In New York, between 1957 and 1965, dozens of now-renowned jazz musicians drifted in and out of a Sixth Avenue loft in a building called the Flower District. Their conversations and jam sessions were meticulously recorded on audio tape and in pictures by former LIFE Magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith, who lived in the loft next door. Smith recorded 4,000 hours of audio tape and took 40,000 photographs in the Jazz Loft. This documentary highlights the best footage.
Fishko’s documentary also spends time telling the viewer Smith’s background. The almost obsessive photographer moved to New York, leaving behind his wife and children, after a failed project in Pittsburgh which yielded 22,000 unused photos of the city. These stunning photographs belie the personal struggle Smith endured to get them. Smith, like some of the musicians he documented, struggled with addiction. He used pills to sustain his work patterns, even after he left LIFE magazine and was no longer making money off his photographs.
Fishko admits that Smith’s exhaustive work is a little confounding: “We’re still not sure exactly what Gene Smith was trying to create in the loft. But he did remarkable work there, and his pictures by the tens of thousands and stacks and stacks of audio tape reels tell us things about community, music-making, obsession and art that we couldn’t learn in any other way.”
— Diana Martinez, Film Streams Education Director
