Historic Monterey Festival tapes

brownie · June 13, 2005

From the Monterey Country Herald today:

NEW LIFE FOR OLD JAZZ TAPES

Festival gets archive grant

By BETTINA ADRAGNA

Herald Correspondent

Recordings of live performances by Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and others at the Monterey Jazz Festival are in danger of deteriorating.

To help preserve these recordings and others from 1958 to 1969, the Grammy Foundation has given the jazz festival a $40,000 grant for its Archive Preservation Project to digitally reformat and catalog the archives, in partnership with Stanford University.

The digitized recordings will be put in an online database so that scholars can access them more easily, said Jason Arnold, marketing associate for the jazz festival.

The earlier tapes are in "troubling" condition, he said. "They've been deteriorating for quite awhile, so we want to make sure they're well preserved and taken care of so that people can listen to them and hear them in the best possible quality... Once everything is digitized, it'll be much easier to access and to manage."

The inspiration for the project comes as the jazz festival approaches its 50th anniversary in 2008, said General Manager Tim Jackson.

"We realized that we need to preserve old media... Sooner or later, that tape is just going to disintegrate." Currently, the archives are stored on various media, from quarter-inch reel-to-reel tapes to CDs.

The jazz festival wrote a proposal to the Grammy Foundation and other organizations, which Jackson thinks will be successful also. He's hoping that the music will be transferred and preserved over a period of a couple of years.

"The first 10 years of the Monterey Jazz Festival are a treasure trove of some of the greatest jazz performers of the history of the music," said Paul Fingerote, the festival's marketing director. "That's why this grant is so important, to help restore and preserve some of the greatest jazz artists and performances that have ever taken place and that happened to have occurred on the stages of the Monterey Jazz Festival."

The archives contain over 100 audio recordings from 1958-1969, including performances by Louis Armstrong, Harry James, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Housed in the Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound, they comprise more than 1,200 sound recordings, 370 films, and paper-based records such as festival programs and souvenir magazines.

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Jazz archives The archives recorded during the first decade of the Monterey Jazz Festival, from 1958-1969, contain the works of: Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Quincy Jones, Woody Herman, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk and Jimmy Giuffre. For more information about the Monterey Jazz Festival, go to www.montereyjazz festival.org/info/