So what is the status of the VOA Archives now? Is the current data
available? Has the penultimate Carnegie Hall recital by Josef Hofmann
surfaced?
joe salerno
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Snyder" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Carnegie Hall 1957
> I thought maybe Larry Appelbaum would respond to the questions regarding
> this recording, but perhaps he's not on the list, or too busy to respond.
> He spoke at the Institute of Jazz Studies a few weeks ago, and here's a
> rough summation:
>
> VOA recorded the concert and LC began receiving the VOA archives (many
> thousands of recordings) in 1963. Jazz researchers (Lewis Porter in
> particular) suspected the existence of the tapes starting in the
> mid-1990's and made inquiries, but LC had years to go in their processing
> schedule and had never received any kind of list from VOA of what they had
> given to LC, so it was simply a matter of waiting for LC to work their
> way throught the pile. It wasn't until early this year that the tapes were
> discovered. Once they were, the quality of the recording and the
> performances was such that there was no problem at all securing the
> permissions of the Monk and Coltrane estates for release, and in fact T.S.
> Monk essentially took control of the situation and got the record company
> ball rolling.
>
> Two myths already seem to be growing up around this recording. One is that
> the tapes were "previously unknown." Again, researchers had known about
> the concert, and surmised that VOA had recorded it. If VOA had recorded
> it, tapes were most likely sitting in the vault along with the rest of the
> VOA archive at LC, it's just that there was no intellectual control over
> that pile, meaning no cataloging data of any kind. The second myth is that
> as T.S. Monk has said in at least one interview, "it's a miracle" that the
> tapes were found. It wasn't anything of the kind. Rather it was the
> result of money and resources being spent on a methodical processing job.
> Larry and his staff go into work every day with a new bunch of material to
> digitize and catalog, they do the job and they do it well. So many
> archives, as we all know, lack the staffing and resources to do the same
> kind of methodical, usually thankless work. In this case, we should be
> using the Monk/Coltrane issue as an example of what you come up with when
> you can process over the long haul.
>
> Matt Snyder
> Music Archivist
> Wilson Processing Project
> The New York Public Library
>
