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 >