Museum Acquires Storied Trove of Performances by Jazz Greats

[Aristaeus]

For decades jazz cognoscenti have talked reverently of “the Savory Collection.” Recorded from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s by an audio engineer named William Savory, it was known to include extended live performances by some of the most honored names in jazz — but only a handful of people had ever heard even the smallest fraction of that music, adding to its mystique. After 70 years that wait has now ended

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/arts/ ... ml?_r=2&hp

[segarfan]

what an awesome find. they can't release these too soon for my taste.

[Aristaeus]

The Savory Collection Likely to Hold More Surprises for Jazz Fans

So what happens to “The Savory Collection” of classic jazz now that its existence is no longer a closely guarded secret and the first fragments of its riches have spilled into the public domain? There are nearly 1,000 discs in the collection, recorded by the audio engineer William Savory in the late 1930s and into 1940, the height of the swing era, but barely 10 percent of them have been digitized. What about all those other records?

Readers of Tuesday’s article on the discovery and rescue of the music in the Savory collection naturally have questions about how they can hear more, especially in purchasable CD or MP3 form. Mr. Schoenberg said that the museum, a nonprofit organization, is in discussions with Mosaic Records, a label that specializes in jazz reissues, about releasing the Savory collection on CD

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/ ... jazz-fans/

[Cousi]

YES!! I've heard about the Savory Sessions but in truth had forgotten about them since the person I'd heard it from said "we'll never hear any of them". This is awesome and something to add to my Wish List.

One notable example is a stunning six-minute Coleman Hawkins performance of “Body and Soul” from the spring of 1940; in it this saxophonist plays a five-chorus solo even more adventurous than the renowned two-chorus foray on his original version of the song, recorded in the fall of 1939. By the last chorus, he has drifted into uncharted territory, playing in a modal style that would become popular only when Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” in 1959.

I had heard that Coleman Hawkins was noted for his solos and really pushing the boundaries of the style but to hear that Hawkins was playing Davis before Davis did is just ... wow!

But because of deterioration, converting the 975 surviving discs to digital form and making them playable is a challenge. Mr. Schoenberg estimates that “25 percent are in excellent shape,” he said, “half are compromised but salvageable, and 25 percent are in really bad condition,” of which perhaps 5 percent are “in such a state that they will tolerate only one play” before starting to flake.

“As fate would have it, a couple of the most interesting Count Basie things are so badly corroded that it took me two afternoons and 47 splices just to put one of them back together again,” Mr. Pomeroy said while working on yet another Basie tune, a shuffle featuring Lester Young on clarinet rather than saxophone, his main instrument. “In almost every case I’ve been able to get a complete performance, but it can be very fatiguing to hear the same skip over and over again and have to close the gap digitally.”

Initially, Mr. Pomeroy was reluctant to take on the project, saying he had too much of a backlog to accept new work. But as Mr. Schoenberg recalled their initial conversation, standing in Mr. Pomeroy’s studio one morning last month, “when I said ‘It’s Bill Savory,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ ”

This is awesome news. Imagine finding surveillance videos of the capture of John Dillinger and multiply that by 975. This is phenomenal - words fail me.