March 10, 2005

Tape Machine as a Fly on the Wall of Jazz

. Eugene Smith was one of America's great photojournalists, a Life magazine staff member during the 1940's and 50's whose work yielded archetypal American images. He photographed American and Japanese soldiers at war, a country doctor in Colorado, a midwife in rural South Carolina. He became famous for his work ethic, as well as for the empathy of his pictures.

In the late 1950's, a few years after a nervous breakdown, he cut loose from a Time-Life salary and a family in Westchester and became an obsessive documenter of a Manhattan loft full of jazz musicians, on Sixth Avenue near 28th Street. Living there, he shared building space with the painter David X. Young, the trumpeter Dick Cary and the composer and pianist Hall Overton.

This time, Smith used not only cameras, but the latest portable tape recorders as well.

He was in several kinds of pain. He had been wounded in the head and arms in the war, and had become an alcoholic and an amphetamine addict. But his true drug was work: musicians say the loft walls and stairwell were covered with drying photo prints. And though he paid $40 a month in rent, he may have spent more than that on recording tape alone.

"The loft was open every night until about 11," recalled the pianist Paul Bley, who remembers dropping by about once a week. "You climbed the stairs and Smith would open the door, with a camera held waist-high. He was charming, hipper than most musicians. He'd chat you up for quite some time with the camera going click-click-click as fast as it could go."

Smith's jazz-loft project, if you can call it that, lasted from 1957 to about 1965, through what were arguably jazz's best years, when most of the music's early masters were still alive, and the players of a new generation were challenging its foundations.

The project had no proper dimensions, and never attained anything resembling publishable form; it ended when the building's resident musicians moved on and the scene dissipated. When Smith died in 1978, evidence of that period lay deep within his 22 tons of pack-rat archives.

Sam Stephenson, a writer, instructor and research associate at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, and an expert on Smith, has spent the last four years discovering what, exactly, is on the nearly 3,000 hours of tape in the archives. With an associate, Dan Partridge, he has constructed an oral history of the jazz loft, speaking to 177 people who spent time there.

So far, the tapes indicate a lovely and finite discovery - a few great sessions from jazz's greatest period - inside a grander and more mysterious one. Until I took a trip to Durham, N.C., last week, nobody had heard the Smith tapes since their rediscovery, except some of the musicians on them and Robin D. G. Kelley, a Columbia University professor who is writing a biography of Thelonious Monk. (Some other recordings from the loft, made by David X. Young, were released on CD five years ago.)

I heard hours of loft rehearsals by Monk's big band, prior to its Town Hall concert in 1959; by Paul Bley's magnificent trio in 1961 and 1964; by Zoot Sims with a just-drifting-through cast, including the pianist Dave McKenna and drummer Roy Haynes; of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Chick Corea, Warne Marsh and others.

Some of these recordings will be useful to jazz scholarship, including many conversations with the elusive, sometimes taciturn, Monk. Some of the sessions are strong enough to be released on CD. But I also heard many hours of tepid jamming on standards by musicians who never made it, because of lack of talent, psychological instability or drugs. They are part of jazz history, too, though usually never documented.

And there are honest, elucidating moments between bursts of music. At a jam session in January 1964, Rahsaan Roland Kirk (then just Roland Kirk) is thinking out loud about asserting greater control over his art. He wants to open a small Manhattan performance space without a liquor license, entirely about music and not bar profits.

"Jazz cats don't have no faith," Kirk gripes to three other musicians there. "But I have faith in myself. If I were playing in a place, people would come and I could make a living. I don't need no million dollars."

"When I get to 50 years old, I don't want to be working for nobody else but myself," he says.

"I might not do it in the next five years," he goes on, "but I'm going to do it before I pass away." Kirk was 27 at the time; he died in 1977, at 42.

And there is the deep end of Smith's documentary mania. He miked three floors of the building, as well as the stairway. There are reels of Sixth Avenue street noise, Smith's chats with the local beat cop, telephone calls to editors and acquaintances (including one to Charlie Chaplin), taped television and radio programs, and endless conversation about money: evidence of the daily grind among the musicians, artists and quasi-bums at 821 Sixth Avenue.

On one tape, Smith is talking to a pianist from Detroit in her mid-20's, Alice McLeod; a few years later she married John Coltrane. The topic is the ethics of documenting musicians in the loft. It seems that Ms. McLeod herself did not know that even this conversation was being recorded.

Mr. Bley, who has heard the tapes, said: "I wasn't aware that he was recording me. But I'm glad that he did."

There are many more hours of Smith's tapes, sitting with the rest of his archive in the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It is costly to find out what they hold. Grants, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, have allowed Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Partridge to make high-quality digital transfers of the first 300 tapes (or more than 900 hours) out of the full cache of 1,790, and to construct their oral history of the period. There may be a book of photographs and some CD's out of all this at the end, but nothing can happen until the other tapes are heard.

Many of the remaining tapes are unmarked. But to judge by the photographs Smith made in the loft, as well as the testimony of the scene's survivors, the tapes might include Jimmy Giuffre's late-50's trio with Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall; Bill Evans; Vic Dickenson; Pee Wee Russell; Cecil Taylor; Kenny Dorham; John Coltrane; and possibly even Bob Dylan.

But then again, they might not. The markings on 86 tapes indicate that they contain the sounds of cats in heat and meowing; 113 more are recordings of Long John Nebel's late-night radio show on WOR, to which Smith would compulsively send listener-response telegrams. What they will show, for sure, is life as it happened around Smith, an anthropology of a fascinating time and place.

"This is postwar, midcentury, urban fieldwork," Mr. Stephenson said. "Even if there was no music, it'd be important. Even it was people sitting around shooting pool."