Inside the boxes are wigs, maybe thousands, the inventory of a Chinese business that now holds the lease. Nothing about this nondescript building in the flower district betrays its decade-long history as a bustling clubhouse for the jazz scene, beginning in the mid- 1950s.
So it takes some effort to picture Thelonious Monk, one of jazz’s great composers, pacing these floorboards early in 1959 as he prepares for his momentous large-group debut at Town Hall, which would help lay the groundwork for a career beyond clubs. It takes imagination to place him and Overton at a pair of upright pianos, hashing out chord voicings for one after another of his songs. But these things did happen; that much we know from an extraordinary cache of tape recordings made by Smith, who had wired most of the building with microphones.
The Monk-and-Overton tapes account for just a fragment of some 3,000 hours of material amassed by Smith from 1957 to ’65. Because of the light they shed on both musicians, their value is inestimable. Monk, famous for his cryptic silence and cavalier methods, comes across as exacting, lucid, even voluble — an eccentric genius, yes, but also a diligent one. Overton, enlisted to orchestrate Monk’s knotty compositions, is revealed as a patient amanuensis and a brilliant foil.
“What’s obvious is their mutual respect, and the extent of their precision,” said the pianist Jason Moran, 34. “It’s crazy to hear how specific everything was.”
Mr. Moran is among a handful of people to have listened to the loft recordings at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, which is in the process of cataloging all of Smith’s tapes. On Friday, as part of a 50th anniversary celebration of the Town Hall concert, Mr. Moran will perform a postmodern tribute, complete with excerpts from the tapes. Together with a concert on Thursday — a more literal re- enactment led by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, which will be broadcast live on WNYC-FM in New York — it’s among the more anticipated jazz events of this year.
The larger story of the loft has been an immersive project for researchers at Duke, who have interviewed 300 people in 19 states. Sam Stephenson, who directs the effort and whose book on the subject, “Rhythm of a Corner: W. Eugene Smith and a New York Jazz Loft 1957-1965,” will be published by Knopf this fall, described a convergence of forces, saved for posterity by the will of one man’s obsession.
Smith moved to 821 Avenue of the Americas, near West 28th Street, in 1957, leaving behind a family in Westchester and a job with Life magazine, where he had perfected the photo-essay form. He fixated on the loft and the street outside, shooting 20,000 photographs while peering out of a fourth-floor window, as if it were the aperture to another camera. “Robert Frank, the photographer, was a friend of Smith’s,” Mr. Stephenson said at that window one recent morning (beside a tower of boxes marked “Jumbo Afro”). “He told me that Smith went from a public journalist to a private artist with this body of work.”
The tapes came out of the same impulse. Smith recorded hours of random noise, broadcasts, the comings and goings of the place. But because his fellow residents included Overton, the pianist Dick Cary and the painter David X. Young, he also got a cross section of jazz culture at a dynamic time. (He and Overton shared an open floor plan divided by a temporary wall; Cary was downstairs, Young upstairs.) The tapes include jam sessions and off-the-cuff interactions among dozens of musicians, famous and unknown. One night in 1961, Mr. Stephenson said, Smith’s microphones caught the drama of a drug overdose by the pianist Sonny Clark, who was squatting in the stairwell at the time.
