The story of how the Library found a rare Dec. 29, 1940, lacquer
disc recording of one of the premier saxophonists of all time and the first
"jazz hipster," Lester Young, illustrates how research and discovery in
one Library collection can lead to another collection with surprising results.
The existence of this previously unknown jazz recording, mysteriously
labeled "Jam Session, December 29, 1940," was revealed on April 11 before
some 20 reporters and press cameras gathered in the Members' Room of the
Jefferson Building for the Librarian's announcement of the fourth annual
National Recording Registry.
Gene DeAnna, head of the Recorded Sound Section in the Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS), told, "the rest of the
story" behind the story, tracing the Young discovery to MBRS cataloger
Arlene Balkansky's research, during the late 1990s, in the Library's Margaret
Mead Collection, which, in several different formats, resides in various
Library divisions.
Balkansky was searching for information about a silent film that was
made by writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and anthropologist Jane
Belo as part of their study of religious ceremonies in a rural African
American community in Beaufort, S.C. They had filmed services in the Commandment
Keeper Church in May 1940, in Beaufort.
Among Mead's papers Balkansky found letters to Mead and Belo from one
Norman Chalfin, who mentioned audio recordings he had made part of the
Hurston Beaufort expedition. Balkansky tracked Chalfin to Pasadena, Calif.,
located him with a call to telephone information service for Pasadena and
within three minutes was talking to him. Chalfin acknowledged that he was
the audio technician who had accompanied Hurston and Belo to South Carolina
to record the music, religion and language of a people before their heritage
and culture were lost to history. Chalfin told Balkansky he still had his
Hurston sound recordings, among others dating from the 1940s, made while
he was pursuing a career as a professional audio engineer. Eventually,
his entire collection of 150 16-inch lacquer discs came to the Library
in 2002, as the Norman and Ethel Chalfin Collection.
While going through these discs to catalog them and prepare them for
preservation, DeAnna said, MBRS researchers found not only the Beaufort
church recordings but also a disc with a recording on one side of Arturo
Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in a performance of Beethoven's "Missa
Solemnis." The Beethoven label had been scratched out on the other side,
which had been left blank, and someone had written "Jam Session, December
29, 1940."
"The outer sleeve had some pencil marks showing first names that would
be of great interest to jazz aficionados—Doc, J.C., Shad and, most intriguing,
L. Young," DeAnna recalled.
"When our audio engineer Larry Appelbaum cued the disc, we were delighted
to find a jam session featuring Lester Young leading a small band in an
unidentified club," DeAnna said. Accompanying Young were trumpeter Shad
Collins, drummer Doc West, trombonist J.C. Higginbotham and pianist Sammy
Price.
The jam session recording lasted about 30 minutes and filled the backside
of the Toscanini recording, probably made of a broadcast, and one side
each of two additional 16-inch discs.
Young made this recording in his prime, not long after he had left the
Count Basie Band, with which he had been the featured sax soloist, and
sometime before he entered the Army at a time that began a downward spiral
in his health and career.
Of this recording, Loren Schoenberg, executive director of the Jazz
Museum in Harlem, said: "Yes, this was Lester's absolute zenith, and there
is precious little extant from this period. Imagine a new Shakespearean
sonnet, a Chopin nocturne or a Hemingway short story—that's what we have
here, an American master, a true iconoclast, at his very best."
Engineer and jazz expert Appelbaum described Young as "the first cool-jazz
musician" who coined phrases adopted by jazz musicians at the time and
gave blues singer Billie Holiday her nickname, Lady Day. The 1986 film
"'Round Midnight" featured a main character based on the life and music
of both Lester Young and Dexter Gordon.
"Lester Young was the link between the swing sound of Coleman Hawkins
and the bebop of Charlie Parker," according to Appelbaum. "He invented
a new style, his own saxophone language. The way he played then is now
the standard repertoire among sax players of today."
DeAnna compared the Lester Young recording with that of a Carnegie Hall
concert recording that Appelbaum had discovered while listening to a Voice
of America tape selected for preservation at the Library. Announced at
last year's National Recording Registry event as a recent discovery, this
rare recording of Thelonious Monk in concert with John Coltrane at Carnegie
Hall was made on Nov. 29, 1957. "You can imagine that audience, in formal
dress, listening quietly and applauding politely. Even though they played
with improvisations, the Monk quartet obviously had practiced; it was a
tight performance," DeAnna said.
By way of contrast, Chalfin made his three-disc recording of Young and
the others at a noisy nightclub, which some speculate was the Village Vanguard
in New York City. While club guests smoked, drank, chatted and probably
danced, Young and his group, were "loose," improvising on standards such
as "Royal Garden Blues," and the listener can hear Young creating new sounds
that were to influence the next generation of jazz musicians. Heard in
the Chalfin recording is a club announcement that "the chili con carne
is ready."
A CD of the Monk recording, titled "Thelonious Monk Quartet with John
Coltrane at Carnegie Hall," was a top-selling jazz recording in 2005.
DeAnna said no one has come forward yet to release and market the Lester
Young recording, but the Library will make a digital master to preserve
the sounds from the fragile lacquer discs. The entire Chalfin collection
is a leading candidate for preservation in digital format, and the Young
recording, "in our priority for preservation, is at the top," DeAnna said.
The electronic transcription technology that Chalfin used to make field
recordings in the 1940s was the most advanced at that time. Amplifying
sound to literally "cut" grooves in lacquer-covered discs was the next
step up from acoustical recordings made with wax discs. According to DeAnna,
the Germans invented magnetic tape technology during World War II, but
the Americans had not yet acquired tapes as a recording medium in 1940.
When Chalfin took his "portable" recording equipment to South Carolina,
he had to string electrical wire 600 feet from a barn to the Commandment
Keeper Church, which had no electricity, DeAnna said.
"Thank goodness, these discs were aluminum-based, coated with a thin
layer of lacquer. After the war started and aluminum became scarce, transcription
discs were made of glass and covered with a layer of lacquer that peeled
easily," DeAnna said. The Chalfin discs are in danger of peeling, too,
if they are not maintained in cool, dry conditions.
The next step is to make a digital master directly from the lacquer
discs. However, noise and vibrations from recent construction projects
at the Library's Madison Building have made it nearly impossible to record
analog discs at preservation quality, so this digital-preservation project
may have to wait until a state-of-the-art digital preservation laboratory
opens at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va.,
sometime next year.
MBRS preservationists also are in the slow, painstaking process of restoring
the Hurston film and trying to synch the sounds captured by Chalfin's recordings
with the action in the film. Both the film and three Chalfin discs are
cataloged and awaiting discovery and use by scholars.
Source: Information Bulletin
Library Of Congress
May 2006
