Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2008

Jazz Loft: The Healing Power of What’s Seldom Told

‘Doctor” and “document” come from the same Latin root, “docere,” which means “to heal and make right.” Sam Stephenson ’ 89 wit-nesses the healing power of documentation each time he interviews someone about what life was like at a loft in New York where jazz musicians congregated after hours in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

“There’s something about paying attention to someone that’s a healing quality,” Stephenson said. “That’s what I’ve learned in this project: the transformative possibilities of really caring about someone’s story.”

Stephenson and Dan Partridge ’ 95 bring a fly-on-the-wall perspective to the music, the talent, the culture of the New York jazz scene from a half-century ago through their work on the Jazz Loft Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Stephenson, while working on a book about photographer Eugene Smith, discovered a cache of 1,740 audio tapes that comprised a 4,000-hour soundtrack of life in that time and place. Smith had thoroughly miked the loft where he lived on Sixth Avenue and East 28th Street, recording not only the jazz played by the greats and the not-so-greats, but the conversations, street sounds and the occasional police raid.

The Jazz Loft Project plans a book of
Smith’s photographs, a traveling exhibit that
will include clips from the audio tapes, and

a 10-week radio series co-produced with WNYC public radio.

“The way conventional history works is the most outstanding things are the ones that are documented,” Stephenson said. “In this loft, there are many people who are mediocre musicians who are documented. That tells a side of jazz history that isn’t told a lot.”

Over the past five years, Stephenson and Partridge have tracked down people they heard on the tapes, videotaping the individual stories of how folks from all walks of life, from all parts of the country, came together in an unassuming building in Manhattan. Stephenson began with 134 names he took from the sketchy labels on the tapes when he first found them in a library at the University of Arizona in 1998. He determined who was still alive and how to track them down, one by one. Each find led him to others, unidentified in the tapes but who were regulars at the loft. His list numbers 587, and that won’t be the end.

“The people who are long forgotten
have stories just as compelling as the icons.”

Stephenson wrote an article about the jazz loft for Double Take magazine in 1999. David Logan read it, and in 2001, the Reva & David Logan Foundation in Chicago gave the project its first grant. Other grants followed, enabling Stephenson to devote himself full time to the project, copy the

DAN SEARS ’ 74

Sam Stephenson and Dan Partridge at Duke University.

tapes onto CDs and bring in Partridge.

Partridge, who vets and catalogues the tapes, is the first to hear them. Even though he would like to get through as much of the content as he can before the radio series in 2010,“this very well could be my work for years to come,” Partridge said.“The tapes are so rich, you can’t just rush through them.”

The tapes were made during an important time historically in the U.S., he said, and the culture of the times is reflected in some of the conversations he hears. Even though some of the jazz on the tapes is mediocre compared to the final product that showed up in record stores, Partridge finds it fascinating to hear the musicians learning to play the pieces initially.

Stephen Anderson, assistant professor of jazz studies and composition at UNC, considers a place like the loft to be a jazz laboratory.

“It’s the same as a chemist who does his research,” Anderson said. “A lot of the tunes that are now standard repertoire happened in these clubs. All the exploration is going to happen in places like the loft.”

Students of jazz can learn from what doesn’t make the final cut as much as from listening to the finished version, said Anderson, who recently released another CD by his trio. The jazz loft tapes “would reveal what [the musicians] were doing in the laboratory as opposed to the recording session,” he said.

But for Stephenson, a writer, not a musician, the stories hold more interest than the music. He has pulled some quotes from the oral history interviews he has done and has come up with more than 20,000 words. There is no room for that in the book of photographs, a fact that he is “already torn about,” he said.

“The thing that keeps me going is there are people Smith documented who would have been lost to oblivion,” he said. “You look around you and think, what would be completely forgotten 50 years from now if I didn’t record it? What can I do to record something, to tell people about what would ordinarily be unknown?