Back at the start of the research that led to The Jazz Loft Project, “13 years later” was not a part of the plan. Sam Stephenson didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that his investigation into the universe of artifacts left behind by legendary American photographer W. Eugene Smith would come to resemble one of Smith’s ever-growing photo essays, its focus growing wider by the day. But here he is, 13 years since the beginning of the entire project, and there are still over a thousand CDs to listen to.
Stephenson’s involvement with Smith’s work began as a magazine article. He was writing on the artist’s Pittsburgh project, a photo essay originally centered on the city’s bicentennial. Smith’s undertaking, intended to require three weeks of work and about 100 pictures, evolved into a four-year, 22,000-photograph anthology. The extent to which the project consumed him led Smith to leave his family and home and move into a Manhattan loft—the loft that captured Stephenson’s attention.
“There was never a plan in which I made a decision to work this long on this project,” Stephenson said. “It just sort of organically grew.”
The process through which Stephenson has explored and condensed Smith’s work is fascinating in its own right. What Smith left behind, aside from approximately 40,000 photographs, are about 4,000 hours of recorded sounds: jam sessions, street noise, television and radio programs, interpersonal banter, people reading aloud.
“It’s not just jazz: there’s conversations, there’s just ordinary things that Smith recorded, and you get a glimpse of what life was like in the middle of Manhattan in this rundown building,” Stephenson said.
The book has a particular focus on the idea of life as it was really lived by poor musicians and the people who surrounded them, at a specific time in American history—a quality that’s unusual for a work of its type. In fact, Stephenson identifies some of The Jazz Loft Project’s aims with a different type of work entirely.
“Where you get that is novels,” he said. “Novels give you that insight into ordinary life, and that’s really the greatest contribution that novelists make.... This project gives you a glimpse of that in non-fiction. It’s not normal.”
Stephenson’s work, and that of his team, has consisted primarily of two activities, both designed to illuminate as clearly as possible what happened at and who frequented Smith’s loft.
First, there is the listening. The initial challenge was to turn the recordings made by Smith into CDs Stephenson and his team could archive and listen to. This required them to raise half a million dollars, a “long, arduous process” that required multiple grant submissions and a handful of benefactors. Since then—and now, and well into the future—the CDs need to be heard, and this task mostly falls onto Center for Documentary Studies research associate Dan Partridge.
Partridge has been at it now for six-and-a-half years. Out of the 5,089 disks contained in two substantial filing cabinets in his office, he estimates they’ve listened to about two-thirds. Though he said that someone had already marked the disks that supposedly contained music, there are surprises.
“We’re still stumbling on music,” Partridge said. “I’ll be listening to street noise or a recording of the radio and then there’ll be a jam session.”
The second part of Stephenson’s research is what he calls, “the real honor and privilege of a lifetime.” This is the opportunity to interview those who made up the living, breathing part of the loft’s history, the people whose voices are preserved on those recordings and whose improvisations Partridge keeps discovering. In addition to the musicians, Stephenson spoke with family members, photography students, associates of Smith and anyone else who might’ve happened to pass through the loft between 1957 and 1965, the years Smith lived there.
This is Stephenson’s favorite part of the project. He’s talked to some by phone and others in person, having traveled to New York 91 times since the effort’s commencement. And already, it’s been more fruitful than one could ever hope for.
“I’ve generated from these interviews enough material as a writer to last me the rest of my life,” he said.
But by no means are musicians always the best source of anecdotes.
“I think one of the frontiers of jazz history is interviewing family members,” Stephenson said. “A lot of the musicians are dead, but they still have families. And a lot of those family members, particularly the spouses, have clearer, deeper memories than the musicians themselves.”
It is from these countless hours of research into the personalities and sounds of Smith’s loft, combined with his photographs, that The Jazz Loft Project has been culled. The book, Stephenson’s third on Smith, is only one part of the entire Project, which also includes the aforementioned Web site, a traveling exhibit and a ten-part radio series on National Public Radio. And although this work does have an academic, intellectual bent, he thinks of it as something more than that, something different.
“Jazz history is told from the point of view of what happened in the clubs and the studios. And there are thousands of recordings from clubs and studios,” Stephenson said. “But for every hour spent on a stage or in a studio, there are probably a thousand, a million hours that were spent by jazz musicians in places like this loft. You never get to hear that, you never get to see that. So that’s what this project offers.”
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