.

 

Interviews with the players

THE JAZZ LOFT ACCORDING TO W.EUGENE SMITH features a colorful and gifted group of characters, still with us, whose formative professional years were spent in and out of this same dilapidated New York building in the 1950s and 60s, and many of whom were recorded and photographed by Smith.  Among them:

 

Carla Bley, jazz pianist and composer, who went there after her day job as the cigarette girl at Birdland.

 

Steve Reich, iconic contemporary composer, who had composition lessons there with Hall Overton, the dynamic Juilliard teacher, composer and jazz arranger.

 

David Amram,  film-composer, performer, author, raconteur who came to New York and asked the question, “Where’s the jam session?” - and found the answer in this building.

 

And related characters

 

Pat Smith, a young teen when his father, the revered photographer W. Eugene Smith, moved into the beat-up old building in the flower-district.

 

Bill Pierce, photographer, who had the job of greeting his famous boss W. Eugene Smith’s “groupies” at the door of the building each morning.

With the help of these and other “witnesses” to the life in the loft and the world of New York in this period, we tell the story of Smith’s growing preoccupation with his new home base.

 

What was Smith doing there?

From the loft years we flash back to learn about Smith’s career at Life Magazine, where he struggled desperately to control his art in a corporate world, and about his perilous experiences as a combat photographer in World War II.  We explore the inevitable questions about Smith –what in the world was he doing in this beat-up old building?  Why was he taping and shooting everything there? 

Jazz history is made in the middle of the night

We weave in stories of the 3 A.M. Thelonious Monk rehearsals, fully-documented by Smith’s tapes and photos, for a now-famous Town Hall concert. We learn about the “jazz guru to the stars,” Hall Overton, an under-appreciated master.  We hear magnificent, open-ended jam sessions with no purpose other than just “to play.” And we see the dark side of one drummer, Ron Free, who got hooked on hard drugs and had to escape from the loft scene and New York, long before the scene and the loft changed dramatically.  

 

Conclusion

The film tells a divided story -- full of the riches of playing together in the 1950s and early 60s at a seminal moment for the art of jazz, but with plenty of detours into the dark struggles and the prices paid for the freedom to live a creative life.

THE JAZZ LOFT ACCORDING TO W. EUGENE SMITH is about a place and a person who was obsessed with that place and every bit of life that was lived there.  Gene Smith left behind a “Jazz Loft Project” to compile, edit, enhance and complete—and provided the materials for a new understanding of a turning point, a time capsule of the moments just before a new kind of popular culture, not to mention modern urban life, were born.  

 

Project History

The pictures and reels of audio tape used in this production –thousands and thousands of them—were discovered roughly 15 years ago by Sam Stephenson, who documented the find in his book The Jazz Loft Project (Knopf 2009).  The tapes were distilled into a multi-part Public Radio series produced and hosted by Sara Fishko and presented on WNYC and NPR in 2009.

 

Personnel

A Production of WNYC New York Public Radio in Association with Lumiere Productions

Written, Produced and Directed by Sara Fishko

Producer Calvin Skaggs

Director of Photography Tom Hurwitz

Producer/Research Consultant Sam Stephenson

Editor and Associate Producer Jonathan J. Johnson

 

WNYC executive in charge 

Dean Cappello

 

Funders

National Endowment for the Humanities

Reva and David Logan Foundation

Oliver Kramer

National Endowment for the Arts

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

New York State Council on the Arts