Download or read book The Jazz Loft Project written by Sam Stephenson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reissue of an acclaimed collection of images from photographer W. Eugene Smith’s time in a New York City loft among jazz musicians. In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. Here, from 1957 to 1965, he made nearly 40,000 photographs and approximately 4,000 hours of recordings of musicians. Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists, and he turned his documentary impulses away from work on his major Pittsburg photo essay and toward his new surroundings. 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 this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.
Download or read book The Jazz Loft Project written by Sam Stephenson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 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) . . .
Download or read book Gene Smith s Sink written by Sam Stephenson and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith; In an interview with Philippe Halsman, W. Eugene Smith remarked: "I didn't write the rules, why should I follow them?" Famously unabashed, Smith is photography's most celebrated humanist. During his reign as a photo-essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of jazz musicians, disasters, doctors, and midwives revolutionized the role that image-making played in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come. In 1997, lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith's stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson set out to research those who knew him from various angles. In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson revives Smith's life and legacy, merging traditional biography with highly untraditional digressions. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; and Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whom Smith recorded on surreptitious tapes. The result of twenty years of research, Gene Smith's Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer's beguiling legacy and the subjects around him"--
Download or read book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire written by Will Hermes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a group portrait of some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Dylan.
Download or read book Limelight written by Helen Gee and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Loft Jazz written by Michael C. Heller and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.
Download or read book Universal Tonality written by Cisco Bradley and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa via the Carolinas to his childhood in the South Bronx, and illustrates his rise from the 1970s jazz lofts and extended work with pianist Cecil Taylor to the present day. He outlines how Parker’s early influences—Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and writers of the Black Arts Movement—grounded Parker’s aesthetic and musical practice in a commitment to community and the struggle for justice and freedom. Throughout, Bradley foregrounds Parker’s understanding of music, the role of the artist, and the relationship between art, politics, and social transformation. Intimate and capacious, Universal Tonality is the definitive work on Parker’s life and music.
Download or read book W Eugene Smith written by Jim Hughes and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1989 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years in the writing, this probing biography examines the passionate, haunted and brilliant man whose quest for perfection resulted in an unparalleled photographic legacy. Photographs.
Download or read book Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra written by Steven Feld and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinguished scholar Steven Feld shaped the field of the anthropology of sound and music. In this new work, he looks at the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a group of jazz players in Ghana, including some who have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended Coltrane with local instruments and philosophy. He describes their cosmopolitan outlook as an accoustemology, a way of knowing the world through sound. Feld combines memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, telling a story of diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests both American nationalist and Afrocentric narrations of jazz history.
Download or read book Words Without Music A Memoir written by Philip Glass and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award Finalist for the Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing "Reads the way Mr. Glass's compositions sound at their best: propulsive, with a surreptitious emotional undertow." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical music. Yet in Words Without Music, his critically acclaimed memoir, he creates an entirely new and unexpected voice, that of a born storyteller and an acutely insightful chronicler, whose behind-the-scenes recollections allow readers to experience those moments of creative fusion when life so magically merged with art. From his childhood in Baltimore to his student days in Chicago and at Juilliard, to his first journey to Paris and a life-changing trip to India, Glass movingly recalls his early mentors, while reconstructing the places that helped shape his creative consciousness. Whether describing working as an unlicensed plumber in gritty 1970s New York or composing Satyagraha, Glass breaks across genres and re-creates, here in words, the thrill that results from artistic creation. Words Without Music ultimately affirms the power of music to change the world.
Download or read book Jazz written by Hans-Jürgen Schaal and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz arrived in New York in the 1920s & caused a riot. Artist Robert Nippoldt has put together a collection of drawings of the leading figures of the time, includes luminaries such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong etc. Jazz expert H-J Schaal provides a short history of the period, and a text on each of the musicians featured.
Download or read book Dust Grooves written by Eilon Paz and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.
Download or read book Washington DC Jazz written by Dr. Regennia N. Williams and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington, DC, Jazz focuses, primarily, on the history of straight-ahead jazz, using oral histories, materials from the William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress, the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia, and Smithsonian Jazz. Home to "Black Broadway" and the Howard Theatre in the Greater U Street area, Washington, DC, has long been associated with American jazz. Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine launched their careers there in the early 20th century. Decades later, Shirley Horn and Buck Hill would follow their leads, and DC's "jazz millennials" include graduates of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. For years, Bohemian Caverns and One Step Down were among the clubs serving as gathering places for producers and consumers of jazz, even as Rusty Hassan and other programmers used radio to promote the music. This volume also features the work of photographers Nathaniel Rhodes, Michael Wilderman, and Lawrence A. Randall.
Download or read book Minamata written by W. Eugene Smith and published by Center for Creative Photography. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bull City Summer written by Howard L. Craft and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of artists find stories and images on the field and behind the scenes about the Durham Bulls.
Download or read book Civic Jazz written by Gregory Clark and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greg Clark welcomes his readers by asking them to accompany him on a trip to a New Orleans club, where the warmth of the music and the warmth of the audience instill a special feeling of communion, of getting along. Clark s book treats the idea that jazz demands from those who make it as well as those who listen a form of life that substantiates the seemingly impossible American value that is "e pluribus unum." The process of getting along (in communication, in community) is something the great student of culture and rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, spent his life trying to describe. Clark has found that jazz, as an activity and a cultural form, goes a long way toward illustrating that process. Jazz is often described as democratic. Burke s rhetorical and aesthetic ideas explain how this is so. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict with each other to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. And this, too, is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. In chapters that deal with such issues as what jazz does and how jazz works, Clark uses examples from jazz history (from Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines to Miles Davis and Bill Evans), but also from contemporary jazz, both recorded and live, e.g., pianist Jonathan Batiste and his Social Music, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and her collaborative Mosaic Project, or the newly emergent vocalist, Cecile Mclorin Salvant, all of this in the service of making improvisation and ensemble work yield the experience of transcendence that results from intense engagement with jazz as aesthetic form (for players and listeners alike). The resulting book is a study of jazz in the context of American aspirations toward democratic interaction "and" a study of Kenneth Burke s democratic rhetorical theory and practice as essentially aesthetic in function and effect. Marcus Roberts, the much-lionized neoclassical pianist, crafts a Foreword that points to practical ways these ideas can work to improve and inspire both musicians and citizens."
Download or read book Blue Notes in Black and White written by Benjamin Cawthra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. John Coltrane, one hand behind his neck and a finger held pensively to his lips. These iconic images have captivated jazz fans nearly as much as the music has. Jazz photographs are visual landmarks in American history, acting as both a reflection and a vital part of African American culture in a time of immense upheaval, conflict, and celebration. Charting the development of jazz photography from the swing era of the 1930s to the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s, Blue Notes in Black and White is the first of its kind: a fascinating account of the partnership between two of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Benjamin Cawthra introduces us to the great jazz photographers—including Gjon Mili, William Gottlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, Roy DeCarava, and William Claxton—and their struggles, hustles, styles, and creative visions. We also meet their legendary subjects, such as Duke Ellington, sweating through a late-night jam session for the troops during World War II, and Dizzy Gillespie, stylish in beret, glasses, and goatee. Cawthra shows us the connections between the photographers, art directors, editors, and record producers who crafted a look for jazz that would sell magazines and albums. And on the other side of the lens, he explores how the musicians shaped their public images to further their own financial and political goals. This mixture of art, commerce, and racial politics resulted in a rich visual legacy that is vividly on display in Blue Notes in Black and White. Beyond illuminating the aesthetic power of these images, Cawthra ultimately shows how jazz and its imagery served a crucial function in the struggle for civil rights, making African Americans proudly, powerfully visible.
