"Music In All Things: W. Eugene Smith And The Jazz Loft"

[ghost of miles]

On a recent Night Lights show historian Sam Stephenson joined me to talk about photographer W. Eugene Smith and the so-called "jazz loft," the building at 28th St and Sixth Avenue in New York City that served as a home, haunt, and jam-session space for jazz musicians and other artists in the 1950s and 60s:

Music In All Things: W. Eugene Smith And The Jazz Loft

The show includes music recorded at the loft by both Smith and painter David X. Young, as well as Thelonious Monk and Hall Overton discussing Monk's upcoming Town Hall concert, excerpts from notable radio programs that Smith listened to and taped, and more.  

Stephenson is the author of a new book about Smith, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View, as well as a previous book about the loft, The Jazz Loft Project.

[medjuck]

Is that music commercially available? 

[Larry Kart]

Maybe he’s changed his spots, or I’m just dead wrong about the guy,  but based on his New Yorker and Paris Review pieces from several years back about Sonny Clark and also on his IMO messed-up “Jazz Loft Project,” I have my doubts about Sam Stephenson. Here are some comments I’ve made about his work here.

 

1) Rather creepy, almost vampire-like-in-tone article [the New Yorker piece or the Paris Review piece on Sonny Clark, I don’t recall which]. I would hope that Stephenson passes on the material on Clark that he has gathered to someone with a different, less neo-hipster-rides-again sensibility. Also IMO, "The Jazz Loft Project" book fell between two stools. One was the desire to capture the jittery, relatively random texture of the life photographer W. Eugene Smith was leading at the time; and this the book did accomplish -- by more or less imitating that texture. But if one were interested in the actual musicians who played at Smith's loft and the actual music they played there -- lots of luck. IIRC, little or no knowledgeable sorting out of the material from that perspective was done.'

 

2) The creepy tone I refer to stems from several things. First, the focus [in those pieces] on whether the body that was buried as Sonny Clark's actually was his. Either it was or it wasn't, and if it wasn't it may well be a sign of social-racial indifference or worse on the part of the relevant authorities, but this is a primary piece of info about Sonny Clark?

 

Second, the fact that Stephenson says he may write a biography of Clark. I know -- not creepy in itself, but given the junky-life associations he understandably leans on, I sense, as I said in my previous post, a neo-hipster orientation in Stephenson, which IIRC was also present in "The Jazz Loft Project," and I almost always find that creepy, though YMMV. I'm thinking he'll give us, if he gets around to it, something along the lines of James Gavin's Chet Baker bio, "Deep In A Dream."

 

Finally, there's something about Stephenson's account here that doesn't quite track; and if so, that gives me a queasy feeling. He says that he heard Clark's music for the first time by chance in a Raleigh, N.C., coffee shop in 1999, but he also says that at this time he had been working on what seems to be what eventually would become "The Jazz Loft Project." Then, some unspecified but apparently short time later, Stephenson discovers that the Sonny Clark whose music he had heard and been moved by in that North Carolina coffee shop not only was a habitue of Smith's jazz loft but also was at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes that Smith captured on tape -- almost dying from an overdose in the company of Lin Halliday.

3) OK -- If and when Stephenson comes out with a Sonnny Clark biography, we shall see, according to our own tastes, of course.

But until shown otherwise, I'll stick by intuition that Stephenson is a somewhat exploitive neo-hipster type. For one thing, can you imagine a not particularly jazz-oriented freelance writer setting out to write, with any hope of getting it published by a major firm like his current publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, a book on Sonny Clark unless it were focused on Clark as an exemplary hardbop junkie? It's the "romance" that's thought to sell, especially the dark, tragic romance (as in the Clark-Halliday episode that W. Eugene Smith captured on tape). That someone also was a brilliant musician is just icing on the cake.

 

4) Maybe I'm pushing this too hard, but that seems to leave us with two options: 1) Stephenson not only had never heard Clark's music until he just happened to encounter it in that N.C. coffee shop in 1999, but he also at that point had never heard of him at all; or 2) he was already aware of Clark's name from his work on the Smith material but hadn't yet bothered to check out his music. Option 1) is not impossible -- it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe -- but unless I've misunderstood what Stephenson says, it seems like a whopping big coincidence to me that he would be entranced by Sonny Clark's music out of the blue and then discover that Clark not only was a habitue of the place he'd been researching but also was at the center of one of the more sadly dramatic events that took place there and that W. Eugene Smith would capture on tape. Option 2) seems a tad more likely and also seems to me to fit the rather loose way the music and the musicians are treated in "The Jazz Loft Project" IMO, but I don't like that sort of looseness; it feels exploitive to me. And if option 2) is the case, what does that do to the N.C. coffee bar story?

 

5) OK -- I've read through "The Jazz Loft Project" again, and one of the first things I noticed was this (p. 5):

 "From [W. Eugene Smith's] photos and tapes and from interviews with participants, we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college."

This struck me as an extremely odd assertion, but how to check it myself, as author Sam Stephenson surely must have done, otherwise why would he say such a thing? I wasn't going to write down every name in the book as I went along -- that way lies madness (though some might think I'm halfway there already) -- but then at the back of the book I saw there was a list of those 589 people, many of whom I had heard of. So with the aid of Google and the like, I began to check and discovered that (conservatively) -- because many of these people I didn't know of, and there was a limit to my patience -- at least 61 one of those 589 people had gone to college. I'll print their names below, but first, why would someone take the trouble to say "only a dozen or so" when they either hadn't checked or had checked in such a  half-assed way that their answer was so wide of the mark? Makes me wonder.

 

Those sometime habitues of the Smith's jazz loft who did go to college:

 

Toshiko Akiyoshi

Mose Allison

David Amram

David Baker

Warren Bernhardt

Donald Byrd

Teddy Charles

Harold Danko

Dennis Russell Davies

Miles Davis

Richard Davis

Bob Dorough

Don Ellis

Bill Evans

Don Friedman

Lee Friedlander

Dave Frishberg

Jimmy Giuffre

John Glasel

Eddie Gomez

Gigi Gryce

Jim Hall

Don Heckman

Nat Hentoff

Joe Hunt

Chuck Israels

David Izenson

Lincoln Kirstein

Nathan Kline

Joel Krosnick

Yusef Lateef

Barbara Lea

Mark Levine

Mark Longo

John Lewis

Alex Leiberman

Teo Macero

Norman Mailer

Ron McClure

Mike Nock

Bob Northern

Hank O'Neal

Hall Overton

Ray Parker

Paul Plummer

Steve Reich

Perry Robinson

Robert Rossen

Roswell Rudd

George Russell

Lalo Schifrin

Gunther Schuller

Peter Serkin

Dick Sudhalter

Steve Swallow

Billy Taylor

Francis Thorne

Mal Waldron

Martin Williams

Phil Woods

Denny Zeitlin

 

P.S. Not every name on the list is a jazz musician, obviously. Some are just people who went by the place.

 

6)

More odd, dubious moments from Sam Stephenson's "The Jazz Loft Project":

p. xii: "Among the tunes played is 'I Got Rhythm,' composed in 1930 by George Gershwin."

 

How helpful.

 

p, xvi: "Among the tunes played is is the 1926 composition by Ray Henderson 'Bye, Bye Blackbird'"...

See above (such instances are present throughout; won't mention them again).

 

p. 3: "Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idosyncratic Steinway B piano...."

"beat-up," yes, but how so "idiosyncratic"?

 

P. 167-8: "Late September 1961

"Suddenly someone on the sidewalk ... whistles a distinctive, piercing call from his lips.

 

"Smith: 'Frank [Amoss], there's a chuck-will's-widow out there.

"There is the whistle call again. It's a near perfect mimic of the chuck-will's-widow, a nocturnal bird ... that inhabits the swamps of the South in the summer. [Reasonable speculation follows that Smith knew this call from his youth in Wichita, Ks.]....

"Frank Amoss: 'That was Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt trying to get in here [i.e. one of them was the whistler].

"Davis and Hewitt were both African-American pianists....Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, and Hewitt in New York. Davis probably whistled the bird call, given his Southern childhood, but Hewitt could have visited Southern relatives as kid, too.

 

[OK, SO FAR — BUT NOW GET THIS, WHICH FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE ABOVE.]

 

Ironically, on September 29 Robert Shelton published in the New York Times the first-ever notice of a young new artist named Bob Dylan, who performed at Gerde's Folk City that same week. Shelton wrote: 'He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.' Surely, Minnesota native Dylan wouldn't have known firsthand the call of a chuck-will's-widow."

 

"Ironically...?" "Surely…”?

Another little gem from "The Jazz Loft Project," p. 231:

 

"But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel."

 

"...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed.

OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

 

[paul secor]

Has anyone read Stephenson's book, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View?

[ghost of miles]

3 hours ago, medjuck said:

Is that music commercially available? 

The music that David X. Young recorded came out around 2000 in this collection:

David X. Young's Jazz Loft

Some of the music that Smith recorded can be heard on the Jazz Loft Project website:

Chaos Manor

I had an email exchange with Michael Cuscuna last year about the loft tapes, but he thinks the audio quality and the loose jam-session content might not make for a viable Mosaic set.  I don't think there are currently plans by anybody else to commercially release the music either.  

 

2 hours ago, paul secor said:

Has anyone read Stephenson's book, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View?

Yes, and he chose a more indirect biographical approach that may not please all readers.  (He tlalks a little bit about it near the end of the Night Lights program.)  Anybody with an interest in Smith would still enjoy it, I think.

[ghost of miles]

I remember your previous comments, Larry, and I’ll start with a full-disclosure admission that I may not be completely dispassionate here, given that in the past year I’ve not only become good friends with Stephenson; he’s now my neighbor.  (His wife is at IU on a two-year fellowship, and they moved into the long-vacant house that borders my side-yard, so I can actually see his desk lamp from my desk when I look out my window.)  So while this extended attack on Stephenson upsets me, I’ll do my best to respond to it in an objective manner.

 

Maybe he’s changed his spots, or I’m just dead wrong about the guy,  but based on his New Yorker and Paris Review pieces from several years back about Sonny Clark and also on his IMO messed-up “Jazz Loft Project,” I have my doubts about Sam Stephenson. Here are some comments I’ve made about his work here.

 

 

 

1) Rather creepy, almost vampire-like-in-tone article [the New Yorker piece or the Paris Review piece on Sonny Clark, I don’t recall which]. I would hope that Stephenson passes on the material on Clark that he has gathered to someone with a different, less neo-hipster-rides-again sensibility. Also IMO, "The Jazz Loft Project" book fell between two stools. One was the desire to capture the jittery, relatively random texture of the life photographer W. Eugene Smith was leading at the time; and this the book did accomplish -- by more or less imitating that texture. But if one were interested in the actual musicians who played at Smith's loft and the actual music they played there -- lots of luck. IIRC, little or no knowledgeable sorting out of the material from that perspective was done.'

Recreating the texture of the loft struck me as THE overreaching purpose of the book--it was a book about a place where jazz, among other things was made.  IIRC there is a fair amount of talk about the musicians and the music in there, but certainly much more material available on the website that Stephenson and others put together:

The Jazz Loft Project

Hardly the work of a "neo-hipster."

 

2) The creepy tone I refer to stems from several things. First, the focus [in those pieces] on whether the body that was buried as Sonny Clark's actually was his. Either it was or it wasn't, and if it wasn't it may well be a sign of social-racial indifference or worse on the part of the relevant authorities, but this is a primary piece of info about Sonny Clark?

 

I’d say it’s a pretty sad commentary on the fate/status of brilliant musicians like Clark in that era, yes. 

 

Second, the fact that Stephenson says he may write a biography of Clark. I know -- not creepy in itself, but given the junky-life associations he understandably leans on, I sense, as I said in my previous post, a neo-hipster orientation in Stephenson, which IIRC was also present in "The Jazz Loft Project," and I almost always find that creepy, though YMMV. I'm thinking he'll give us, if he gets around to it, something along the lines of James Gavin's Chet Baker bio, "Deep In A Dream."

 

Not sure what gives with the obsessive, NKVD-like drive to identify “neo-hipsters”. Also, I don’t know how on earth anybody would write about Chet Baker, or many other musicians of this era, without drugs being a part of the narrative.  The life of heroin addicts IS creepy and disturbing, and this particular jazz generation was devastated by it.  I know you’re driving at something different here, accusing Stephenson of taking some sort of voyeuristic, sensationalistic interest, which I don’t get at all, and didn’t get from Gavin’s book, either.  I actually wish somebody would write MORE extensively about the impact of drugs on the 1940s/50s/60s jazz generation, given how strong that impact was.  Not because I think it’s “darkly romantic,” but because ignoring or sidelining it is false history.

 

Finally, there's something about Stephenson's account here that doesn't quite track; and if so, that gives me a queasy feeling. He says that he heard Clark's music for the first time by chance in a Raleigh, N.C., coffee shop in 1999, but he also says that at this time he had been working on what seems to be what eventually would become "The Jazz Loft Project." Then, some unspecified but apparently short time later, Stephenson discovers that the Sonny Clark whose music he had heard and been moved by in that North Carolina coffee shop not only was a habitue of Smith's jazz loft but also was at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes that Smith captured on tape -- almost dying from an overdose in the company of Lin Halliday.

 

3) OK -- If and when Stephenson comes out with a Sonnny Clark biography, we shall see, according to our own tastes, of course.

 

But until shown otherwise, I'll stick by intuition that Stephenson is a somewhat exploitive neo-hipster type. For one thing, can you imagine a not particularly jazz-oriented freelance writer setting out to write, with any hope of getting it published by a major firm like his current publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, a book on Sonny Clark unless it were focused on Clark as an exemplary hardbop junkie? It's the "romance" that's thought to sell, especially the dark, tragic romance (as in the Clark-Halliday episode that W. Eugene Smith captured on tape). That someone also was a brilliant musician is just icing on the cake.

 

 

 

4) Maybe I'm pushing this too hard, but that seems to leave us with two options: 1) Stephenson not only had never heard Clark's music until he just happened to encounter it in that N.C. coffee shop in 1999, but he also at that point had never heard of him at all; or 2) he was already aware of Clark's name from his work on the Smith material but hadn't yet bothered to check out his music. Option 1) is not impossible -- it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe -- but unless I've misunderstood what Stephenson says, it seems like a whopping big coincidence to me that he would be entranced by Sonny Clark's music out of the blue and then discover that Clark not only was a habitue of the place he'd been researching but also was at the center of one of the more sadly dramatic events that took place there and that W. Eugene Smith would capture on tape. Option 2) seems a tad more likely and also seems to me to fit the rather loose way the music and the musicians are treated in "The Jazz Loft Project" IMO, but I don't like that sort of looseness; it feels exploitive to me. And if option 2) is the case, what does that do to the N.C. coffee bar story?

 

Again, I don’t get this rather jazz-NKVD approach.  Stephenson talks in the program about how he started writing about Smith (he’s spent 20 years researching and working on these two books—pretty arduous effort for an alleged “neo-hipster”) in 1997.  The Smith archives are huge.  We’re talking more than 4000 hours of recordings, many thousands of photographs, hundreds and hundres of people who passed through this space… this was a massive undertaking.  Stephenson had to hire a fulltime assistant for seven years to help him sort through all of the material. There’s nothing “suspicious” about Stephenson’s not having heard Clark until 1999 and then discovering that he was also one of the artists who spent time in the loft… the book wasn’t even published until 2009.

 

 

 

5) OK -- I've read through "The Jazz Loft Project" again, and one of the first things I noticed was this (p. 5):

 

 "From [W. Eugene Smith's] photos and tapes and from interviews with participants, we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college."

 

This struck me as an extremely odd assertion, but how to check it myself, as author Sam Stephenson surely must have done, otherwise why would he say such a thing? I wasn't going to write down every name in the book as I went along -- that way lies madness (though some might think I'm halfway there already) -- but then at the back of the book I saw there was a list of those 589 people, many of whom I had heard of. So with the aid of Google and the like, I began to check and discovered that (conservatively) -- because many of these people I didn't know of, and there was a limit to my patience -- at least 61 one of those 589 people had gone to college. I'll print their names below, but first, why would someone take the trouble to say "only a dozen or so" when they either hadn't checked or had checked in such a  half-assed way that their answer was so wide of the mark? Makes me wonder.

 

 

 

Those sometime habitues of the Smith's jazz loft who did go to college:

 

 

 

Toshiko Akiyoshi

 

Mose Allison

 

David Amram

 

David Baker

 

Warren Bernhardt

 

Donald Byrd

 

Teddy Charles

 

Harold Danko

 

Dennis Russell Davies

 

Miles Davis

 

Richard Davis

 

Bob Dorough

 

Don Ellis

 

Bill Evans

 

Don Friedman

 

Lee Friedlander

 

Dave Frishberg

 

Jimmy Giuffre

 

John Glasel

 

Eddie Gomez

 

Gigi Gryce

 

Jim Hall

 

Don Heckman

 

Nat Hentoff

 

Joe Hunt

 

Chuck Israels

 

David Izenson

 

Lincoln Kirstein

 

Nathan Kline

 

Joel Krosnick

 

Yusef Lateef

 

Barbara Lea

 

Mark Levine

 

Mark Longo

 

John Lewis

 

Alex Leiberman

 

Teo Macero

 

Norman Mailer

 

Ron McClure

 

Mike Nock

 

Bob Northern

 

Hank O'Neal

 

Hall Overton

 

Ray Parker

 

Paul Plummer

 

Steve Reich

 

Perry Robinson

 

Robert Rossen

 

Roswell Rudd

 

George Russell

 

Lalo Schifrin

 

Gunther Schuller

 

Peter Serkin

 

Dick Sudhalter

 

Steve Swallow

 

Billy Taylor

 

Francis Thorne

 

Mal Waldron

 

Martin Williams

 

Phil Woods

 

Denny Zeitlin

 

 

 

P.S. Not every name on the list is a jazz musician, obviously. Some are just people who went by the place.

 

 

 

I don’t have the book at my office so can’t check the context of the assertion, but I’ll grant that it definitely seems off.  If the book were riddled with such assertions or observations, that would be problematic.  I don’t recall it being that way.  If somebody were to compile a list of numerous such instances, it might invalidate the overall work to some degree, though even then I’d still argue that Stephenson and those who assisted him did invaluable work in reconstructing this world.  It was a rare chance—mostly because of Smith’s manic penchant for documentation—to mine a deep set of materials that allow us to reimagine a time and place—a rather dilapidated loft in mid-20^th-century America—that now seems culturally significant.

 

 

 

6)

 

More odd, dubious moments from Sam Stephenson's "The Jazz Loft Project":

 

p. xii: "Among the tunes played is 'I Got Rhythm,' composed in 1930 by George Gershwin."

 

 

 

How helpful.

 

 

 

p, xvi: "Among the tunes played is is the 1926 composition by Ray Henderson 'Bye, Bye Blackbird'"...

 

See above (such instances are present throughout; won't mention them again).

 

 

 

The book was written for a non-jazz-specialist audience, not the Organissimo board or Mike Fitzgerald’s jazz-research listserv (though I’m sure Stephenson wanted that audience to enjoy it as well), so I don’t understand why identifying the names of the tunes and their composer/date origin is problematic.  Also, this hardly seems to jibe with the earlier critique that the book ignores the musical aspects of the loft.

 

 

 

p. 3: "Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idosyncratic Steinway B piano...."

 

"beat-up," yes, but how so "idiosyncratic"?

 

 

 

P. 167-8: "Late September 1961

 

"Suddenly someone on the sidewalk ... whistles a distinctive, piercing call from his lips.

 

 

 

"Smith: 'Frank [Amoss], there's a chuck-will's-widow out there.

 

"There is the whistle call again. It's a near perfect mimic of the chuck-will's-widow, a nocturnal bird ... that inhabits the swamps of the South in the summer. [Reasonable speculation follows that Smith knew this call from his youth in Wichita, Ks.]....

 

"Frank Amoss: 'That was Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt trying to get in here [i.e. one of them was the whistler].

 

"Davis and Hewitt were both African-American pianists....Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, and Hewitt in New York. Davis probably whistled the bird call, given his Southern childhood, but Hewitt could have visited Southern relatives as kid, too.

 

 

 

[OK, SO FAR — BUT NOW GET THIS, WHICH FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE ABOVE.]

 

 

 

Ironically, on September 29 Robert Shelton published in the New York Times the first-ever notice of a young new artist named Bob Dylan, who performed at Gerde's Folk City that same week. Shelton wrote: 'He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.' Surely, Minnesota native Dylan wouldn't have known firsthand the call of a chuck-will's-widow."

 

 

 

"Ironically...?" "Surely…”?

 

Another little gem from "The Jazz Loft Project," p. 231:

 

 

 

"But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel."

 

 

 

"...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed.

 

Pretty much the context of the times, wasn’t it?  You lived it, I didn’t, so I should defer to you, but writers like Yates, Cheever and Updike lived it too and presented an atmosphere in their then-contemporary stories that doesn’t sound at all afar from what Stephenson’s describing here.

 

OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

 

Nice snarky remark bordering on a personal/character attack, and completely off the mark at that. 

 

OTOH Sam and I did go down to our local record store last week on Black Friday to wait in line an hour and a half before they opened, in order to buy the two copies they’d ordered of the Sonny Clark 1960 Time Sessions LP reissue… pretty damned neo-hipsterish, eh?    Nothing to do with love of Clark’s music, of course… we just wanted to be the 50-year-old “cool kids.”   Ben Ratliff cites Stephenson twice in his new liner notes for that Clark LP, fwiw, but maybe he's just another gullible "neo-hipster."

 

 

Edited December 4, 2017 by ghost of miles

[medjuck]

IIRC I liked the book a lot.  As to co-incidence: Last summer I read Zadie Smith's book "Swingtime" wherein I first read the name Jeni LeGon  who, along with Fats Waller and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, is in the great film number "Living in a Great Big Way"   which I have seen many times never knowing the female  dancer's name. A few days after I finished the book I got an e-mail from David Palmquist in which he wrote about his late friend Jeni LeGon.  

Now I don't believe in anything except the law of averages but shit like this keeps happening. 

[Larry Kart]

8 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

I remember your previous comments, Larry, and I’ll start with a full-disclosure admission that I may not be completely dispassionate here, given that in the past year I’ve not only become good friends with Stephenson; he’s now my neighbor.  (His wife is at IU on a two-year fellowship, and they moved into the long-vacant house that borders my side-yard, so I can actually see his desk lamp from my desk when I look out my window.)  So while this extended attack on Stephenson upsets me, I’ll do my best to respond to it in an objective manner.

 

Maybe he’s changed his spots, or I’m just dead wrong about the guy,  but based on his New Yorker and Paris Review pieces from several years back about Sonny Clark and also on his IMO messed-up “Jazz Loft Project,” I have my doubts about Sam Stephenson. Here are some comments I’ve made about his work here.

 

 

 

1) Rather creepy, almost vampire-like-in-tone article [the New Yorker piece or the Paris Review piece on Sonny Clark, I don’t recall which]. I would hope that Stephenson passes on the material on Clark that he has gathered to someone with a different, less neo-hipster-rides-again sensibility. Also IMO, "The Jazz Loft Project" book fell between two stools. One was the desire to capture the jittery, relatively random texture of the life photographer W. Eugene Smith was leading at the time; and this the book did accomplish -- by more or less imitating that texture. But if one were interested in the actual musicians who played at Smith's loft and the actual music they played there -- lots of luck. IIRC, little or no knowledgeable sorting out of the material from that perspective was done.'

Recreating the texture of the loft struck me as THE overreaching purpose of the book--it was a book about a place where jazz, among other things was made.  IIRC there is a fair amount of talk about the musicians and the music in there, but certainly much more material available on the website that Stephenson and others put together:

The Jazz Loft Project

Hardly the work of a "neo-hipster."

 

2) The creepy tone I refer to stems from several things. First, the focus [in those pieces] on whether the body that was buried as Sonny Clark's actually was his. Either it was or it wasn't, and if it wasn't it may well be a sign of social-racial indifference or worse on the part of the relevant authorities, but this is a primary piece of info about Sonny Clark?

 

I’d say it’s a pretty sad commentary on the fate/status of brilliant musicians like Clark in that era, yes. 

 

Second, the fact that Stephenson says he may write a biography of Clark. I know -- not creepy in itself, but given the junky-life associations he understandably leans on, I sense, as I said in my previous post, a neo-hipster orientation in Stephenson, which IIRC was also present in "The Jazz Loft Project," and I almost always find that creepy, though YMMV. I'm thinking he'll give us, if he gets around to it, something along the lines of James Gavin's Chet Baker bio, "Deep In A Dream."

 

Not sure what gives with the obsessive, NKVD-like drive to identify “neo-hipsters”. Also, I don’t know how on earth anybody would write about Chet Baker, or many other musicians of this era, without drugs being a part of the narrative.  The life of heroin addicts IS creepy and disturbing, and this particular jazz generation was devastated by it.  I know you’re driving at something different here, accusing Stephenson of taking some sort of voyeuristic, sensationalistic interest, which I don’t get at all, and didn’t get from Gavin’s book, either.  I actually wish somebody would write MORE extensively about the impact of drugs on the 1940s/50s/60s jazz generation, given how strong that impact was.  Not because I think it’s “darkly romantic,” but because ignoring or sidelining it is false history.

 

LK: Among the other things I didn't like about "Deep in a Dream" is that Gavin  repeats the  admittedly colorful but false story of how Baker died (see Jeoren de Valk's Baker biography for the facts --  Baker was not murdered/pushed out of that window but fell to his death after opening the window and losing his balance, probably because he was high). Further, Gavin gave me the feeling that he was not much of/or even at all a jazz person; he gets so many nagging details about the jazz milieu of the time wrong that I'd have re-read the whole book to know where to begin, and I chucked it way back when. (Let me see if I can retrieve some of that stuff.) Finally, IIRC Gavin's initial take on Baker, bouncing off of those gorgeously romantic William Claxton photos of him, ia to see Chet as a James Dean-like gay icon. Not that Gavin is making this up or that it's a historically false aspect of Baker's aura, but.... This becomes rather creepily clear when Gavin deals with Bruce Weber, the celebrated advertising photographer who made the Baker bio film "Let's Get Lost." Now Gavin himself is gay -- no secret there, and in one sense so what -- but Weber is something of a bete noire in the "out" gay community because it is believed there, based on Weber's Calvin Klein underwear ads of young hunks and their packages, and his penchant there and elsewhere for depicting buff preppy young men romping  around in swimming pools with golden retrievers, while Weber OTOH has consistently denied that he himself is gay and that his ads have any such beefcake content. And this understandably pisses off a segment of the gay community -- hey, it would piss me off, too. In any case, the parts of "Deep in a Dream" that are devoted to Weber and his persona and behavior are fueled by such an angrily passionate distaste for the man on Gavin's part that one wonders whether Weber, not Baker, was his true subject. 

Finally, there's something about Stephenson's account here that doesn't quite track; and if so, that gives me a queasy feeling. He says that he heard Clark's music for the first time by chance in a Raleigh, N.C., coffee shop in 1999, but he also says that at this time he had been working on what seems to be what eventually would become "The Jazz Loft Project." Then, some unspecified but apparently short time later, Stephenson discovers that the Sonny Clark whose music he had heard and been moved by in that North Carolina coffee shop not only was a habitue of Smith's jazz loft but also was at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes that Smith captured on tape -- almost dying from an overdose in the company of Lin Halliday.

 

3) OK -- If and when Stephenson comes out with a Sonnny Clark biography, we shall see, according to our own tastes, of course.

 

But until shown otherwise, I'll stick by intuition that Stephenson is a somewhat exploitive neo-hipster type. For one thing, can you imagine a not particularly jazz-oriented freelance writer setting out to write, with any hope of getting it published by a major firm like his current publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, a book on Sonny Clark unless it were focused on Clark as an exemplary hardbop junkie? It's the "romance" that's thought to sell, especially the dark, tragic romance (as in the Clark-Halliday episode that W. Eugene Smith captured on tape). That someone also was a brilliant musician is just icing on the cake.

 

 

 

4) Maybe I'm pushing this too hard, but that seems to leave us with two options: 1) Stephenson not only had never heard Clark's music until he just happened to encounter it in that N.C. coffee shop in 1999, but he also at that point had never heard of him at all; or 2) he was already aware of Clark's name from his work on the Smith material but hadn't yet bothered to check out his music. Option 1) is not impossible -- it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe -- but unless I've misunderstood what Stephenson says, it seems like a whopping big coincidence to me that he would be entranced by Sonny Clark's music out of the blue and then discover that Clark not only was a habitue of the place he'd been researching but also was at the center of one of the more sadly dramatic events that took place there and that W. Eugene Smith would capture on tape. Option 2) seems a tad more likely and also seems to me to fit the rather loose way the music and the musicians are treated in "The Jazz Loft Project" IMO, but I don't like that sort of looseness; it feels exploitive to me. And if option 2) is the case, what does that do to the N.C. coffee bar story?

 

Again, I don’t get this rather jazz-NKVD approach.  Stephenson talks in the program about how he started writing about Smith (he’s spent 20 years researching and working on these two books—pretty arduous effort for an alleged “neo-hipster”) in 1997.  The Smith archives are huge.  We’re talking more than 4000 hours of recordings, many thousands of photographs, hundreds and hundres of people who passed through this space… this was a massive undertaking.  Stephenson had to hire a fulltime assistant for seven years to help him sort through all of the material. There’s nothing “suspicious” about Stephenson’s not having heard Clark until 1999 and then discovering that he was also one of the artists who spent time in the loft… the book wasn’t even published until 2009.

LK: I'll have to re-read those Clark pieces (if I can still find them) and get back to you on that. Maybe what I found anomalous there instead makes perfectly good sense, but that was not my impression.

 

 

5) OK -- I've read through "The Jazz Loft Project" again, and one of the first things I noticed was this (p. 5):

 

 "From [W. Eugene Smith's] photos and tapes and from interviews with participants, we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college."

 

This struck me as an extremely odd assertion, but how to check it myself, as author Sam Stephenson surely must have done, otherwise why would he say such a thing? I wasn't going to write down every name in the book as I went along -- that way lies madness (though some might think I'm halfway there already) -- but then at the back of the book I saw there was a list of those 589 people, many of whom I had heard of. So with the aid of Google and the like, I began to check and discovered that (conservatively) -- because many of these people I didn't know of, and there was a limit to my patience -- at least 61 one of those 589 people had gone to college. I'll print their names below, but first, why would someone take the trouble to say "only a dozen or so" when they either hadn't checked or had checked in such a  half-assed way that their answer was so wide of the mark? Makes me wonder.

 

 

 

Those sometime habitues of the Smith's jazz loft who did go to college:

 

 

 

Toshiko Akiyoshi

 

Mose Allison

 

David Amram

 

David Baker

 

Warren Bernhardt

 

Donald Byrd

 

Teddy Charles

 

Harold Danko

 

Dennis Russell Davies

 

Miles Davis

 

Richard Davis

 

Bob Dorough

 

Don Ellis

 

Bill Evans

 

Don Friedman

 

Lee Friedlander

 

Dave Frishberg

 

Jimmy Giuffre

 

John Glasel

 

Eddie Gomez

 

Gigi Gryce

 

Jim Hall

 

Don Heckman

 

Nat Hentoff

 

Joe Hunt

 

Chuck Israels

 

David Izenson

 

Lincoln Kirstein

 

Nathan Kline

 

Joel Krosnick

 

Yusef Lateef

 

Barbara Lea

 

Mark Levine

 

Mark Longo

 

John Lewis

 

Alex Leiberman

 

Teo Macero

 

Norman Mailer

 

Ron McClure

 

Mike Nock

 

Bob Northern

 

Hank O'Neal

 

Hall Overton

 

Ray Parker

 

Paul Plummer

 

Steve Reich

 

Perry Robinson

 

Robert Rossen

 

Roswell Rudd

 

George Russell

 

Lalo Schifrin

 

Gunther Schuller

 

Peter Serkin

 

Dick Sudhalter

 

Steve Swallow

 

Billy Taylor

 

Francis Thorne

 

Mal Waldron

 

Martin Williams

 

Phil Woods

 

Denny Zeitlin

 

 

 

P.S. Not every name on the list is a jazz musician, obviously. Some are just people who went by the place.

 

 

 

I don’t have the book at my office so can’t check the context of the assertion, but I’ll grant that it definitely seems off.  If the book were riddled with such assertions or observations, that would be problematic.  I don’t recall it being that way.  If somebody were to compile a list of numerous such instances, it might invalidate the overall work to some degree, though even then I’d still argue that Stephenson and those who assisted him did invaluable work in reconstructing this world.  It was a rare chance—mostly because of Smith’s manic penchant for documentation—to mine a deep set of materials that allow us to reimagine a time and place—a rather dilapidated loft in mid-20^th-century America—that now seems culturally significant.

LK: I would like to get Stephenson's account of why he said: "...we can document 589 people ... who passed through the dank stairwell of this building in the 1950s and 1960s.... From all walks of life all over the map, only a dozen or so of those people went to college." In particular, I wonder what point he was trying to make by citing this falsehood ("we can DOCUMENT?"), which seemed unlikely to me right off and that I was able to determine was untrue in  just a few minutes on the Internet.  Was he trying to  suggest that the Jazz Loft crowd  was a subculture of outsiders who, among other things, either had no truck with institutions of higher learning or who had found that such institutions would have no truck with them? Or does he think that if you went to college back in  those days you couldn't have been an "outsider" of some sort at some times or in some respects? What?

An  added problem I have with this passage is its implicit social falsity, its failure to grasp how societies in their shaggily various strains actually work. It would be convenient if, in dealing with what in this case is a not unknowable chunk of the fairly recent past, we could neatly separate the "sheep" from the "goats" and proceed to judge accordingly. That is, as in the passage you quote from down below -- ""But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- a single broad brushstroke or so covers all.

Yes, some jazz clubs of the time were a drag, some clubowners were s.o.b.s or worse, and African-American musicians were often jerked around. But "hellholes"? And "the so-called golden age" of jazz"? As  the distraught Vegas comic puts it in Lenny Bruce's "Palladium" routine, "Why don't you get a nail and do it up right?"

 

6)

 

More odd, dubious moments from Sam Stephenson's "The Jazz Loft Project":

 

p. xii: "Among the tunes played is 'I Got Rhythm,' composed in 1930 by George Gershwin."

 

 

 

How helpful.

 

 

 

p, xvi: "Among the tunes played is is the 1926 composition by Ray Henderson 'Bye, Bye Blackbird'"...

 

See above (such instances are present throughout; won't mention them again).

 

 

 

The book was written for a non-jazz-specialist audience, not the Organissimo board or Mike Fitzgerald’s jazz-research listserv (though I’m sure Stephenson wanted that audience to enjoy it as well), so I don’t understand why identifying the names of the tunes and their composer/date origin is problematic.  Also, this hardly seems to jibe with the earlier critique that the book ignores the musical aspects of the loft.

LK: It's a matter of tone and/or ear. I understand that the book was trying to serve several audiences, but there's a way to serve them all, and IMO this isn't it. E.g. the first reference should have been simply ""Among the tunes played is Gershwin's 'I Got Rhythm'." Everybody is informed; no one feels like he's being treated as a rube or being addressed by one.

 

 

p. 3: "Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idosyncratic Steinway B piano...."

 

"beat-up," yes, but how so "idiosyncratic"?

 

 

 

P. 167-8: "Late September 1961

 

"Suddenly someone on the sidewalk ... whistles a distinctive, piercing call from his lips.

 

 

 

"Smith: 'Frank [Amoss], there's a chuck-will's-widow out there.

 

"There is the whistle call again. It's a near perfect mimic of the chuck-will's-widow, a nocturnal bird ... that inhabits the swamps of the South in the summer. [Reasonable speculation follows that Smith knew this call from his youth in Wichita, Ks.]....

 

"Frank Amoss: 'That was Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt trying to get in here [i.e. one of them was the whistler].

 

"Davis and Hewitt were both African-American pianists....Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, and Hewitt in New York. Davis probably whistled the bird call, given his Southern childhood, but Hewitt could have visited Southern relatives as kid, too.

 

 

 

[OK, SO FAR — BUT NOW GET THIS, WHICH FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE ABOVE.]

 

 

 

Ironically, on September 29 Robert Shelton published in the New York Times the first-ever notice of a young new artist named Bob Dylan, who performed at Gerde's Folk City that same week. Shelton wrote: 'He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.' Surely, Minnesota native Dylan wouldn't have known firsthand the call of a chuck-will's-widow."

 

 

 

"Ironically...?" "Surely…”?

 

Another little gem from "The Jazz Loft Project," p. 231:

 

 

 

"But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel."

 

 

 

"...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed.

 

Pretty much the context of the times, wasn’t it?  You lived it, I didn’t, so I should defer to you, but writers like Yates, Cheever and Updike lived it too and presented an atmosphere in their then-contemporary stories that doesn’t sound at all afar from what Stephenson’s describing here.

LK: No -- not pretty much the make up of the audience at, say, the Five Spot, which would pretty much overlap the sort of people who paid visits to Smith's loft. And I can't imagine the characters from those authors' stories showing up at either place. 

 

OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

 

Nice snarky remark bordering on a personal/character attack, and completely off the mark at that. 

LK: All I know of Stephenson is what he wrote in those articles about Sonny Clark and the "Jazz Loft" book -- all of which seemed flawed to me in ways I found disturbing. If all you know of me is what I've written, and you find it disturbingly wrongheaded, I would expect you or anyone else to come at me in an implicitly personal manner because I was the person responsible. 

OTOH Sam and I did go down to our local record store last week on Black Friday to wait in line an hour and a half before they opened, in order to buy the two copies they’d ordered of the Sonny Clark 1960 Time Sessions LP reissue… pretty damned neo-hipsterish, eh?    Nothing to do with love of Clark’s music, of course… we just wanted to be the 50-year-old “cool kids.”   Ben Ratliff cites Stephenson twice in his new liner notes for that Clark LP, fwiw, but maybe he's just another gullible "neo-hipster."

LK: Ratliff ? Yup, him too. You -- not at all, though. 

 

 

 

[Larry Kart]

OK, here is the stopped-me-in-my-tracks anomaly in Stephenson's Paris Review piece about Sonny Clark:

"Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever at home. I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier.... 

"My wife, Laurie Cochenour, grew up in Elizabeth Township, about seven miles from Herminie No. 2. [Clark's home town.] For the past decade, I’ve done a bit of research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me."

Help me out here. Stephenson has done "research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her [his wife's] family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me" -- and this chance episode in that Raleigh coffee shop is "the first time" (my emphasis] Stephenson has "noticed" Clark's actual piano playing? Again, this doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe, but to me it is freaking strange that a) one would have  been working on a  book "about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians" and b) have been doing some "research" on one of those jazz musicians "for the past decade," not have taken the trouble to listen to some of that musician's music, which in 1999 was not at all hard to come by. What am I not getting about this?

[Larry Kart]

More on Gavin's Chet Baker biography, taken from something I posted elsewhere at the time:

Gavin did lots of interviews with lots of interesting people (e.g. Russ Freeman, Jack Sheldon, 
Carson Smith, Bob Zieff etc.) with interesting points of view who 
were around at the time and know where the bodies are buried. 
The problem is that Gavin, while far from the worst of the 
"pathographer" breed, doesn't have the grounding to 
sort through all the good stuff he has without creating an air of 
semi-pervasive dubiousness and introducing lots of inadvertent 
"wised up" howlers -- e.g. a reference to the Miles Davis of the 
Birth of the Cool band supposedly perfecting "the ethereal sound 
of cool" while "in the throes of addiction." No, Miles was not an addict at the time.)

The book is full of such 
stuff, most of it arising because, again, Gavin seems not to be a jazz 
person but someone who was drawn to Baker on a "cultural 
historian" basis--and that may be putting it kindly. Here's one 
odd little example among many: on p. 112, Gavin writes of pianist 
Dick Twardzik: "Soon he was a junkie, and joined with [drummer 
Peter] Littman, the rising young saxophonist Serge Chaloff, and 
other buddies in a fraternal ritual of getting high, then playing 
jazz." No date is given, but in 1951, when Twardzik first worked 
with Chaloff in Boston, the pianist was a talented 20-year-old 
novice while Chaloff was a 28-year-old poll-winning "star" who 
had returned to Boston, his hometown, in part to recover from 
ill-health (mostly the vicissitudes of drug addiction). Also, Chaloff was no longer "rising" but pretty much descending toward his eventual demise. 
Characterizing Chaloff as a "rising young saxophonist" and 
saying that he and Twardzik were "buddies" strikes me as more 
than a little tone-deaf; no one who knew who Serge Chaloff 
was before he started to work on this book could have said what Gavin did there. 

It's as though Gavin had written in his previous book about the 
New York cabaret scene: "Liza Minnelli admired 
the rising young singer Mabel Mercer." Minnelli might 
have admired Mercer, but Mercer had "arrived" long before 
Minnelli was old enough to be fond of anyone other than her dolly. (Also--and this just may be 
me--the phrase "a fraternal ritual of getting high, then playing 
jazz" inadvertently brings to mind a bad movie of the 
'50s: "Hey, fellas, I know what -- let's get high, then play jazz!")

If you bring enough context to "Deep in a Dream," you may be 
able to sort things out yourself, but don't trust Gavin to do it for 
you or to do it accurately. To return to that Serge Chaloff example, 
if I were writing a serious work on Figure Y or subject X and 
something or someone came up in relation to my main topic that 
was unfamiliar to me (as Chaloff seemingly was to Gavin), I 
hope I would try to acquire however much context I needed to say 
something sensible at that point rather than something that's not 
only "off" or just plain wrong but also probably 
stems from, a need to display some would-be "wised up" 
attitude. But then that's the sort of book that Gavin's publisher 
clearly wanted from him, not that he was unwilling to supply it.

 

 

[ghost of miles]

5 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

OK, here is the stopped-me-in-my-tracks anomaly in Stephenson's Paris Review piece about Sonny Clark:

"Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever at home. I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier.... 

"My wife, Laurie Cochenour, grew up in Elizabeth Township, about seven miles from Herminie No. 2. [Clark's home town.] For the past decade, I’ve done a bit of research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me."

Help me out here. Stephenson has done "research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her [his wife's] family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me" -- and this chance episode in that Raleigh coffee shop is "the first time" (my emphasis] Stephenson has "noticed" Clark's actual piano playing? Again, this doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe, but to me it is freaking strange that a) one would have  been working on a  book "about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians" and b) have been doing some "research" on one of those jazz musicians "for the past decade," not have taken the trouble to listen to some of that musician's music, which in 1999 was not at all hard to come by. What am I not getting about this?

The article was published in 2011.  "For the past decade" is referring to that perspective.  Stephenson first heard Clark about two years before that, in the 1999 coffeeshop incident.  That's also around the same time he started really delving into Smith's archives, which ultimately took about ten years to lead to the book The Jazz Loft Project.  

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

The article was published in 2011.  "For the past decade" is referring to that perspective.  Stephenson first heard Clark about two years before that, in the 1999 coffeeshop incident.  That's also around the same time he started really delving into Smith's archives, which ultimately took about ten years to lead to the book The Jazz Loft Project.  

OK -- but the phrase "I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier...." is what threw me; "I was working" clearly referring in 1999, when he went into that coffee shop and heard Clark's music for the first time, while it is "for the past decade"since then he has been working on the Jazz Loft book, and it was at some point during those years he came across the tape Smith had made of Clark's near-death from an overdose.

P.S. I apologize for my misreading/misinterpretation of what in fact was the case, but rereading that piece:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/01/13/sonny-clark/

I don't think that my confusion re: chronology was entirely of my own making.

 

[ghost of miles]

"But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel."

"...posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel." -- well, that's it then; case closed.

 

Pretty much the context of the times, wasn’t it?  You lived it, I didn’t, so I should defer to you, but writers like Yates, Cheever and Updike lived it too and presented an atmosphere in their then-contemporary stories that doesn’t sound at all afar from what Stephenson’s describing here.

LK: No -- not pretty much the make up of the audience at, say, the Five Spot, which would pretty much overlap the sort of people who paid visits to Smith's loft. And I can't imagine the characters from those authors' stories showing up at either place. 

DBJ: From what I know of mid-20th-century jazz nightclubs in NYC--and I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to--the Five Spot was frequented mainly by writers (Mailer, Baldwin, Dan Wakefield--I have talked with Wakefield about his time there), painters like Larry Rivers, jazz artists, and a fair # of 1950s "original" hipsters, but it doesn't sound typical of clubs of the time--more like an insider kind of place.  Even Birdland, judging from media accounts I read while researching the Night Lights show about it, seemed to cater just as much to a non-jazz society crowd as it did to hardcore jazz fans.  Photographs and film footage I've seen of clubs from that era often yield images of clubgoers who would look at home in the Yates/Updike world (granted, yes, those authors' literary characters were more likely to be found at suburban cocktail parties).  Maybe The Apartment is a better reference point for that era and the Manhattanites who frequented jazz clubs for reasons other than a genuine love of jazz, but I think Stephenson's point is simply that "the golden age of jazz" wasn't so golden for a lot of musicians, economically or otherwise, though it did produce a lot of great music.  Smith's loft was a place where those who hung out tended to feel more at home than they did in the jazz club world; certainly that was the case for Ronnie Free, for example.  (Free ended up living there for about three years and according to Sam is on more than 100 hours of the 400 hours of music recorded there.)  The "overly-broad brushstroke" doesn't seem that way to me in the service of what Stephenson's writing about, part of which is why the loft became such a haven in the first place.  

One other clarification re Smith's taping that captures Clark's OD:  Smith was recording practically ALL of the time.  I know you're not saying he was deliberately, coldly taping the incident, but I wanted to make that clear for anybody else reading this.   The incident happens in the background... iirc Smith's talking to somebody else about an unrelated matter, and Lin Halliday and his girlfriend are heard as well trying to help Clark come out of it.  Stephenson told me in our interview that Smith's tapes indicate Clark was "squatting in the loft" throughout the summer of 1961, pretty much living in the stairwell.  Smith was indiscriminately taping life in the loft and that's one of the events subsequenty captured.  One of the reasons the Jazz Loft Project book took so long for Stephenson to finish was the sheer, mountainous amount of material that had to be sorted through, which is why he employed a fulltime assistant for seven years to help him.

[ghost of miles]

LK: OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

 

DBJ: Nice snarky remark bordering on a personal/character attack, and completely off the mark at that. 

LK: All I know of Stephenson is what he wrote in those articles about Sonny Clark and the "Jazz Loft" book -- all of which seemed flawed to me in ways I found disturbing. If all you know of me is what I've written, and you find it disturbingly wrongheaded, I would expect you or anyone else to come at me in an implicitly personal manner because I was the person responsible. 

DBJ:  Well, you're indirectly calling him a "posing hipster" in the above, which around any kind of scholarly or jazz-lover parts strikes me as a rather over-the-top personal characterization, given the connotations of inauthenticity and glib, faux-intellectual airs that label carries.  I suppose the logic flows from that--it seems fair to say that's how you assess Stephenson's writing, and therefore such writing must emanate from that kind of person.  I obviously strongly disagree with the assessment and still don't get approaches like the off-base zeroing-in on Stephenson's coffeeshop experience of Clark's music... it seems like an opinion has been formed about the writer and examples are being sought, sometimes erroneously, to reinforce it.  But I think it's also fundamentally unfair to translate one's opinion of a writer's or artist's work into an evaluation of that writer or artist as a person.  To reverse the equation, just because Miles Davis played a good deal of beautiful, moving music doesn't mean he was a beautiful human being.  

[Larry Kart]

I mentioned the Five Spot not because it was typical but because its habitues and the habitues of the Jazz Loft might have overlapped to some degree. And Max Gordon's Village Vanguard, and Frank Holzfeind's Blue Note and George Marianthal's London House and the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago, George Wein's Storyville in Boston, the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood,  and the Blackhawk, Keystone Korner, and the Jazz Workshop  in San Francisco, and the Half Note,  Bradley's, et. al. in New York were all "hellholes"?

[Larry Kart]

2 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

LK: OTOH, I don't doubt Sam Stephenson's ability to detect a posing hipster at twenty paces.

 

DBJ: Nice snarky remark bordering on a personal/character attack, and completely off the mark at that. 

LK: All I know of Stephenson is what he wrote in those articles about Sonny Clark and the "Jazz Loft" book -- all of which seemed flawed to me in ways I found disturbing. If all you know of me is what I've written, and you find it disturbingly wrongheaded, I would expect you or anyone else to come at me in an implicitly personal manner because I was the person responsible. 

DBJ:  Well, you're indirectly calling him a "posing hipster" in the above, which around any kind of scholarly or jazz-lover parts strikes me as a rather over-the-top personal characterization, given the connotations of inauthenticity and glib, faux-intellectual airs that label carries.  I suppose the logic flows from that--it seems fair to say that's how you assess Stephenson's writing, and therefore such writing must emanate from that kind of person.  I obviously strongly disagree with the assessment and still don't get approaches like the off-base zeroing-in on Stephenson's coffeeshop experience of Clark's music... it seems like an opinion has been formed about the writer and examples are being sought, sometimes erroneously, to reinforce it.  But I think it's also fundamentally unfair to translate one's opinion of a writer's or artist's work into an evaluation of that writer or artist as a person.  To reverse the equation, just because Miles Davis played a good deal of beautiful, moving music doesn't mean he was a beautiful human being.  

I'm sorry, but I thought the "Jazz Loft" book was pretty much a mess for several inter-related reasons: 1) What Smith left behind was a mass of material that was an almost literal mess -- one that, as you say, it took Stephenson a long time to sort out; 2) I think that Stephenson perhaps understandably made a decision that to sort out things beyond a certain point would not be true to the nature of Smith's loft and the kinds of lives that were being lived there, so he left things on the "shaggy" side; and 3)  Smith's own life during that period was itself fairly well, albeit colorfully at times, messed up. The resulting book then was again IMO "shaggy" (if that's right word) to a fault. E.g. because Smith obsessively taped certain radio broadcasts, we are treated IIRC to page after page of those transcripts, which I can't imagine being of much interest other than as a record of what Smith's habits and quirks were. Also, and this is just my opinion, notable though Smith was as a photographer at one time, I don't find much of the work of his that's reproduced in the book to be of high quality. Do you? So for me it's a book that falls between several stools -- the quirky, ramshackle latter-day life of Smith (which I don't find to be a subject of much interest), and the jazz lives that were lived in and the actual music that was made in Smith's loft. Those things do interest me, but reading the book I felt that those things got the short end of the stick, and this I found frustrating. 

P.S. It was Stephenson who rather high-handedly introduced the disparaging term "posing hipsters" -- "The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries." 

[ghost of miles]

We re-aired Music In All Things: W. Eugene Smith And The Jazz Loft last week and it remains archived for online listening.  The slide-show from the original post, unfortunately, has been swallowed up by the new format that IU has forced our station to adopt.

[AllenLowe]

just reading this thread; I am pretty much with Larry, and I have to say that the statement "But those bars [in which jazz musicians played "in the so-called golden age" of jazz] were hellholes, and the musicians, especially the African-American musicians, were jerked around. The clientele for these dingy joints were posing hipsters or disappointed men who hated their bosses and took advantage of their secretaries, like the characters in a Richard Yates novel" is for me a complete disqualifier in terms of being able to read or take seriously anything this guy Stephenson says or writes. Sorry, as I know he is a friend, but that graf represents the worst kind of sociological trendy cultural writing, from liberals who see the music and the culture as symbols rather than art and who think that by spreading this kind of thing they can prove their progressive bonafides. . 

Edited August 22, 2018 by AllenLowe

[ghost of miles]

I have a completely different take on what Sam's doing, and his jazz loft book is one of the most amazing historical documentations of a jazz scene that I've ever encountered.  For me he's good company in a library that includes you and Larry as well.  

[paul secor]

I think that the book is a good documentation of what was a messy scene. I can't imagine a much better job being done, considering the mass of unorganized material that had to be collated.
I also think that the nitpicking that's been posted here has ignored the positive qualities of the book.

[AllenLowe]

well we all make judgements sometimes, absent the full picture:

"A nothing review (that I wasted time reading) about a nothing book (that I won't waste time reading)."

17 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

I have a completely different take on what Sam's doing, and his jazz loft book is one of the most amazing historical documentations of a jazz scene that I've ever encountered.  For me he's good company in a library that includes you and Larry as well.  

I will check it out; turns out he's a Facebook friend. I just wish he would either explain or cut that line. 

[paul secor]

29 minutes ago, AllenLowe said:

well we all make judgements sometimes, absent the full picture:

"A nothing review (that I wasted time reading) about a nothing book (that I won't waste time reading)."

 

I explained my statement further and elaborated later on in that thread.

[AllenLowe]

true, and, Larry was pretty elaborate as well in explaining, in great detail, his statements.