WHAT: Celebration of the publication of the Center for Documentary Studies’ “The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965.” Project director Sam Stephenson will read and sign books, and Ronnie Free, who played drums at the loft, will perform with his trio.

WHEN: Thursday from 6 to 10 p.m.

WHERE: West End Wine Bar, 601 W. Main St., Durham

ADMISSION: Free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be available for sale at this event.

By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

DURHAM — W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) was one of the great photojournalists of the 20th century. His extensive body of work included pictures of soldiers in the Pacific during World War II, and photo essays on a country doctor in Colorado and a nurse-midwife in South Carolina.

From 1957 to 1965 he focused his many observational skills on the place where he lived, a five-story building at 821 Sixth Ave. in New York City. Smith moved into the fourth floor, next to musician and composer Hall Overton, who was part of a burgeoning after-hours jazz scene that took place on several floors of the building. During this period, musicians both great and obscure passed through the loft to jam, work out ideas and rehearse — among them Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Alice McLeod (Coltrane) and current local musicians Martin Eagle and Paul Jeffrey.

Smith documented the scene. He took some 40,000 photographs during this period — of musicians and scenes of the surrounding neighborhood, known then as the flower district. He also wired the building for sound, and recorded 1,740 reels of tape that documented the music, along with conversations and other sounds.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has preserved Smith’s work in The Jazz Loft Project, which includes a radio series, an exhibit (which will come to the Nasher Museum in February 2011) and a book. Sam Stephenson, director of the project, will read and sign copies of the project’s recently published book “The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965” Thursday at West End Wine Bar in Durham.

Smith’s reel-to-reel recordings translated to 5,089 compact discs. Stephenson, who teaches at the center, began working on the project in 1998, but did not hear the first tapes until 2002, he said in a phone interview. The University of Arizona, which had Smith’s massive archive, insisted on first preserving the tapes digitally. In the interim, Stephenson spent a lot of that time tracking down and interviewing people who had been at the loft.

Dan Partridge, a research associate at the center, was the first to hear the tapes. “He’s done an incredible job of meticulously and diligently working through these tapes,” Stephenson said. Smith’s tapes contain myriad sounds, Stephenson said, including “really good jazz, really awful jazz,” street noises, and noises that are baffling. On one tape “you can hear water dripping in Smith’s darkroom and cats meowing,” he said.

In addition to music, Smith recorded radio shows and advertisements. The book contain quotes from writers James Baldwin, Dorothy Parker and Nelson Algren, taken from radio broadcasts caught on the tapes. Fidel Castro’s 1960 United Nations speech is excerpted.

The challenge for Stephenson was deciding what to include in the book. One focal point is Hall Overton, and his work at the loft with pianist-composer Thelonious Monk. At the loft, during the period covered in this book, Overton and Monk collaborated on arrangements and rehearsals for Monk’s historic big band concerts at Town Hall in 1959, Lincoln Center in 1963 and Carnegie Hall in 1964. The book includes an excerpt (laced with subtle humor) of a conversation between Overton and Monk about the 1959 date.

As he conducted interviews, Stephenson said the relationship became the “clear centerpiece for this book. I don’t think anybody knew the relationship, and it’s an important one.” During his research, “the figure of Hall Overton just kept getting bigger and bigger. He was the real backbone of that musical scene,” Stephenson said. Overton was a respected teacher and arranger who did not seek notoriety, a quality that drew other musicians to him, Stephenson said.

Although the book contains many slices of conversation drawn from not quite a decade, Stephenson sought to give it a narrative structure. Stephenson calls the work “kind of an elegy” for the jazz scene and Smith’s time documenting it. After the innovative years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the jam sessions ended around 1965, as rock and other forms of popular music drew audiences from jazz. Smith left the loft in 1971. Today, Stephenson writes, the building, now in an area that was rezoned for residential uses, most likely “will be sold and demolished to make way for more condos.”

“I hope that if you read [the book] from cover to cover there’s something that unfolds,” Stephenson said. “I wanted a novelistic unfolding of a world.”

On the Web: More information at www.jazzloftproject.org.