David Niven's jazz collection.

[Hardbopjazz]

Anyone seen this before? A collection of jazz recordings from David Niven donated to a school. I haven't downloaded any of this. Not sure if they are private tapes or commercial issue music. Who was David Niven? No, he isn't the actor from the golden age of Hollywood.  

https://archive.org/details/davidwnivenjazz?&sort=-downloads&page=2

 

Edited May 10, 2017 by Hardbopjazz

[Niko]

Given the limited information it's hard to judge whether all of it or just most of it is commercially issued... Strange idea to digitize that collection! Then again, those massive private cassette collection were a big thing in their time (as is currently discussed elsewhere here)

 

[Stonewall15]

Is there any kind of index to this massive collection? Also it would be nice to know which tapes (or portions of tapes) have never been issued on LP or CD. 

[Hardbopjazz]

I have no idea what this is. Someone asked me if I knew about this collection. I will download one and listen to it to see if it is unknown recordings or commercially released music. 

[Ted O'Reilly]

At a glance, it seems to be all commercially available material, with Mr. Niven acting as a d.j. for his own amusement.  It appears to be compilations all reduced to cassette, then digitized.  No doubt valuable to his family, but...   

[Daniel A]

"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. "

Unfortunately there are speed problems on these tapes. I sampled the (a?) Sinatra collection and 'New York, New York' was in Db. 

[clifford_thornton]

5 hours ago, Daniel A said:

Unfortunately there are speed problems on these tapes. I sampled the (a?) Sinatra collection and 'New York, New York' was in Db. 

Ha!

I'm not always sure that people at Archive.org vet what's being thrown up there (Grateful Dead notwithstanding).