A trove of buried treasure, discovered after decades of shadowed legendry about its whereabouts (and even its very existence); a fascinating wizard, who decades ago created the treasure in the first place; a dedicated and intrepid archaeologist who retrieves these valuable artifacts in person – that’s the stuff of a summer blockbuster, coming soon to your neighborhood theater or X-Box 360.
Except that in this case, the trove contains previously unheard recordings by some of the greatest jazz artists of the 30s and 40s. They exist in a format that few imagined possible at the time they were recorded, by a musician and technological genius, who squirreled them away, far from curious ears, for 70 years. His death in 2004 released his hold on them; now the techno-wizard’s son has sold them to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (NYC), where painstaking efforts have begun to digitize and preserve this remarkable music.
The entire story of “the Savory Collection,” which includes a vital Chicago connection (see below), appears in an excellent and detailed article in today’s New York Times. In a nutshell, it explains how a recording enthusiast named William Savory (born Desavouret on a transatlantic voyage from France) captured live radio broadcasts by the jazz giants who then walked the earth – among them Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, and Lester Young – using the then-unusual formats of 12- and 16-inch discs.
At the time, 10-inch discs, recorded at 78 RPM, were the common medium. But these could capture only about three minutes of music, which is why the studio recordings of that day are so short. With his larger discs – and sometimes recording at 33 1/3, decades before that became the industry standard – Savory could record the extended performances that jazz musicians favored in clubs and in concerts.
And since these “live” settings constitute the laboratory where most jazz experimentation takes place, these newly discovered discs reportedly offer valuable insights into the improvisatory process of major musicians. They also shed light on several less frequently recorded, but no less important, artists of the time.
It is unlikely that this material will find its way onto reissues for public sale, owing to the copyright complications of locating musicians’ heirs some 70 years after the fact. Loren Schoenberg, the executive director of the National Jazz Museum – who personally transported the discs in a rented truck from Malta, IL, the hamlet west of DeKalb where they were discovered – plans to make them available for listeners at the museum and eventually on line.
For more on all this – along with details about the fabulous and mysterious life of William Savory, who also did pionnering work on WW II radar and later eavesdropping technology, for the Defense Department and apparently the CIA – see the entire Times story here.
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