ARSC New York Chapter OCTOBER 2015 Meeting
A JOINT PRESENTATION WITH AES — N.Y. SECTION
7:00 P. M. Tuesday, 10/6/15
NOTE NEW VENUE -->
The New School for Jazz Performance
5th floor, 55 West 13 Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues) New York, NY
Join us for a Meet & Greet at 6:30pm Presentation begins at 7:00pm
Revisiting the Legendary 1938 Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert, or
"The Greatest Broadcast That Never Happened"
Host: Robert Auld, AuldWorks
Expert panel: Vincent Pelote, Director of Operations, The Institute of Jazz
Studies, Rutgers University Seth B.Winner, President, Seth B. Winner Sound
Studios
Benny Goodman's January 16, 1938 concert in Carnegie Hall was one of the
most important musical events of its era. It signified a major cultural
shift, in which jazz was accepted as more than just entertainment played in
"low" venues like brothels and speakeasies. The 1950 Lp issue of the
concert was an immediate hit and has never been out of the catalogue since. It
is, simply, the largest selling jazz album of all time.
Many mysteries and misconceptions have abounded about how the concert was
recorded and what source was used for the initial 1950 Lp release. When
Columbia reissued the concert on CD in the 1980s, it seemed that the
original lacquer discs made in 1938 had been lost, so the first CD issue
used the 1950 tapes. In the 1990s, Phil Schaap, backed by the resources of
Sony (now owner of the Columbia catalogue), finally tracked down the
original disks and produced a reissue from them in 1999. That reissue was
controversial, as many of the problems of reproducing lacquer from the
thirties were not dealt with as well as they might have been.
So matters stood until recently, when Seth Winner, one of the most
experienced historical transfer engineers who specializes in audio
restoration, came into possession of the original transcription discs. At
this AES New York section meeting, Vincent Pelote and Mr. Winner will
discuss the importance of this concert, the origins of this particular set
of discs, and the problems that are present in this source as well as in
all the previous re-masterings. We will hear audio examples illustrating
both those problems, and the digital techniques that can be used to restore
the sound for possible future issues.
Vincent Pelote is Director of Operations at the Institute of Jazz Studies
at Rutgers University, Newark campus. He has lectured on a number of jazz
topics such as Women in Jazz, Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, and The
International Sweethearts of Rhythm. He has compiled discographies of
Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, the Commodore record label and he is one of
the contributors to the Oxford Companion to Jazz. Mr. Pelote has written a
number of LP and CD program notes on jazz guitar, Mary Lou Williams, Benny
Carter, Johnny Smith and others. He is one of the hosts of the radio
program, "Jazz From the Archives," on WBGO-FM, Newark’s NPR affiliate.
Seth B. Winner is currently engaged in a NARAS-sponsored conservation and
preservation project with New York Philharmonic World War II-era
broadcasts. He established Seth B. Winner Sound Studios in 1990. Included
among his previous re-mastering clients are the Minnesota Orchestra,
Metropolitan Opera, Sony Music, Pavilion Records, Ltd., Crystal and
Universal Records. He has earned three Grammy Nominations and one honorable
mention from NARAS. From 1996-2004, he was co-chair with Gary Galo of
ARSC’s Technical Committee and a contributor to the CLIR
Technical Report concerning analogue identification, conservation and
preservation. Recent preservation and re-mastering projects have been
undertaken for The Cy Walter Archives, the Bach Aria Group, the Princeton
Symphony Orchestra and Mark Laycock, the Schnabel Family Foundation, the
Benny Carter and Benny Goodman Collections housed at Rutgers University’s
Institute of Jazz Studies, and a 4-CD package devoted to Jussi Björling’s
American radio broadcasts published by the American JB Society on the WHRA
label. Since 1989 he has re-mastered the critically acclaimed Vocal Record
Collectors’ Society Annual Issues. As a sound engineer at the New York
Public Library for almost 25 years, he has supervised the preservation of
such collections as the Voice of America, the National Orchestral
Association, the Little Orchestra Society, Roberta Peters, Henry Cowell,
Vincent Persichetti, Otto Luening and Eubie Blake. He has also been the
technical curator of the Toscanini Collection since 1988.
OUR NEXT PROGRAM WILL BE ON 19 NOVEMBER
Sonic Arts Center, Room 95, Shepard Hall, CCNY
Paul Kozel will present TOWER MUSIC, recording the sounds of Paris’s Eiffel
Tower ↂ
The Sonic Arts Center at CCNY offers 4-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees
in Music with a concentration in Music and Audio Technology. Their program
provides an in-depth curriculum emphasizing real-world skills with a
project-based approach. Students enjoy a well-rounded program, with
emphasis on audio technology, music theory, orchestration, and history to
help them compete in a field that today demands an ever-growing and highly
diverse skill set.
All ARSC NY Chapter meetings are free and open to the public.
Voluntary contributions to help defray our expenses are welcome!
To join ARSC, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org
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