Re: [ARSCLIST] Carnegie Hall 1957

[Matthew Snyder <msnyder@xxxxxxxx>]

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