By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

DURHAM — Ronnie Free, who played drums at 821 Sixth Avenue before leaving in 1960, will perform with his trio at Thursday’s book signing at West End Wine Bar. Sam Stephenson’s book contains a list of people who were at the Sixth Avenue loft. Two are local keyboard player and composer Martin Eagle, and saxophonist and former Duke University Jazz Studies Director Paul Jeffrey.

Jeffrey, who was Thelonious Monk’s last tenor sax player, already had met Monk when he went to the loft. He also knew Hall Overton and once played at a session with him on Long Island. In addition to the Sixth Avenue building, musicians Sam Rivers, Ornette Coleman and others also maintained lofts for a time. Jeffrey remembers them as places where musicians could play music that they might not get to play in clubs.

About W. Eugene Smith’s taping of the sessions, Jeffrey said, “None of the musicians knew this guy was doing all of this,” but his recordings “preserved a lot of history.”

Eagle went to the loft in 1964, when he was a musician with trumpeter Don Ellis’ big band. He first heard about the loft from bass player Jimmy Stevenson, also with Ellis, who had taken over one floor a few years earlier. The Ellis organization ended up rehearsing at the loft.

“I was there several times a week … almost always in context with Don Ellis’ band,” Eagle said. “Everybody who was anybody in New York passed through that building.”

“They had a piano, a good size room to rehearse in,” he remembered. “It was a very funky kind of place …. It was the kind of place that musicians hung out.”

Eagle met saxophonist Ornette Coleman during this time, which he called “an extraordinarily fruitful period for jazz in New York.”

“Through that jazz loft I got to be somebody on the scene,” he said. “It enabled me to become a professional.”