Customer Reviews

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Beautiful and truly spiritual book. Like great jazz itself. Life affirming and what all art should be; truly democratic.
The photographs are stunning. The writing and transcriptions get all the right juices flowing. I would love to hear some of the tapes Smith recorded.

Get this book as a gift for yourself or someone close to your heart.
Like the old Medicine Show man said "Good for what ails you and gives you what you ain't got".

If you are a musician, you will come alive in Sam Stephenson's awesome collection of the happenings in a loft on Sixth Avenue in New York during the late 1950's and 1960's. Every struggling jazz musician with talent was there. Those of lesser talent never came back.
Tiny clips of conversations, recorded on tape bring back recollections of moments passed with enough spirit, to let you join the clan.
The book will serve as a Rosetta Stone, for those who long ago participated in making jazz the American standard in the world and who want to reconnect with friends to make more music, or to sit back and smile in their memory.

To start with, I'm an old photography teacher, specializing in black and white. Secondly, one of my best friends is the brother of Hall Overton, a major name in this book. These are the two ground works for what I write.

Hall's brother is so proud of how the author has brought his brother and the people, music and times out so close to reality. Smith has photos beyond expectations and locations.

I know Hall Overton is depicted here as he was ...down to the smallest detail. His brother agrees.

Smith's photos are quite accurate, including moods, emotions, feelings, inspirations.

I am happy to see this material finally covered in such true and accurate detail. It is grand!

On a quick thumb-through, this looks like a book I'll spend lots of random hours with. Very nicely put together, and what I expected of the BOOK.

Alas, I should have read *all* of the Amazon reviews prior to purchase. Like others, I expected at least one CD with this, and was disappointed at the absence of one (or more). I learned about this book from a year-end review of "best books." Both that review and the title of the book led me to think that it included audio (as apparently others also thought). And as much as I looked forward to the photography--and I looked forward eagerly to that--I also looked forward to hearing the rehearsal/jam banter as well as the music. Had the title been "...Photographs and Transcripts", it would be more accurate, and you wouldn't be reading reviews like this one.

One other observation: the description says "deckle edge", but the book is not. That doesn't matter to me one way or the other, but it might to some people.

Bottom line is that I'll keep the book and peruse it in leisure moments. But I agree with others who misunderstood that we feel just a little bamboozled.

This is a magnificent book that captures human life and creativity as played out during a thin slice of the past in a tiny nook of the globe. No other book I know is quite like it. It is special.

About 1954, two people with loft space in a then 100-year-old five-story building on Sixth Avenue, near 28th, in the Flower District of Manhattan, began to allow jazz musicians to practice and jam there. For the next decade or so, the decrepit building was a favorite private late-night haunt of many jazzmen, many who never were "somebody" but some who were (for example, Chet Baker, Art Blakey, Sonny Clark, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Roland Kirk, Theloneous Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Pee Wee Russell, and Zoot Sims). In 1957, W. Eugene Smith - at a nadir in his personal life - left his family and moved into the building. From there, over the next eight years, he recorded - both with his cameras (40,000 pictures) and with tape recorders (1700 reels) -- a wide spectrum of the life that occurred in the lofts, out front on Sixth Avenue, and in the world at large as broadcast over New York radio and television.

After Smith died, those 40,000 pictures and 1700 reels of tape were part of 22 tons of Smith's materials that were delivered to the University of Arizona. Sam Stephenson spent years sifting through the materials, tracking down and interviewing some of those whom Smith had recorded decades earlier, and then putting together this documentation of Smith's documentation. It is an extraordinarily rich, eclectic, and fascinating book - an assemblage of the raw events of time as it unfolded within and in front of one building in Manhattan circa 1960 (somewhat like what I imagine Walter Benjamin imagined).

THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT is comprised primarily of the following: an account of the building and its unique place in the jazz world of New York City; an account of W. Eugene Smith, his quirky genius, and his time at 821 Sixth Ave.; black-and-white photographs that Smith took of jazz musicians playing and relaxing in the jazz lofts; black-and-white photographs Smith took from a fourth-floor window of street life below him on Sixth Avenue; and transcriptions of numerous verbal exchanges that Smith caught on his tapes, including conversations among people within the building and all sorts of broadcast communications, both radio and television.

As one would expect, the photographs are of exceptionally high quality. Smith truly was one of the great American photographers of the 20th Century. ("Iconic" has become a dreadfully over-used and trivialized word, but Smith's photograph from the rear of his two small children walking into a garden of sunlight - the concluding photo of Edward Steichen's famous photography collection "The Family of Man" - is iconic even in the old sense.) But the book is so much more than a book of photography. It is a record of the past that begins to approach the past itself. In his "Jazz Loft Project", Smith seems to capture and preserve in amber the transitory happenings - both significant and insignificant, sublime and mundane - from half a century ago. To now review those amber-enclosed artifacts is curiously intoxicating and exhilarating.

Bassist Jimmy Stevenson was one of the lesser-knowns who once made 821 Sixth both a home and a jazz practice spot. He left the jazz world in the 1970s and in 2003 the author, with luck, found him selling wind chimes by the side of a road in California. Here is what Stevenson said about Smith's archives: "You can't imagine somebody calling you up out of the blue and telling you that they've got tapes--many, many hours of tapes--of you talking and playing music forty-five years ago. Hearing these tapes is like somebody playing back your memories for you, only these are memories you forgot you had." When I see Smith's photographs of 1950s New York street life and read transcripts of broadcasts of the 1960 World Series or ongoing developments during the Cuban missile crisis, I too - to a much lesser but still far from negligible extent - am confronted with memories that I forgot I had.

There is much more in and to THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT than I have been able to touch on in this review, and I can scarcely begin to convey my enthusiasm for it. I note that other reviewers have complained because the book does not include any audio excerpts from the tapes that are part of the 821 Sixth Avenue archive. I too would love to hear well-selected excerpts of those tapes and I hope that someday I will be able to do so. But even without any audio, THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT is a treasure. Likely it would be especially valued by connoisseurs of jazz and/or W. Eugene Smith, but I wholeheartedly recommend it to one and all.

I saw this book at a local national chain bookstore, and heard a good review on Public Radio, but preferred buying it from Amazon. This is a really nice book, good printing quality, nice grainy images, (many of which show the typical lower view angle of the twin lens reflex) should smell like stale coffee and cigarette smoke to make it better, but, alas, a mistake was made. This book should have had a music CD in it to go along for the mood. To me, a really serious error, and whoever made the decision NOT to put a CD in it is an idiot. Hence four stars instead of five. The book is medium sized and a nice step away from the more formal photography books where every image is treated like some kind of moment in time and fawned about excessively. In this book the images are in context with a running history/conversation that can take you back in time. For some of us it might rekindle an interest in a type of photography which has now been replaced by the digital stream of too much of the same. Also books of this type should have a mandatory preview capacity on Amazon with better planning to show the real content. As a matter of fact, Amazon should have a policy that ALL photography books have a preview capacity.

Shipping on this book by Amazon was mishandled. It was put in a container with a much larger book, improperly padded and slipped and bounced around. Result: Book is damaged in one corner. I'll keep it anyway, I would like to see packers in Amazon warehouses attend some classes in shipping.

I purchased this book for my husband, jazz guitarist and art photographer Peter Leitch, and he has pored over every detail on every page: the documented history of artists who passed through the great photographer Eugene Smith's loft (he taped long conversations, rehersals, radio shows...)is priceless and well researched (Peter has found an occasional typo: n.b. J.R. Montrose and Jack Montrose are NOT the same person) but in general it is a major scholarly labor of love. If you're in New York go to the Eugene Smith photography show in conjunction with this book at the Lincoln Center branch of the NY Public Library.

The legendary jazz loft at 821 6th Avenue existed and functioned under the tutelage of photographer W. Eugene Smith between 1957-65. Smith's legacy consisted of some 40,000 photographs and more than 1700 reel to reel tapes which yielded more than 4000 hours of listening. Here are some of the musicians who participated over the years in the loft sessions: Thelonious Monk, Hall Overton, Pepper Adams, Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Sonny Clark,
Joe Farrell, Gil Coggins, Bill Crow, Don Ellis, Ronnie Free, Lin Halliday, Freddy Greenwell, Dave McKenna, Freddie Redd, Wilbur Ware, Bill Evans, Henry Grimes,Bill Takas,Jimmy Raney, Jim Hall. This is,of course, just a partial list of participants. It should be noted that Monk was there mainly to rehearse and prepare for the famous 1959 Town Hall concert. The photographic collection showed many pictures of musicians but also included shots taken from the loft window of various street activities. The tapes included not only musical performances but as well some taped radio and tv shows and some conversations taped between people in the loft. Particularly I enjoyed the one between tenorist Lin Halliday and pianist Sonny Clark. Some of the tapes can be heard on the Jazz Loft web site and some can be heard on the WNYC web site. It would be nice if they could be edited and in part released as a CD set. The book is of tabletop size and weighs in at nearly four pounds. Get it.

I got this for my son who is a jazz musician. He was pleased because he knew about it and was curious to see it. I am anxious to hear his reaction to this unique book. My only qualm about it is that the title almost makes it sound like it comes with tapes.I think it should be made clearer that the book contains transcriptions of the tapes and doesn't include audio tapes.

For anyone interested in the work of photographer W. Eugene Smith and jazz music this book is a must. I didn't even think twice before ordering it, and that too with the fastest post possible. The documentation Smith did in his loft years is invaluable to photography and jazz students, plus anyone interested in what was going on in non-mainstream New York in those years. The entire 'Loft Project' can be summed up in just word 'passion'. I have read the bool cover to cover three times. I keep it near my jazz CD collection and refer to it many times when playing the music of artisys who played in his loft. Nothing more.. just go out and get it.

Navroze Contractor
Cinematographer/writer