W. Eugene Smith's The Jazz Loft Project arose out his Pittsburgh project. In 1955 he quit his longtime well-paying job at the magazine and turned his attention to a freelance assignment in Pittsburgh, a three-week job that turned into a four-year obsession. Smith never finished the book.

In 1957 Smith moved out of the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York and moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. 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 jazzmen.

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.

For the next eight years, the building became his home, his studio and, to an extent, his world. It also became the home of what came to be known as the Jazz Loft, a rehearsal and performance space that attracted the likes of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, as well as their retinue of musicians, hangers-on, dealers, girlfriends, visiting writers and photographers, and various colourful characters from the city's demimonde.

Diane Arbus passed through, as did Norman Mailer, Salvador Dalí, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. It became a kind of microcosm of the ever-changing nocturnal city.

As his ambitions broke down for the epic Pittsburgh project, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists which he documented in image and sound. Smith took an estimated 40,000 photographs of the jazz scene in and around the Loft. He also spent endless nights photographing the surrounding streets from his windowsill on the fourth floor. Frustrated by the limits of the still image, he placed microphones throughout the building to record rehearsals, impromptu sessions and even conversations.

The sounds and stories that emerged from those years are the basis for The Jazz Loft Anthology, a ten-part radio series now heard across four one-hour programs. This is a world in which playing music was sheer pleasure, without any thought of its destination or outcome; where jamming together was the greatest possible joy for hundreds of musicians who worked until 3 AM in clubs and then – looked for a place to play for a few more hours!