The Jazz Loft: Photos of a Lost New York

W. Eugene Smith was one of mid-century America’s greatest photojournalists; his work for Life Magazine during and after World War II made him rich and famous.  In 1957, Smith, 38, moved into a fourth-floor loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, near West 28th Street, in the heart of what was then Manhattan’s commercial flower market.  Over the next eight years, he shot over 1,000 rolls of film, many of them from his window, capturing a world in one block.

Many of those photographs can be found in Sam Stephenson’s recently published The Jazz Loft Project, which is equally devoted to Smith’s other passion, jazz.  As it happened, his next-door neighbor was composer-arranger Hall Overton, and Smith was letting him use his loft as a rehearsal space for some of the era’s great jazz musicians. Not only did Smith photograph the musicians, he wired the whole building for sound, hooked up several tape recorders, and let the spools spin till they ran out, recording everything from jam sessions to conversations in the hallway.

The first of the two videos below presents a number of photographs taken in and from the loft, accompanied by actual sounds captured by Smith’s tape recorders in the building.

The Jazz Loft: Photos of a Lost New York

The Jazz Loft Project: An Interview with Sam Stephenson

Slide Show: The Jazz Loft/Photos of a Lost New York

(Please Click Image to View Slide Show)

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Obama’s Speech on Race: The View from a Car Repair Shop

Obama’s Speech: The View from an Atlanta Car Dealership

I don’t too often read The Daily Kos, and I haven’t ever quoted from it, finding its writers’ opinions to be expressed in a manner that is usually much too strident and overly self-confident for my own tastes.  Nevertheless, I came across a quite engaging article that was published in Daily Kos today about Barack Obama’s speech on racial issues in America.  The article was not written about the speech itself.  The author, socratic, had taken his car to an Atlanta car dealership for repairs and had an extended wait at the shop while the car was being worked on.  Not long into that wait, Obama’s speech came on the air and a number of other customers were following it on a television set in the shop.  The author had been watching the speech intently, but suddenly stopped and started observing the other people who were watching it.  The article, then, became an account of his experience of watching the other people’s reactions to Obama’s speech.  Access to the entire article is provided below, but here is a long selection from that article:

“I’d planned to wait for my car to be worked on, because it was only a minor brake job.  No big deal.  An hour in and out, and the dealership has wifi.  I could work from where I was.  So I sat down in the waiting room.  My backtracking after deciding to take a different route.  The slow traffic through Downtown (Atlanta).  A few minutes spent with a salesman talking about the diesel Jeep.  The strange sums of seconds spent here and there through the morning caused me to sit down almost at the moment Barack Obama walked up to the podium to begin his speech.

Now, I’m not going to talk about the speech itself.  Plenty of folks have done that. I’ll just say that I was watching intently, pleased with what I was hearing.  When, after about 5 minutes, the guy who was working on my car came by to tell me that the car wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, I thanked him and stayed right where I was to watch the rest of the speech.  But something curious happened.  I was snapped out of the moment of the speech by the mechanic’s visit, which was fine because Obama was, in a very real sense, giving the speech about race in America that I’ve wanted to hear my entire life: genuine, personal, intelligent, and direct.  I’ve watched the speech again since this morning, and it didn’t disappoint, but just at that moment I stopped watching it…and started watching the people around me.  The young Black man.  The elderly white couple.  The two white women, one college-aged, one in her late-20s.  One middle-aged white woman.  Two white men, one college-aged, one in his late-30s.  One Asian couple.  All of them were watching the speech.  Rapt.  Nodding.

Gradually, the twenty-something white woman went back to her laptop, but kept smiling when Obama would say something important.  The elderly white couple whispered in their Southern accented way: “He’s really good… He’s saying good things… He’s a good young man.…”  The young Black man chuckled when Obama said that Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, but was otherwise simply watching.

And at one point, the middle-aged white woman asked one of the dealership folks, in another thick, thick Southern accent if she wouldn’t mind turning up the volume, because she really wanted to hear this speech.  She, this white Southern woman from the suburbs, wanted to hear this speech, delivered by a Black man with a funny name running for President.  And she was nodding.

But she wasn’t the only one.  Folks from the dealership, passing through on their way to and from whatever they do (most of them for not a lot of money) stopped and watch for 3 or 4 minutes.  A young mechanic of ambiguous ethnicity stopped by at least a half-dozen times.  Hours later he stopped me as I was walking to the cashier to pay and said “That was some speech,” then paused awkwardly, and said, hushed, “It’s good that folks our age are getting involved, I think.”  Two salesmen, white, mid-40s, Southern as sweet tea, stopped and watched.  And nodded.  And I wasn’t the only one to stick around to watch the speech after my business at the dealership was done.

Never seen anything like that.  I bet a lot of folks in that dealership were Republicans.  Most, based on snippets of conversation I heard, were Southerners.  Almost all were white.  And they watched, listened, and agreed with what Barack Obama was saying about race in America.  I decided today that there are a lot of good people in the world.  I decided that after all the slogans, after all the bumper stickers, and after all the excruciating hours of listening to Bill O’Reilly divide us, most folks don’t hate most other folks.  And when someone stands up, and explains the situation clearly, concisely, and directly, they can see that, yeah, we have issues to work through and that, yeah, we need to do something.”

socratic’s diary, March 19, 2008, The Daily Kos

Another reader of socratic’s article posted this John Coltrane music video as a tribute to “the Atlanta car dealership, for socratic, for all of those who have been challenged by Obama’s words to look into their own hearts, and for the young man who is willing to take on this burden of a nation at odds with its own existence, Barack Obama.”

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme

You can read the entire story in socratic’s diary, which was posted today in The Daily Kos.

Barack Obama: Not This Time

Technorati: Barack Obama, Obama, African-American, Black, Obama’s Speech on Race, race, racial, race in America, Atlanta car dealership, Atlanta, Georgia, Daily Kos, socratic, socratic’s diary, John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, art, celebrities, photographs, photography, music, jazz, songs, entertainment, video, music video, culture, cultural issues, cultural, gay, gay life, gay pride, GLBT, politics, political, 2008 Election, social, social issues, social life, society, news, political news, world news, world

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