Events

**This event has been rescheduled

for Friday April 2nd at 7pm**

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Sam Stephenson is a writer and instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has written a beautiful hardcover book, full of photographs, about W. Eugene Smith's photographs and recordings of some of the biggest names in Jazz who haunted a Sixth Ave loft in NYC in the late 50's... 

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

"(A) landmark
book...An essential book for jazz fans, photography lovers, and those
interested in the history of New York." - Publisher's Weekly, starred
review.

"The most chaotic and soulful gift book this year...an elegiac stew of
sight and sound, and a singularly weird, vital, and thrumming American
document." - Dwight Garner, New York Times.

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

"(A) landmark
book...An essential book for jazz fans, photography lovers, and those
interested in the history of New York." - Publisher's Weekly, starred
review.

"The most chaotic and soulful gift book this year...an elegiac stew of
sight and sound, and a singularly weird, vital, and thrumming American
document." - Dwight Garner, New York Times. 

n 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer,
walked out of his comfortable settled world—his longtime well-paying
job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four
children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York—to move into a dilapidated,
five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and
Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City’s wholesale flower district.
Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a
massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh.

821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some
of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and
Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground
characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh
opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the
loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from
Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.

From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft,
making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career,
photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets
of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired
the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels
(4,000 hours) of stereo and mono
audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes,
Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and
Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa,
and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist
Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie
Listengart.

Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris
Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson,
and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts,
thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors,
marijuana dealers, and others.

Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes
eleven years ago and has spent the last seven years cataloging,
archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for this book, as
well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout.

W. Eugene Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds
of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the
publication of The Jazz Loft Project, no one had seen Smith’s
extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of
those who were there and lived to tell the tale(s) . . .