Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[INDISTINCT CHATTERING]

W. EUGENE SMITH: The Howes is exactly the same volume as the other.

Oh, but the mic, I would say, is much closer.

Oh, probably six to eight inches, again,

so it can easily be seen

that the Japanese mic has the greatest sensitivity.

Yes, however, it's not a national characteristic.

Remember that, ladies and gentlemen.

Not a national characteristic.

Now, I have increased the volume again.

It's back up at twice the volume setting of the Japanese mic.

I'm going to press the record on button

to see if that can make a difference.

Now it's pressed.

I don't know whether it makes a difference or not.

Now, pressing both the record button

and the little gray button.

And I must say, I think it does.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

HARRY COLOMBY: There weren' many places to jam.

And word, I think, got out

that there's something creative going on here.

BILL CROW: The little bit of it that I remember

was just there were photographs everywhere.

Stuck 'em up on the walls, on the tables, everywhere.

CARLA BLEY: There was no intercom,

or lock on the door, I think you just walk in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Whenever the word went out that there was a place to play

we would all go there.

So this painter, Dave Young,

found this wonderful building down in the flower district.

It was a wreck but he fixed up a loft for himself

and the first thing he did was to get an old upright piano

lifted up there, and tell all of his friends

that he had a place to play.

DAVID ROTHMAN: They had no heat.

Some illegal hot-wired electric.

They would play, they would start to play

and then the building would shake.

'Cause it was not just happening on that floor

but on the floor directly below and the floor even below that.

CROW: People would hea about it and drop in.

And then, of course, other musicians lived there.

It was like a little family.

Hall Overton was there, a great friend of mine

who was also a classical composer and a jazz player

and did both equally well.

He was composing, working in there.

Always with a cigarette in his mouth.

Always, drooping off and the ashes all over him.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEVE SWALLOW: There was often a mixture of musical styles on any given night.

And you'd have Dixieland guys up there, playing happily away

with the beboppers and the post-beboppers.

Bebop, it just knocked me out.

It just, it floored me

you know and I had to play that music.

It was a high experience, Bebop.

It's packed with information.

BEN RATLIFF: That was a time when jazz was going in every direction at once.

It was all there, and alive and present.

And you had a range of people coming through this loft

from, you know, I guess early twenties

to people in their fifties and sixties.

COLOMBY: It wasn't fashionable then.

You know, a loft are like a major place.

It was a loft.

It was creaky, smelly,

and I remember the odor when you walk up those stairs.

It was an old building.

My first thought was when I went in there, by the way,

"This is gonna go up in flames."

I always looked for how to get out.

"Where's the door to get out?"

PHIL WOODS: Just that whole thing of the fun of the music

and that was happening at the loft.

That was happening all over New York.

There was a spirit about

improvising that was infectious.

ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: If you think about the history of jazz,

jazz has always struggled for a place.

So imagine what it meant to make music in a loft space

where the sounds of the city

are sort of invading that space

and inspiring musicians to try to mimic, speak back to,

and engage those sounds.

Jazz musicians wake up and they need to play.

The work is the excitement and they're always looking for excitement

and they're always looking for work.

REDD: Through so many clubs in New York City,

there were so many people trying to play the music.

So we were learning from each other.

I think I was 17 when I arrived, 18?

And I instantly got a job as a cigarette girl in Birdland

and that was my education, musically.

I got to hear every band.

Just really stood in front of the stage

with a tray around my neck

and if someone wanted to buy a pack

I'd say, "Wait till the piece is over for God's sake."

I ended up in a loft on Sixth Avenue.

It was in the flower district.

It was illegal to live there

but we had it fixed up like an office.

Our clothes were in file cabinets.

And every morning we would make it look like

we had a business there

and every night we would take away

all that artifice and have a house.

There were a number of musicians up and down that street in the 20s.

And we could get to each other's lofts by crossing the roof,

fire escape up to the roof, across the building next door,

down the fire escape, knock on the window and in we went.

SAM STEPHENSON: Gene Smith moved into the loft in 1957

and he had a space on the fourth floor

facing Sixth Avenue.

So much about him was what he could see through his eyes

so I just feel like those windows...

There was something about that Sixth Avenue window

that reminded him of his home in Wichita.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHENSON: He called that window his proscenium arch.

The window had a scene, or a play,

being acted out below him all day, every day.

It was the same scene, but it was always different.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CROW: And Gene got fascinated

with the musicians that were around there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CROW: Most of the time he stayed in the background and just lurked.

SWALLOW: And he was so much a part of the scene that

I don't think anybody ever experienced

a self-conscious moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

REDD: Usually, musicians,

especially jazz musicians, are shy, camera shy.

Somebody comes and says "Okay, hold that pose, you know, just act natural."

You never even noticed he was there.

Gene was never in the way. You know, he was a way.

He was beautiful.

WOODS: We used to cal him Lamont Cranston

'cause he was the shadow, you know.

He was just around all the time.

And he started buying recording equipment.

CROW: Tape machines were reel to reel and didn't work well.

Tapes were constantly jamming or flying off the spools.

STEPHENSON: The portable tape recorder was introduced

into the culture in the mid-1950s.

Before that, the tape recorder

was the size of a suitcase or a bed.

SMITH: This mic happens t run up two floors.

I was trying to run both machines off the one.

COLOMBY: He recorded the television, the radio, the telephone.

WOMAN: [ON PHONE Your number please?

SMITH: LA 4, 6935.

WOMAN: [ON PHONE Who's calling please?

SMITH: Uh, Eugene Smith.

WOMAN: [ON PHONE Mr. Eugene Smith.

SMITH: No company, I'm photographer in New York.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: WNYC, the voice of New York City and WNYC FM.

The internationally known authority on etiquette

Mrs. Emily Post died at her New York home at the age of 86.

He got little, little microphones

only about that big around, about that long.

And he would bore holes in the floor

and stick these microphones up from his loft into Dave's loft.

The bit from a drill came up through the floor and then

a microphone came up after the hole was made.

That was Eugene, placing another mic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

He was just there as part of what was happening.

Like part of the band.

He was part of the rhythm section.

Only instead of playing the drums or the bongos or the bass or the piano

he was playing his camera.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I had seen him already in Lifemagazine

and was quite impressed to meet him.

And once I got to go in because he was standing there

as I walked in and he invited me in

and showed me a lot of pictures.

He had these photographs on shelves in folders

and he just would pull things out and show 'em to you,

and he had some things on the wall.

JOHN COHEN: There's something about his work that was special.

It didn't look like all the rest of the photographs you saw.

I didn't know Smith then, I just knew of him.

And I knew he was around, and he was one of the big guys.

He was one of the most admired of the photographers.

Gene was really considered a kind of saint

among photojournalists in that era.

His work was really...

Well, it was called a picture essay and it was the best

kind of achievement a photographer could have,

a long story about a single subject.

You have to understand, that this was before television

and a major way of getting news and information,

generally, was through the picture magazines,

Life being the biggest one,

Look being it close competitor.

It was the photographer that ruled the day

because that's how the stories were being told.

VICKI GOLDBERG: He was very interested in the drama of the black and white photograph.

There are very strong darks and very bright highlights in his photographs.

His pictures, of all sorts, do deal with the dark and light.

And he was very good on the darks.

He took himself seriously.

He thought of himself as a Rembrandt.

I may exaggerate in saying Rembrandt,

but I don't think that's so farfetched.

BILL PIERCE: In the morning, there would be a crowd of people

at 821 Sixth Avenue at the front door

who wanted to come up and talk to Gene

and everything, because he was famous, he was a star.

And my job would be to go down and say to the crowd,

"Mr. Smith would love to see you

"but, unfortunately, he has to work today."

STEPHENSON: He was revered.

I think he was at the very top of the photography pyramid.

Just one story, I think, that illustrates that is Larry Clark

from Tulsa, graduated from high school

and came to New York. And part of the reason why

he came here was to meet Gene Smith.

He put on a suit and went to 821 Sixth Avenue and knocked on the door.

The address was available in the phonebook.

And there's a photograph of him in the loft that day.

Diane Arbus, there's a photograph of her in the loft,

she brought some of her work over.

There were photographers stopping by all the time.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like, what was the place like?

A dump. [CHUCKLES] Extremely cluttered.

At first, it was only one floor

and then he rented more and more floors

but it was just junk.

I mean, it was just piled and piled with stuff.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEVE REICH: When I walked in the room,

three walls, floor to ceiling filled with photographs.

But that was just the beginning.

That was what was the underlying layer.

Then into those photographs

were stuck many other photographs

so they were kinda leaning out.

So you felt all these walls were just leaning in on you

with photographs.

He was like a mad scientist.

He'd have this big old desk

and it would be pictures and negatives and tapes.

PIERCE: Prints layouts, dummies.

I mean, the loft was packed with stuff.

At the same time, he's doing the jazz things,

he's shooting out the window, he's... I mean this man

worked and worked and worked and worked and worked.

Gene used to work so long in the darkroom

that what he would do

is he would do the same thing that every college student

on writing his thesis would do.

Load up on amphetamines.

At different points, he'd be taking pills to go to sleep

and he'd be taking pills to stay awake so he could get work done.

If he had a deadline coming, I mean, he really wouldn't work seriously

until he had a short time till the deadline,

and then he would work straight through, nonstop,

no sleep, hardly any food and then he'd completely

just about go into a coma till he recovered three, four days.

SMITH: Now we offer you the New York premiere

of Holmboe's Concerto No. 10.

HARBUTT: His darkroom, in the loft, was spotless, which it has to be.

He would have music playing. He always had music going on.

At that period, a lot of people were imitating his printing

'cause it was so beautiful, I mean really.

It put all other prints a little bit to shame.

PATRICK: I spent a lot of time in the darkroom with him.

And a lot of time watching him.

He used a lot of ferricyanide, which is a bleach

painted on with artists' brushes or cotton swabs,

depending on the area he had to lighten.

He was a really careful printer.

He would print for hours and hours.

Hours and hours and hours on one print.

They use to sell paper in 250-sheet boxes

and he claimed, on one print,

that he went through a whole box before he got the right one.

PATRICK: I remember him working on the Spanish village, on the wake scene

and if you look at the faces,

he even went as far as touching up the eyeballs to brighten the eyes.

Look at the fingernails, there's a nice glisten

and that's all ferricyanide.

Now that's a beautiful example of what

ferricyanide can do.

So he can print this all dark and bring out some highlights

but then have the spotlight of greatness on the great man.

Essentially what you do, is you take a photograph that's

well-exposed and then you print it dark

so that it's too dark, it looks just like this, or like this.

And then you take it out of the fixer

and with a little brush and this terrible, poisonous ferricyanide

you go [CLICKS TONGUE] and it starts to bleach the image

so the whites become whiter

and when it gets just far enough,

you put it back under the fixer

and it stops the action, then you can

do it with more care or less care

and he was a master at doing it.

Look at this, look at how that light gives her a halo.

It's not really the light of a Coleman lamp

but it's the light of a picture.

So, saved by the bleach.

Or made by the bleach.

[PIANO PLAYING]

CARMAN MOORE: I knew he was famous, I knew he was a famous photographer,

you know, ofLife Magazine.

Life Magazine,of course, to an Ohioan was, like

just short of the Bible.

Just to see him up there in that rat's nest, you know.

COHEN: Gene brought that pictorial sense from an earlier time

and maybe a sense of audience

which was very effective when you try to reach a mass audience likeLife Magazine.

But the word on the street was that he, you know,

he argued with Life Magazine all the time

for the right to control the compositions, the layouts.

If you worked for Life Magazin

they gave you the film, you used your camera,

they took your film after you shot the pictures,

then somebody else developed it,

somebody else made the contact prints,

somebody else circled which ones to be enlarged,

somebody else enlarged them, someone else did the layout,

somebody else did the titles.

Everybody accepted that convention

and, suddenly, into the middle of this,

Eugene Smith is saying no.

Well, he had very high ideals. He was a perfectionist

and he was very clear that he knew how to lay out

the story that he had brought in.

Gene had a reputation of being stormy and he

wanted things done his way and the editors wanted things

another way and there was often this tension.

He did argue all the time.

I'd hear him, I'd overhear conversations

complaining about this editor or that person.

I don't know if this is true

but from what I hear, he offered to jump out of the window

so often if they didn't do what he wanted

that one of the editors finally said to him,

"The window's open, Gene, go ahead." [LAUGHS]

He quit 100 times and realized he had to try to support a family.

And he'd succumb. You know, he started doing

advertising work, whatever...

You know, stuff that he didn't want to do, he hated it

because he had this tremendous debt.

And with that many kids and that many people...

His career at Life was doomed.

And he finally quitLife Magazine at the end of '54.

Gene fell into my arms, if you wish, because I was then

trying to run Magnum, the international cooperative

and that was the only place for Gene to go.

Let's go east, across the country to Pittsburgh.

MORRIS: The first major assignment

that I was able to get for Gene

was one he should've turned down.

It was to photograph Pittsburgh.

It was a disaster from the start.

Smith was hired to make 100 photographs

for a book commemorating Pittsburgh's bicentennial.

He was 36 years old when he went to Pittsburgh.

He was in his prime, he was in his physical prime,

and his artistic prime.

He was prone

to these cycles of extraordinary effort followed by periods of collapse.

When he had worldwide acclaim atLife Magazine, I think

there's really no other way to say it, but it,

it heightened his ego.

But he had severe self-doubts

and he would have to mount these ever-growing projects

to prove his worth.

What happened is he erupted with 22,000 photographs in a four-year odyssey.

At that point in time, in the history of photography,

it was outrageous.

It was considered lunacy.

I think that kind of explosion was inevitable.

It happened in Pittsburgh.

It would've happened if he'd gone to Cincinnati

or London or Rome, or wherever. I think he was gonna erupt.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When Gene finally came back from Pittsburgh he went to his darkroom

in Croton-on-Hudson to work on all this film.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

He had thousands of negatives.

He had sheets of board up on stands with just

thousands of photographs.

He took over the whole house.

We had moved in there in '53.

It was an interesting house and it...

I don't know what it was before.

People kept saying it was some kind of sanatorium.

All the doors had big locks on them

and there were servants' quarters,

multiple wings and areas.

We liked it because it was big

and, you know, I had three sisters,

and we had the live-in housekeeper and her daughter

so basically there was five kids living there.

We had fun, we had a big place to run around in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

He had row after row after row of shelves of record albums at home,

from 78s to 45s, you know, that's all we heard.

My bedroom was above the darkroom area

so I heard music just about 24 hours a day.

We had a huge dining room

with a Ping-Pong table with it and it was just

covered with photographs at all times.

HAROLD FEINSTEIN: He was taking some amphetamines,

probably Dexedrine,

which at that time even my sister who's very conservative

was taking to lose weight.

I worked in the darkroom with him, making what he called proof prints

which were 5x7 copies of

things that he wanted to see and then he'd lay those out.

Then he'd make final prints and then he'd lay those out.

He had racks on the wall so mounted pictures could be

stuck there temporarily so he could study a layout.

He would pull one and then he would pull another one.

And so he was continuously seeing different nuances of his Pittsburgh essay.

He was a bit of an obsessive. He got carried away.

I remember being informed that he was leaving.

So, all of a sudden, we were moving all of his stuff out.

My mother was upset but she didn't mention anything

and really didn't know what was going on.

Basically, we had to sell the house for taxes.

He hadn't paid taxes on it for years.

So, we had to move out.

HARBUTT: He said to me once that he had left his wife and children

because he couldn't be that totally committed

to his work and stay with them.

You know, he wouldn't earn enough money, necessarily,

or he wouldn't even have the time,

you know, the intellectual space to deal with them.

MORRIS: This is the dark aspect of Gene.

He loved his children

but he wasn't able to sustain them.

The official photography world, I believe, thought he'd lost his mind.

The arbiters of photography,

not so much the creators but the facilitators,

the editors and go-betweens,

and gallery owners and whatnot,

they all thought he really lost it

when he moved into this loft.

STEPHENSON: He gave up a beautiful home in suburban, floral Croton

and moved into this cave of a building.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

He set up his studio there,

a darkroom and he had a lot of space,

wall space, the hallways, everything.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Smith certainly preferred the loft to his Croton home.

The loft musicians were right up his alley.

You know, they were used to staying up all night

and playing gigs until 3:00 in the morning

and he was used to blasting music

until dawn, working in his darkroom.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Temperature is 74.

WCBS AM and FM, New York.

It's 9:00.

PAUL NEVEN: This is CBS News in Washington, Paul Neven reporting.

Vice President Nixon charged tonight that Nikita Khruschev

is pulling the rug up from under the peace campaign

being waged by his deputy Frol Koslov.

"At the very time Koslov is talking peace," Nixon said,

"Mr. Khruschev is talking blackmail and threats of force."

[MAN SPEAKING]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

[LAUGHS]

SMITH: Aw...

[MAN SPEAKING]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[CAT MEOWING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

One, two, three, four...

STEPHENSON: He was alway upgrading his equipment.

He would come into some money

and then he would go out and buy $500 of new recording equipment,

new mics, new cords, new recorder.

Always testing mics in various corners of the loft,

including the stairwell.

He had the whole stairwell mic'd from sidewalk up to the fifth floor.

MAN 1: A lot of people talk and don't know what they're talking about.

You're going to mess with what they're talking about

you might as well lie down and die.

[MAN 2 SPEAKING]

[MAN 1 SPEAKING]

[MAN 3 SPEAKING]

[MAN 1 SPEAKING]

[MAN 3 SPEAKING]

[MAN 1 SPEAKING]

SY JOHNSON: He was taping the atmosphere,

the air in there.

Musicians would come and go and sit in and play

and Gene Smith was so amazed at that

dedication, that obsession.

The fact that they just kept playing and playing and playing and playing.

And he found that he identified with that spirit very much.

There wasn't a medium to hold what he was creating.

He wires that place for sound, why?

He is photographing out the window, he's photographing the players.

He's sort of a happening, before there were happenings.

SWALLOW: He had his favorites.

I remember whenever Zoot Simms showed up at the loft,

[SAXOPHONE PLAYING]

Gene would emerge from his hole,

and he always knew when Zoot arrived,

which is further evidence that

the tape recorders were running.

[JIMMY LAUGHS]

JIMMY STEVENSON: We'd be talking one minute,

and the next thing you know we'd all grab our instruments, and that would be it.

STEVENSON: Yeah, it's time.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

STEVENSON: We might play for, you know, three or four hours without stopping.

It would be almost like, like entering into a trance.

DAVID AMRAM: Zoot was fabulous.

And he had that ability where he played like Laurence Olivier,

or Marlon Brando.

As soon as Zoot made a musical entrance,

he'd play like two notes, and suddenly... "Ah."

[MUSIC PLAYS]

He just had a way

of knowing how to begin and create something on the spot.

From the time, you know, he would just pick up the horn and boom, he would go.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

It just poured out of him.

He just had a wonderful imagination.

He just really loved to play.

And he would swing.

I mean, he was a natural swinger.

I think Gene understood when something special was happening.

And Zoot was really at the core of that.

WOODS: I remember when Zoot had been on the road, and he came home.

And he missed New York so he went to the loft, and he wanted to jam.

And Gene, Quill and myself,

we went down to the loft to welcome Zoot home.

So all the saxophone players, "Hey, Zoot's back, Zoot's back, let's all go."

And I never saw so many saxes, man.

And we played, we sat in,

and we jammed, you know we were there about 10, 12 hours,

and then we had to take a break, and we left.

We went and had a bite to eat, went to bed, and we went back the next day.

And there was Zoot, and he was sitting behind the drums.

He had the hi-hat, and the bass drum, and his horn.

And all around were all these saxophone players,

and they were all... [LAUGHS]

He wiped out every sax player in New York, and he was still playing.

He wiped out the rhythm sections.

He was a one-man band, and he was still sitting there playing two days later.

I mean, I never forgot that.

When you talk about soldiers, Zoot was the best.

STEVENSON: There were a few other lofts.

As far as I know there was nothing like the loft that was on Sixth Avenue.

NANCY OVERTON: Since it was a commercial district,

you could play till all crazy hours

and it wouldn't bother anybody.

And that's exactly what they did.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

And all kinds of people came by...

Salvador Dali was having a presentation there,

and the guy who used to play the Lone Ranger on the radio

was a jazz buff, he was there.

So I thought, "Wow, how more diverse can you get than this."[LAUGHS]

STEVENSON: It was lik a little nirvana up there.

But Gene was in there with his camera, all over the place.

He was literally the fly on the wall.

SWALLOW: There was a wonderful camaraderie among all of these people.

I think, in part, because nobody had any money,

nobody had much in the way of money or respect or anything else.

At one point I remember him telling me... [CHUCKLES]

That they absolutely had no money, no credit, nothing to eat.

They did have a Macy's card,

charge card, so they went to the gourmet department in Macy's,

and that's what they ate for a couple of days.

Chocolate covered ants and whatever else they had there.

There was a substance that we called Old Philadelphia.

I don't know whether you got it at a hardware store, or a liquor store,

but you could both drink it and thin paint with it.

He was constantly borrowing. He was constantly pawning.

SMITH: 'Cause that one thing you kept so long was the announcement

that the bank was pulling in a $1,200 loan of mine.

And I didn't know anything about it, and they came down here, you know, and...

STEPHENSON: At some point, Overton was paying Smith's rent

so Smith owed Overton money,

and he was late in paying it back,

and there's this one story where Overton took a hammer and nails,

and nailed Smith into his loft,

and said, "I'm not gonna let you out until you pay your bill."

[PIANO PLAYING]

I really believe if you had to name one person

that was responsible for this jazz scene in this dilapidated,

decrepit, obscure building in the middle of Manhattan,

for 10 years, it would be Hall Overton.

TEDDY CHARLES: Many musicians started gravitating towards that place

because he was not only a serious classical composer

on the faculty at Juilliard, but had taught many, many jazz musicians.

There was like a pilgrimage to come down there and learn from Hall.

CHUCK ISRAELS: It was easy to be attracted to him, because he was

a broad-minded, interesting, well...

Musically educated guy.

[MUSIC PRACTICE PLAYS]

[HALL OVERTON SPEAKING]

REICH: I was studying music and philosophy,

and my primary music teacher said, "Well,

"I think the person that you really should study

"composition with is Hall Overton."

I called up Hall, and he said "Sure, come on over."

And "come on over" was, basically,

Sixth Avenue in the flower market district, in the 20s,

which was basically nothing.[LAUGHS]

I guess there were some flower stores door to door,

but usually when you go down there it was just very, very quiet, and very empty.

MOORE: I just climbed up to the fourth floor, you know,

every Saturday at 4:00 and took a lesson.

I remember a dingy place,

and a messed-up upright piano

with cigarette burns all over the place.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MOORE: He was a teacher.

He was a genius as a teacher.

And a genius at helping people

become more of themselves than they realized they were.

He'd look at your piece, whatever you brought him,

and he'd just start thinking with you...

[PIANO PLAYS]

Hall would teach you for four hours, you know,

you'd pay him for one hour and he'd teach for four.

Oh, I remember the lessons.

One time he wrote down

what composers do for development,

and here's a list of maybe 10 or 15 things,

and all composers, that's all they ever do.

He said, "Here, you have a beautiful phrase. You have...

"This little two measures, or the little four measures,

"and now you got on to something else, don't... No."

He said, develop what you have.

Long lines.

Develop, develop, develop.

They make it bigger this way, or they make it bigger this way,

or they make it smaller this way, or smaller this way,

or they turn it upside down, or they turn it backwards,

or they turn it upside down and backwards,

or they stick in a little piece, or they remove a little piece.

He said, "Look, I'm gonna draw some shapes."

He said, "Here's one shape.

"It goes up, and it goes down.

"Here's another shape.

"It goes down, and it goes up. Here's another shape.

"It goes straight up, and then it went, goes straight down.

"I want you to write a melody that more or less follows those shapes."

Okay.

So you learn a lot.

You learn it's very easy to go like this.

[CHUCKLES]

COLOMBY: He was a natural guy. He smoked.

He always had a cigarette, defying physics.

And everybody talks about Hall, and the...

COLOMBY: Ashes. Ash.

The ash never fell off of his cigarette. [LAUGHS]

Constantly smoking. He always had a cigarette.

To say he was a chain smoker was to way understate the case.

I don't think he ever inhaled, you know.

Just a wonderful, wonderful, special person.

MOORE: I just thought of a story that Hall told me about

where he had come from,

not only, like, the Michigan farm thing,

but about having been in the Second World War.

It just came up, you know, we were having a lesson,

you know, we were talking about Haydn or something like that.

Out of the blue comes this story about

finding a piano in the countryside.

They had just chased the Germans out of a house,

or something like that, and there was a piano there.

And Hall said that he sat down

for the first time in, like, a couple years,

and put his fingers on the piano.

You know, he's virtually on the point of tears about that,

just remembering that.

STEPHENSON: It's a complicated relationship

between Hall Overton and Gene Smith.

They shared a lot.

They were both from the Midwest, Smith from Kansas,

Overton from Michigan.

Lower and Upper Midwest. And...

They both...

Were involved in a very

poignant way in World War II.

Hall Overton carried stretchers, and Smith was a photographer.

So they both were on the front lines seeing the worst of the war,

but they weren't fighting.

[BOMBS EXPLODING]

[NAVAL GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS SOUNDING]

MORRIS: Gene was sent out by Ziff Davis,

the publishing company forPopular Photography.

MORRIS: And he was assigned to cover the carrier war,

which was the big war in the Pacific.

But it was too cold, and too impersonal for Gene.

He wanted to get closer to combat.

AndLife fulfilled his wish by sending him to cover the ground action.

His war reportage was very strong,

and, in fact, he was very badly wounded in the war.

PIERCE: You're looking a a photographer who got close.

This is not that long a lens shot.

He got this picture by getting up close to this guy.

Believe you me, in situations like this,

there has to be an emotional closeness

for this guy to even allow it.

Gene was almost killed.

They practically blew his face off in the war.

Because he was who he was, he stood up when everyone had been ordered to lie down,

and he thought he could get a better picture standing up,

and he may well have done so, but he also got himself severely injured

and couldn't even photograph for two years.

He was hit by fragments of...

From shell fire in Okinawa,

in the spring of 1945,

and I think he suffered from a great deal of pain

in his mouth, and the jaw, and lower head area.

Essentially, the gory details are, there was no roof to Gene's mouth.

I mean it just went up, and the...

When my dad had come home from the hospital, from the war injuries,

he was bedridden at that point.

He had fingers sewn back on.

He had shrapnel still in his spine.

He had, you know, he had severe back aches

where he would just, he couldn't move.

He'd just lie on the floor and absolutely could not move,

because something had shifted.

Sometimes he'd look at some of the war photographs,

and he'd just get tears in his eyes, or start crying.

FRIEND: This is in World War II, the baby's discovered alive.

Um...

Just...

You get those moments during wartime when there's

humanity in the midst of it all,

you know, not that this is just about the tenderness of a warrior,

but there's moments when everything stops.

PATRICK: That's my sister Juanita and myself.

And this was taken in Tuckahoe, New York, behind our house there.

He embellished the story a bit

by saying that he had dreamed about taking this picture

as he had been laid up with injuries after the war,

and he used to see us playing in the backyard,

and he'd looked out of his bedroom window,

and composed this picture.

And decided that he had to have

a masterpiece that represented peace.

He decided he was gonna get out of bed and go photograph.

That's what he did.

He just, all of a sudden, walked out of the house

and started directing us, telling us what to do.

"You go on the left, you go on the right.

"All right now, you go on the right, you go on the left.

"Hold hands. Don't hold hands."

There were many exposures.

He was using a twin lens reflex at that time, camera,

and you had to look down into it.

So every time he'd look down, liquid would run

between his nasal cavity, and his throat, and his mouth.

It's the first picture he took

after he came out of the recovery from his war wounds.

And it's called the Walk to Paradise Garden,

'cause there was a place in his compound that was called Paradise Garden.

But even the title is... We're talking about Eden here,

and young people going into the light.

I've always thought it was a rather horribly sentimental picture.

I don't really want to look at it.

It's very sweet, but it should be on

every Valentine ever printed, as far as I'm concerned.

But I think it was, for him, a coming to life again,

and it has meant a lot to many people.

Oh. that's great. That one of...

You know everybody, everybody looks at this, "Oh, it's so trite."

You know, this is, this is youth going into...

That's all of us going into our future. Beautiful.

SMITH: Here, you want to try this again?

CHILD: Yeah. SMITH: Throw it way up.

PATRICK: We used to go down to the loft building, approximately once a week.

Mainly, my two sisters wanted to go down, Shana and Juanita.

[CHILD CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY]

My dad was always puttering around doing something

and then he'd go in the darkroom and I'd go in the darkroom with him.

He used to like sitting in the window taking pictures,

I'd be sitting in the window too.

And he was like, "Look at that, look at that."

PATRICK: There was a drummer there practicing one day, I have no idea who it was.

There were always, always people there,

twenty-four hours a day, there was somebody there.

CROW: Ronnie Free was a wonderful example of, you know, very good drummer

that started hanging out there and he ended up living there.

RON FREE: I had my drums there and sleeping in the recliner.

I was on call 24/7.

But other drummers came by and played.

Roy Haynes and Elvin... Don't remember who all,

but I was a mainstay.

[CHUCKLES] You went up there with three or four guys.

It was like, "Go wake up Ronnie, we want to play."

FREE: I think I was 18 and I started meeting people that I had idolized

and I started getting gigs pretty quick.

I was there when he got the job with Lena Horne.

I had only known him a couple months

but I was having such a great time hanging out at that loft.

I worshiped him as a drummer.

I was so eager to play with him.

I was happy to be anywhere that I could pursue

my mission. [CHUCKLES]

And it was like a mission. It was like a search for the Holy Grail.

When I was about 12 years old,

a friend of the family took me to New York

and we went to Birdland.

It was such a legendary place.

I'd read about it, and heard about it, and dreamed about it.

The Erroll Garner Trio was playing there

and he had a drummer named Shadow Wilson.

He knocked me out playing mostly brushes,

catching all the licks and so forth, just right on the money.

[STAMMERING] That... It was... I just was totally enthralled.

Fast forward, I moved to New York,

and I go to a place called the Cafe Bohemia down in the Village,

and Shadow Wilson was playing there.

So somebody introduced us and the first words out of his mouth was

"Ronnie, you get high?"

And I thought he was talking about grass

so I said "Yeah, sure, man."

And he said "Come on downstairs."

So we did.

And he pulled out a little packet of white powder

and he had a matchbook cover

and he scooped out a little bit on the tip of the matchbook cover

and held it out to me. And I didn't even know what I was supposed to do with it.

That introduced me to smack.

When I found out that he was going with Lena Horne,

I was kinda sad 'cause they're taking him away, you know?

And as I remember, he was back in a couple weeks.

He didn't... He couldn't stay with that band, he was...

I think his drug habit made him too unstable to do a job like that.

Gene Smith and I were kind of...

Sharing goodies.

He was taking all kind of psychic energizers and things,

so I would give him some of my Desoxyns or whatever the drug du jour...

And sometimes I'd hole up in there for days

and never go outside.

HOWARD WILLIAMS: One day, I'm sitting in my loft

and I heard this "clunk clunk" piano.

"Wait a minute, what's that?"

And, somebody's playing the piano, I said, "That sounds like Monk!"

The voicing, the way he voiced chords...

So I go and stick my head out, "That is Monk!"

[PIANO PLAYING]

MOORE: One day, at the end of the lesson,

I actually was about to leave

and this big old guy is there

and turned out to be Thelonious Monk.

Hall says, "Oh, Thelonious, I'd like you to meet my student, Carman Moore."

And he said "Uh!" and we shook hands.

They were working on the Town Hall big band session

that became part of jazz history.

So I just, sort of, I don't know if I pretended to leave,

but I didn't leave. I just hung at the door there

just to watch this thing unfold.

I was Thelonious Monk's manager at the time,

Hall Overton was a friend of mine.

My brother, Jules, had this idea

of producing Thelonious Monk in a big band setting.

Thelonious with a big orchestra.

And Hall was like a natural to do it

because he was also an arranger, he could score music.

And it became quite a project.

[PIANO PLAYING]

KELLEY: Monk made Overto learn the music by ear.

And he'll play something and he'll have Hall play it back.

[PIANO PLAYING]

MOORE: They talke through the piano.

Their pianos talked.

That was amazing to see them speak the language of music.

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

And Hall was writing away.

Well, Hall had the training to really note take accurately.

So when Monk and he were together,

Monk would sit down and say "Blam!"

And he would hold down his fingers on the piano for that chord

until Hall could write down every single note that Monk was playing.

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[OVERTON HUMMING NOTES]

KELLEY: Here's Monk teaching him how to play his music like an exacting teacher.

For Monk, this was a kind of comeback.

In the early 1950s, he had lost his cabaret card.

He couldn't work in New York City clubs.

Cabaret cards were invented in World War II.

It was a way of knowing who it is that works

in a place where alcohol is sold

to prevent spies from overhearing soldiers

or sailors or marines that come into bars

and say things like "Well, my wife gave me

"a big fat sweater,

"you know, because I'm going to need it."

Oh, they're going to Alaska.

To prevent that, but after the war, they kept that.

You could do concerts, it didn't affect concerts but you couldn't work in clubs.

But Monk was affected by that.

KELLEY: He was making a living by performing in the outer boroughs.

Places like Brooklyn and the Bronx.

So this is going to be a big deal for Monk. It was huge.

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

JASON MORAN: Just for Hall to even get comfortable with just what the sounds are

is going to take a long time.

[PIANO PLAYING]

And the fingers are gonna look like this as you would do it,

instead of like spread out, they're gonna be kind of crunched up, sometimes.

[PIANO PLAYING]

KELLEY: His chord voicings were unlike anyone else's.

They were very sparse.

But he had a way of hitting the note with such dynamism

that he could fill the room with two notes.

[OVERTON HUMMING MELODIC PHRASE]

ROBERT NORTHERN: They worked very well together.

I mean, you know they'd stop and you'd see this conference between Monk and Hall Overton,

which I observed. I thought it was beautiful to see.

Two masters like this working together and working details out.

[MONK SPEAKING]

...you know, where you just...

OVERTON: Sure.

[PIANO PLAYING]

KELLEY: They're struggling over Little Rootie Tootie.

AndLittle Rootie Tootie is a song Monk had recorded several years earlier.

[PIANO PLAYING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

MORAN: I think, maybe, one of the quintessential moments

is when Monk says "Oh, well, let's just listen to the record."

[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN MORGENSTERN: The piano solo onLittle Rootie Tootie,

which is this train piece of Monk's,

was a fairly long solo,

and it also was very characteristic of Monk's touch.

And then he says, "No, let's listen to it again." [CHUCKLES]

MONK: Yeah, play it again.

[MUSIC STARTS OVER]

Let's have the whole band play...

Just play it, just like the record.

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[OVERTON SPEAKING]

[MONK SPEAKING]

[MUFFLED TALKING WITH MUSIC PLAYING]

MORAN: So, Hall kind of arranges the solo,

and they transcribe it and it becomes like,

one of the standout moments

of the Monk at Town Hall recordings.

OVERTON: One, two.

MORAN: Them playing Little Rootie Tootie.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NORTHERN: I got the call a typical New York musician.

When I got there, man, I was excited.

The adrenaline was flowing, the excitement was going.

We showed up at the loft,

and the first thing Monk would do...

"All right, everybody downstairs for your drink."

There used to be a lovely little bar down there.

[INDISTINCT CHATTERING]

One! You know, just to get...

He would just want to check out

who the cats were and what they were doing there.

And he'd have a taste and then back up to rehearsal.

You got Phil Woods and these guys, man.

Everybody just running up the steps, man,

taking out their stuff, getting ready, man.

You know, I mean, we were happy.

[PEOPLE LAUGHING]

KELLEY: Rehearsals for musicians of that caliber

were rare. [CHUCKLES]

[CHUCKLES] They were in the morning,

at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

KELLEY: That's why the loft space was so important.

I mean, imagine what it meant

for working musicians

to arrive at the rehearsals at 3:00 in the morning, and work until 7:00.

[SAXOPHONE PLAYING]

T.S. MONK: It wasn' your normal big band ensemble.

It had a tuba in it.

It had a French horn in it.

These are not swing era instruments.

NORTHERN: This wasn't orchestrated in the usual way.

We were playing piano music

on our instruments, which made it a challenge.

And also, you know, Hall understands like,

the spacing, that needs to happen,

you know, for those 10 fingers

to be spread across those instruments.

T.S. MONK: That's something that Hall and Thelonious

had to talk a lot about,

"How are we gonna get the voicings?"

"How are we gonna get these harmonies?"

You know, translate what you're playing,

what you're actually playing,

to the instruments, and have it sound right.

NORTHERN: And whoever thought of tuba,

I mean, you know, the instrumentations...

This is quite different. Quite different.

WOODS: And I remember we rehearsed

the tune calle Little Rootie Tootie,

and it starts with... [SCATTING]

And then the ensemble... [SCATTING]

And everyone complained about the difficulty.

I mean, it was hard.

They complained about the tempos.

They complained about the...

The intervals.

Interval is the distance between

one note to the other is called an interval,

and Monk plays very awkward intervals.

Okay, back to the top. [SCATTING]

And then we get the... [SCATTING]

Train wreck.

And we're all saying, "Boy this is gonna be...

"This is gonna be a hard gig, man." [CHUCKLES]

NORTHERN: I wasn't accustomed to playing

some of those rhythms that were written in front of me.

And Monk, you know, he respected

that I knew how to play the horn,

but he knew that I was having a bit of a difficulty in swinging the beat.

You know, I was playing it more academically.

So, he called the musicians together,

said, "Let's take a, five-minute break,"

and the guys went out, and I didn't move.

And he saw that I was serious enough

to sit there and study my part, and he looked at me

and I looked right at him, and then he got up

from his piano

and went into a corner of the loft

and danced my entire French horn part.

[TAP DANCING]

He knew I was observing him,

so, we had eye contact for a minute,

and he danced the entire French horn part in Little Rootie Tootie.

Then called the guys back together

and I played it exactly the way he danced it.

That's the kind of teacher he was.

That was tough, hard music, man.

You know, he didn't embarrass me.

He didn't come up and say, "Man, you know, you having problems?"

He didn't say any of those things.

He just danced.

[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]

WOODS: It was special.

I mean, it'd never been done before.

It was not your basic stage band type of writing, you know.

WOODS: I mean, we get to Town Hall to do the concert and it was magic time.

[UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]

We played the heck out of that music, you know.

Monk was in rare form.

I mean he was even dancing great.

[JAZZ MUSIC CONTINUES]

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]

[TUBA PLAYING]

WOMAN: [OVER PHONE What's the name, sir?

SMITH: Uh... Popular Photography Magazine.

WOMAN: Thank you.

SMITH: Or Ziff Davis Publishing Company, either one.

WOMAN: The number is O-R-9.

SMITH: O-R-9.

WOMAN: 7-200.

SMITH: 7-200, thank you very much.

WOMAN: You're welcome.

[DIAL TONE RINGS]

WOMAN: Mr. Kinzer's office.

SMITH: Is Mike there? WOMAN: One minute, please.

WOMAN: Mike.

Mike?

I'm sorry, he's not around right now,

may I take a message?

SMITH: Uh...

No, it's rather important that I speak to him if I can,

if he's at all in the vicinityWOMAN: I'm sorry, I can't find him.

Can I ask who's calling?

SMITH: Well it's Eugene Smith, I...

I'm trying to find out, one, who my enemies are there,

and two...

WOMAN: [CHUCKLES Who your enemies are? SMITH: Yes.

And two, let it be known very frankly

that although I'm going to fulfill my present contracts,

they are not going to get any other books out of me whatsoever.

WOMAN: Well...

SMITH: I mean, this may not be important to them, so I...

WOMAN: Well, I'm certainl sure it is important to them.

Let me look around the office, Mr. Smith.

Will you hold on for just a minute? SMITH: Yes.

[PHONE CLATTERS]

STEPHENSON: He was isolated,

and he needed that isolation in order to do his work,

but he had to have a connection with the outside world.

I mean, he was desperate to find some kind of connection,

and he wasn't real good at it on an intimate level.

[MAN SPEAKING OVER PHONE]

[SMITH SPEAKING]

[MAN SPEAKING]

He required affirmation.

MAN: A very important telegram, pardon me,

everyone please stop, from Eugene Smith.

STEPHENSON: And he would send telegrams to

the Long John Nebel program,

and then they would read the telegram

on the air and he would tape it on his tapes.

MAN: Boy, he's economizing this morning.

One word, camera.

[LAUGHS]

STEPHENSON: I mean, some of those telegrams were very costly.

There's one that they talk about on the air that was like $50

in 1960 money, which is like $300 today.

This is when he's broke,

and he's sending these expensive telegrams

to the radio in the middle of the night.

MAN: [OVER RADIO] Here's another telegram, just came in.

Long John Nebel walks New York City...

"Please have panel discuss my previous telegram,

"signed W. Eugene Smith."

[MEN LAUGHING]

Hey, we should get him on some night, you know.

JOHNSON: He punishe himself. He locked himself up.

Took himself out of the world where he functioned.

He had all that passion, all that fire,

he just... It just was all bottled up in that space.

Well into the point I was married

and had children already, he would still call up,

and he was gonna commit suicide...

He was upset about whatever,

and we'd make these runs

in the middle of the night, down to see him

and comfort him.

And I remember

I had to go to work, and I said

"I'm not coming down, I can't come down,

"you know, you're doing this constantly,

"and I just can't put up with it.

"I've got my own life now."

And he said, "You don't think I'll do it?" And I said...

"Whether you do or not,

"I can't sacrifice my family

"to come down and help you every couple of days."

SWALLOW: It was a dark place.

There was a lot of tragedy unfolding in that building.

As remarkable as the artistic output was,

there was also a deep toll in personal lives

hitting the rocks, in that place.

I was burned out by the time I was 25.

I swear, I felt like I was 100 years old.

I wound up in Bellevue.

I mean, I was in the booby house,

at the top floor, which is the real wackos.

And I say that with all due affection,

because I really got attached to some of those people up there.

One day, I was sitting in the rec room, I think they called it,

and there was a magazine.

On the cover of it was Lena Horne.

I'm looking at this picture

and I was reminiscing, I guess, about the good old days,

which were just a few months ago. [LAUGHS]

And...

Tears started streaming down my cheeks.

And one of the attendants saw me there, you know,

said, "What's the matter with you, man?"

I said, "Oh, just looking at my old boss here, you know.

"I used to work with Lena."

"Mmm-hmm, I see, okay, okay, buddy."

And you could just see those wheels turning,

you know, and he thought,

I could've said I'm Napoleon or something

and it would've made as much sense.

So... [CHUCKLES]

[SOFT PIANO PLAYING]

It wasn't until much later

that I got to thinking about all this,

and I realized that Charlie Parker,

and Charlie Mingus,

and any countless

number of jazz players,

"heroes," had been through

the Bellevue experience...

So, I thought, well,

I'm chasing the bird, you know.

Any respectable jazz man...[LAUGHS]

Has to pay his dues, I guess.

Eventually, my parents came,

and they took me back to Charleston

and I never did make it back to New York.

SWALLOW: This may or may not have happened,

but the story that was

going around in the wake of Ronnie Free's departure from New York,

was that he saw death in the automat.

That he put his nickel in the slot,

opened the door to get his piece of cherry pie

and there was death.

He ran screaming from the automat,

and didn't stop till he crossed

the Mason-Dixon Line. [LAUGHS]

FREE: Years later, I get a manila envelope in the mail,

and I pull out this 8x10 glossy.

Of course Prez is right there with his horn

and his pork pie hat.

And Mary Lou Williams,

of course, I played with her,

and I played with everybody in there actually.

I recognize everybody but this guy,

and I'm thinking, "But, boy, he sure...

"He looks cool."[LAUGHS]

He really looks cool.

And then at some point I started remembering,

"Wait a minute!

"Oh, yeah."

And I didn't even recognize myself.

[VEHICLE HORNS HONKING]

JOHN F. KENNEDY: [ON TV] This sudden clandestine decision

to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil

is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change

in the status quo which cannot be accepted...

STEVENSON: The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

I went downstairs, and that's where

I really got to know Gene.

"Look Gene," I said, "We're liable to be toast here any time."

And he says "Yeah, I know."

And that wasn't so encouraging,

so I said, "Well, until then maybe

"we can just rap," and he says, "Yeah."

He said, "I've been listening to this Miles Davis'

"Sketches of Spain,"

and he says, "The damn this is nothing

"but a rip-off of Rodrigo."

That'll kind of give you a sense of Gene.[CHUCKLES]

MORAN: So, W. Gene Smit is, you know,

like "Yeah, by all means come in,"

you know, "I'm recording my life,

"and you just happen to

"intersect it at certain moments.

"I mean, I'm recording the radio when you leave.

"I'm recording the stairs, you know."

So, that space becomes so well documented

in those years that

it's more than just a snapshot of jazz.

It's like, this real snapshot of what New York

and American culture was kinda like moving through,

at, like, a very tense moment.

MAN: [ON RADIO I listened to the White House

in Washington D.C.,

and President Kennedy said that

state troopers were on their way.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]

There isn't really anything quite comparable

to what happened at 821,

because it's such a, you know, it's a real time capsule.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHENSON: The term "free jazz" popped up.

And the music became more spontaneous,

and free-er, and improvised,

which was exhilarating...

[UPBEAT TRUMPET PLAYING]

But not everybody was on the same page.

And I'm not sure the scene was really quite the same.

At least not in this building.

It was fragmenting.

It was kind of breaking down.

Okay, here is Gene Smith

in the loft,

actually in the hallway,

the outside of his floor, because his place had gotten so crowded

there was no space.

So, he was literally editing pictures in the hallway.

He was literally buried under the weight

of his belongings,

which included thousands of books,

and 25,000 vinyl records,

and millions of negatives.

So, he became just weighed down.

SMITH: Before I took over so much of it,

it used to be a rather interesting and exciting place.

There was a strange painter on the top floor,

and a musician underneath,

and my quiet and gentlemanly conduct

[CHUCKLES] to offset all of this.

I don't know, what else can you say about the loft?

FRIEND: You know I think every generation

has their romantics.

I mean, he was an idealist,

and a romantic, and a single-minded

person who thought

something that nobody in their right mind would think,

but that I believe too,

photography can change the world!

What?

That's so wrong.

That's so... It's not gonna happen.

But maybe there's something in that craziness.

SWALLOW: He had found such fascination

in this decrepit,

filthy loft building,

and the world that it contained.

[SLOW JAZZ PLAYING]

He'd somehow gotten the sense,

and I think correctly, that this was important.

We just thought we were going up there

to have a good time and play.

STEVENSON: There were just musicians

up one side and down the other.

And one of them was better than the next.

BLEY: It was just normal.

It was below normal.

It was like as subculture as you could get.

WOODS: It was life. We didn't think anything of it.

Now it's a big deal.

"Oh man, you played with..."

Yeah, so? You know, that's the way New York was.

SWALLOW: Very often what finally caused

the music to stop was the encroachment of dawn.

You'd look up and there'd be light coming in the window.

That, somehow, signaled that it was

time to go home, and go to bed.

It was also an experience

I really cherished, and looked forward to

every time to leave that building

at dawn, because it was the flower district.

And by that time in the morning

the deliveries were in full swing,

and the sidewalks were jammed

with a forest of the most exotic and beautiful flowers,

smelling as sweetly as you can imagine.

[SLOW PIANO PLAYING]