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Author and curator Sam Stephenson has spent years researching and writing about famed LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith. But he hit the motherload with the contents Smith's Jazz Loft Project. The Jazz Loft was a dilapidated building on 6th Avenue and 28th Street that was a legendary after hour haunt for jazz musicians. Smith left his comfortable life to move in there in 1957.

"And he wired the building from the sidewalk to the fifth floor and made about 4,000 hours of tapes inside the building," Stephenson said. "He also made about 40,000 photographs both inside the building and of life in the old wholesale flower district as seen through the fourth floor window."

Photographs, video and recordings from Smith's Jazz Loft project are now on display at the New York Public Library for the performing arts at Lincoln Center. Visitors can see and hear greats like Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk and Zoot Sims.

The exhibit and book were a long time in the making. Stephenson found the tapes at the University of Arizona in 1998 while researching his third book on Smith. He spent four years just raising money to preserve the tapes even before listening to them.

"Well, the University of Arizona and the Archive of Creative Photography out there, they had the rightful policy that the tapes had to be rightfully preserved before we could play them. They feared that there'd be catastrophic loss during playback if they were improperly played," Stephenson said.

As part of it's partnership to present the exhibition the library will receive a copy of the audio recordings.

"So, it's interesting and sexy in many, many ways because of all the ways in which he tried to record, people putting microphones in the ceiling of other places where jazz was going on within that loft space and at the same time, the concept that we get to have this material. We'll get the oral histories, we'll get the music eventually so that the people that come here will be able to listen to it," said New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Executive Director Jaqueline Davis. "So, we feel like this partnership is amazing."

Stephenson says what makes the archive special isn't just the great musical moments, but the mundane ones.

"With these tapes, you do get to hear musicians who aren't playing very well either because they are trying something new and they just haven't nailed it down yet or they just aren't good enough," Stephenson said. "There are a lot of musicians in this loft who weren't that great even at their best. So having access to that level of culture, is something that I think, anthropologists have been trying to do for a long time."