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A few months ago, Nate Chinen wrote a story on a not-so-famous loft on 6th Avenue in Manhattan that was used for rehearsals by many of the jazz giants of the 1950s and '60s. The jazz community has known about these tapes for a long time, but Nate threw open the floodlights for the rest of the world to see (and hear):

The larger story of the loft has been an immersive project for researchers at Duke, who have interviewed 300 people in 19 states. Sam Stephenson, who directs the effort and whose book on the subject, "Rhythm of a Corner: W. Eugene Smith and a New York Jazz Loft 1957-1965," will be published by Knopf this fall, described a convergence of forces, saved for posterity by the will of one man's obsession.

That man was W. Eugene Smith:

Smith moved to 821 Avenue of the Americas, near West 28th Street, in 1957, leaving behind a family in Westchester and a job with Life magazine, where he had perfected the photo-essay form. He fixated on the loft and the street outside, shooting 20,000 photographs while peering out of a fourth-floor window, as if it were the aperture to another camera. "Robert Frank, the photographer, was a friend of Smith's," Mr. Stephenson said at that window one recent morning (beside a tower of boxes marked "Jumbo Afro"). "He told me that Smith went from a public journalist to a private artist with this body of work."

The tapes came out of the same impulse. Smith recorded hours of random noise, broadcasts, the comings and goings of the place. But because his fellow residents included Hal Overton, the pianist Dick Cary and the painter David X. Young, he also got a cross section of jazz culture at a dynamic time. (He and Overton shared an open floor plan divided by a temporary wall; Cary was downstairs, Young upstairs.) The tapes [a few already released by Mr. Young] include jam sessions and off-the-cuff interactions among dozens of musicians, famous and unknown. One night in 1961, Mr. Stephenson said, Smith's microphones caught the drama of a drug overdose by the pianist Sonny Clark, who was squatting in the stairwell at the time.

Nate's article focuses mainly on Monk's collaboration with Hal Overton, but we can certainly look forward to many hours music by other luminaries of the time:

Known simply as "the Sixth Avenue loft," it was one of maybe a half-dozen places where musicians gathered at a time when various strains of jazz -- mainstream, bebop and cool, among others -- were percolating. Situated in the heart of the flower district, it was the epicenter of what became known as loft jazz.

'"By most accounts, it drew the biggest names, showcased the latest talent and lasted the longest,"' said an article in the fall 1999 issue of Double Take magazine.

'"Guys played with people they'd never seen before," Bob Brookmeyer, a trombone player, said in the article. "Whites, blacks, old guys, young guys. Nobody cared about that stuff. We were all outlaws. Our profession wasn't considered respectable. There was a sense we were all in it together."

There was no lock on the loft's front door, and it was considered bad form to arrive before 11 p.m. There always seemed to be many pretty young women present, and ample bourbon and marijuana. It was a spot where Salvador Dali, Norman Mailer or Willem de Kooning might show up, entourage in tow. "The locus of mad freedoms," Mr. Young once called the scene that his rent bargain made possible.

"It was my great pride and privilege to have initiated and hosted the spirit of that loft, to have lived within its joyous dark atmosphere and shared the antic energies of my very talented friends for more than a decade," he wrote.

Who else might be lurking on these tapes?

There are a thousand tangled narratives: early performances by Chick Corea, as well as Steve Reich, who took weekly lessons with Overton for two years. (Reich will not allow the music to be aired publicly.) Partridge is on the hunt for a tape featuring photographer Diane Arbus. Alice McLeod appears, days prior to her elopement with John Coltrane. There might even be a small bit of Bob Dylan lore, too.

Fantastic!

Duke University Jazz Loft Project

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