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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