In the 1930s, a young audio engineer recorded extended live performances on state of the art equipment, the sort of long jazz jams that standard 10in. records could not record. William Savory guarded it for decades and it has now been required by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. This stuff has never been heard before and holy shit is it good quality. I can't believe this stuff is from the 1930s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/ar...html?ref=music You can listen to some of the cuts here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...html?ref=music An example of the importance of this find:
Quote:
“The Savory Collection” consists of 975 discs with recordings of live performances broadcast by radio stations in the late 1930s, the height of the swing era, and into 1940. Recorded by audio engineer William Savory, the discs feature Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, Bunny Berigan and Lester Young, playing in the relaxed setting of a nightclub or ballroom, rather than the confines of a recording studio, where songs could not exceed three minutes in length. For that reason, and the quality of the music played, Loren Schoenberg, the executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, describes the Savory collection as “one of the greatest finds” in the history of jazz.Quote:
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.
