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Berthold

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  10. So, What Are You Listening To NOW?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    Duke Ellinton "Niven Jazz Collection Tape 18

    please take a look here:

    https://archive.org/details/Duke_Ellington_Tape_18_1939

    This was totaly new to me and I´m amazed to find and listen to this.

     

    David Niven wrote in a text which you will find also around this link:

    An Early Jazz Recording Collection
    by David W. Niven
    My 20-year-old cousin introduced me to jazz when I
    was 10. It was a 10” 78 RPM OK recording of “My
    Heart” made in Chicago on November 12, 1925, by
    Louis Armstrong's Hot Five with Kid Ory, trombone;
    Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Lil Armstrong, piano; and
    Johnny St. Cyr, banjo. On the reverse was “Cornet
    Chop Suey.”
    My hip cousin then advised me to get some recordings
    by another cornetist, Bix Beiderbecke, who started
    recording for OK the same year (1925). I dug, again,
    into my newspaper route money (35 cents) and bought
    the October 5, 1927, recording of “At the Jazz Band
    Ball,” backed by “Jazz Me Blues” by “Bix and his
    Gang”: Bix on cornet; Bill Rank, trombone; Don
    Murray, clarinet; Adrian Rollini, bass sax; Frank
    Signorelli, piano; and Chauncey Morehouse, drums.
    Over the next few years, I acquired every record Bix
    made prior to his early death in 1931.
    Encouraged by my interest in jazz recordings, my
    cousin came up with a third suggestion for my
    collection: Duke Ellington. One year prior to Louis'
    and Bix's first recording, Duke and his six piece band
    “The Washingtonians” with Bubber Miley, cornet;
    Charlie Irvis, trombone; Otto Hardwicke, sax; Fred
    Guy, banjo; Sonny Greer, drums; and Duke, piano, had
    their initial commercial recording date in November
    1924. I became the proud owner of every recording up
    to the start of WWII and some 75% of his recordings
    until his death in 1974, some 180 hours of the recorded
    Duke Ellington.
    Throughout the ten years prior to WWII, during my
    high school and college years, my 78 RPM 10”,
    followed by 33 1/3 RPM LP, collection grew to the
    thousands. All the big names of jazz, along with lesser
    legends, were included, and I found myself with a first
    class treasure of early jazz music. But I also found that
    such a collection was a first-class burden when I was
    moving through the post-war years with family,
    financial, and other fidelity responsibilities taking
    priority. I had always hoped that maybe at least one of
    my kids would show an interest in my collection, so I
    began making tapes that could include a chronological
    compilation of my collection, along with commentary:
    date and place of recording, personnel, soloists, etc.
    The main reason for doing this rather major project
    was to put my collection into some kind of
    compendium form that would attract my children to
    the music that had been of such significance in my life.
    My collection amounted to over 10,00015 hours of
    tapes. I will list here most (but not all) of the Legends
    included, along with the years of their recording and
    the number of hours on the tapes.
    No two people will agree with my selection of
    Legends. I decided to choose from the years prior to
    the BeBop period, i.e., before Gillespie, Bird, Monk,
    Miles.
    Archivist's Notes
    by Kevin J. Powers
    Origins
    It appears, based on Mr. Niven's audio commentaries
    referencing certain artists still being alive at the time of
    the commentaries (for example, Buck Clayton, who
    passed away in 1991, is living, and Johnny Hodges'
    salary is compared to “1993 dollars”), that he put the
    tape compilation together during a period of time
    beginning somewhere in the mid to late 1980s and
    ending somewhere in the early 1990s. His own
    memory on this point is no longer clear. In my
    conversations with Mr. Niven, he has indicated that the
    materials in this selection of “Early Jazz Legends”
    only represents about 40-50% of what he once had in
    his jazz record collection. Other legends, such as
    Bennie Moten and many, many others, were in his
    collection did not make the “cut” for these tapes.
    Mr. Niven contacted Steve Massey, Director of Music
    for the Foxborough Public Schools and Director of the
    Foxborough High School Jazz Program, in autumn of
    2010 with an offer for the music program to
    “download” the tapes for use by the students. Mr.
    Niven was probably not aware of the fact that there is
    no way to download cassette tapes as one would
    download a CD or other digital medium to a computer.
    Instead, cassette tapes, to be converted to a digital
    format, must be played back in their entirety into a
    15 Archivist's note: The actual figure is “over 1,000 hours of
    tapes,” a still very remarkable collection.
    computer sound card and recorded in real-time—just
    as creating a new cassette from another cassette
    requires playing the entire source cassette while
    recording into the copy cassette. In other words, while
    a CD can be downloaded to digital audio in a minute or
    so, a 90-minute cassette requires 90 minutes in order to
    be converted to digital audio; a 110-minute cassette
    requires 110 minutes in order to be converted to digital
    audio, and so forth.
    Equipment & Process
    For this project, I used a TEAC AD-500 cassette deck,
    a desktop computer with a modern SoundBlaster sound
    card, and the audio recording program GoldWave.
    Each cassette was recorded to a single WAV-format file
    at 44100 kHz, 16-bit quality, to match the quality of
    CD-audio. Each resulting WAV file was split at the
    division between Side A and Side B of the cassette, in
    order to make it possible for each WAV file to fit on a
    single 80-minute CD.
    I did not have the time (though perhaps someone else
    will in the future) to cut the WAV files into shorter
    segments for each individual tune. To have done so
    would have delayed this project many years. At any
    rate, much of the joy involved in listening to these
    tapes is having Mr. Niven's insightful commentary as a
    guide. Especially for a generation of listeners who
    have grown up pulling individual MP3 files for
    specific tunes off of the Internet, it is a beneficial
    experience to have a jazz expert (as Mr. Niven most
    definitely is) guide the listener through the life and
    times of the most illustrious figures in jazz—and, in
    the process, introduce the listener to numerous
    recordings with which he is doubtless unfamiliar.
    Although MP3 files are more common than WAV files,
    only WAV files, while much larger, are complete,
    uncompressed reproductions of the sound recorded by
    the computer. The compression process involved in
    producing an MP3 removes portions of sound.
    Therefore, while this project will ultimately include a
    corresponding set of high-quality MP3 files, the WAV
    files will remain as a fully accurate reproduction of the
    tapes.
    At Steve Massey's request, I began archiving these
    cassettes in November of 2010. The project was
    completed in October of 2011. We started with Benny
    Goodman Tape 1, and we ended the initial run with the
    final recordings of Duke Ellington And His Orchestra.
    We then made corrected copies of about 60 tapes that
    appeared to have had gaps in their initial run copies.
    Liner Cards
    In order to create a complete copy of all of Mr. Niven's
    liner cards, I scanned each card at 400 dpi resolution.
    The JPEG images that resulted are as legible as the
    original liner cards. Until I or someone else type up all
    of the liner card listings, we have a complete copy of
    the cards.
    Each card lists artist, tape number, years, and tunes.
    Below the tunes is a key to the numbers next to each
    tune, which indicate the source recordings. For
    example “1 Cottontail” and “1: RCA Victor LP In A
    Mellotone” indicates that the recording of “Cottontail”
    is from RCA Victor LP “In a Mellotone.”
    Condition of the Tapes
    Many, if not most, of these tapes are in terrific shape,
    but others are in mediocre or even poor condition. I
    have rigorously and regularly cleaned, maintained, and
    tested (with known excellent-condition cassettes) the
    heads of the cassette deck used for this project. All
    defects heard here are on the tapes themselves rather
    than the deck used to play the tapes back.
    Final Thoughts
    This is an extraordinary collection. It has been Mr.
    Niven's life's work. It represents the very finest
    American music of the twentieth century, and because
    Mr. Niven took the time and care to record these
    commentaries, he has produced a library that is
    accessible to everyone from jazz aficionados to jazz
    novices. For the Foxborough High School Jazz
    Program, which has enriched the lives of so many
    students, this remarkable compendium of jazz
    recordings should similarly enrich the program itself.
    This is all made even more remarkable by the fact that,
    had Mr. Niven not had the foresight to contact Steve
    Massey in 2010, this entire collection may have
    disappeared. How many collections of jazz like this
    get junked after estate sales every year?
    Thank you, David—your devotion to jazz will enrich
    the musical education of hundreds of students!

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