I love this story from the New York Times, about a huge collection of old live Jazz recordings which have been gathering dust for 70 years but might now be heard once again. Back in the day, 78 rpm records were all that people could bring out and consequently all the classic old Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway tracks are three to four minutes long cos that's all you could get on one side of a 78. Of course, live jazz is the best jazz and all of those artists played far more creative and intense music when they played live, which at the time could only be heard either actually live, or on the radio.
Fortunately for the world, an eccentric audio engineer called William Savory, one of the few people at the time with access to aluminium and acetate record making equipment, made tons of recordings of live jazz from the radio, and then jealously guarded them till his death. Now a museum has bought and lovingly restored them so we are going to get to hear them.
Apparently you can hear the great musicians experimenting with new sounds and forms well before anyone could convince a studio to take a chance on new sounding records,
One notable example is a stunning six-minute Coleman Hawkins performance of “Body and Soul” from the spring of 1940; in it this saxophonist plays a five-chorus solo even more adventurous than the renowned two-chorus foray on his original version of the song, recorded in the fall of 1939. By the last chorus, he has drifted into uncharted territory, playing in a modal style that would become popular only when Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” in 1959.
Amazing. Canny wait to hear that shit.
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