Further evidence has come in verifying the value of that cache of previously unheard recordings in the Savory Collection at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Proof is posted on Newsweek‘s web edition—tantalizing solos from the late 1930s and early ’40s by Mildred Bailey and Jack Teagarden; Lester Young with Count Basie; Roy Eldridge; Herschel Evans; Benny Goodman; Bobby Hackett; Lionel Hampton; and the John Kirby Sextet. To read the Newsweek story and hear the audio clips, go here.
Just for fun, here’s a later edition of the Kirby sextet with (left to right on your screen) Charlie Shavers, Sid Catlett, Charlie Holmes, John Kirby, Buster Bailey and Billy Kyle. This is from a 1947 move, Sepia Cinderella.

For previous Rifftides items about the Savory collection at the National Jazz Museum, see the August 19 and August 22 posts,

Deadlines are stacking up around here like cordwood or like the piles of CDs I haven’t heard. I have mixed feelings about deadlines. On the one hand, I’d like to avoid them. On the other, they help make it possible to meet certain commitments; feeding the family, for example. For the next few days while I chop away, posting will be intermittent and may lack the customary Rifftides profundity.

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.—Rita Mae Brown

Call me a braggart, call me arrogant. People at ABC (and elsewhere) have called me worse. But when you need the job done on deadline, you’ll call me.—Sam Donaldson

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.—Douglas Adams

The natural urge when running a distance is to push harder and finish sooner—to race against time. Every second behind a deadline is a little defeat.—Joe Henderson (the runner, not the tenor player)

In the meantime, here is interesting modish playing by Jeremy Pelt, flugelhorn and trumpet; J.D Allen, tenor saxophone; Dwayne Burno, bass; and Gerald Cleaver, drums. The video was made, evidently recently, at the Paris restaurant Duc des Lombards. YouTube did not supply the name of the tune. You may give it a title of your choice.

Many music lovers intrigued by the National Jazz Museum’s collection of newly discovered recordings wonder when they will be able to hear more than the samples on the museum’s website. Under current law, there is little likelihood that the music will be generally available in most of our lifetimes. That will change only if Congress loosens copyright restrictions. As an editorial in today’s New York Times explains,

Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach.
The Savory collection, like other sound recordings made before 1972, is covered by a patchwork of state copyright and piracy laws that in some cases allow copyrights to remain until the year 2067.

The editorial goes on to urge Congress to create exceptions in cases like those of many of the recordings in the Savory collection. To read all of the Times opinion piece, go here.
It makes sense that if slackening the copyright leash on a work of art causes no financial harm to its creator, the work should be made available to the public. If those “new” solos by Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins are as stunning as the few people who have listened to them say they are, let us hear them.

The government of France generated a storm late last week when news broke of its expulsion of Gypsies to Romania and Bulgaria. President Nicolas Sarkozy defends the policy as part of his administration’s drive for law and order. Critics say that the dismantling of Gypsy camps and the first waves of deportations of Roma people are human rights violations. They charge that the sweep is a cover to distract attention from the ruling party’s recent election defeats and accusations of campaign fund-raising violations. For an article recapping the situation, go here.
Whatever the facts and claims in this latest chapter of the ancient saga of the Roma, the plight of the Gypsies has generated renewed attention to a Gypsy who has been dead for nearly 60 years. Django Reinhardt may be the best-known Gypsy ever to live in France. Certainly, he was the most famous French jazz musician of the 1930s and a guitarist whose legacy includes dozens of 21st century bands modeled on his Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Here is a rare clip of Django and the quintet, evidently from a promotional film.

The Rifftides archive piece below is from May 15, 2006. It includes links to a site that streams many of Django’s recordings and to a Reinhardt CD set.

Django

Django Reinhardt died on this date in 1953. He was forty-three years old. Reinhardt melded jazz and the wild élan of the gypsy music he grew up with in Belgium and France. He began to be noticed in 1930 when he was twenty. By the mid-1930s he, violinist Stephane Grappellii and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France were sensations of Europe. By the end of the decade Reinhardt was also working and recording with Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Dickie Wells, Rex Stewart and other leading American jazzmen.
A few of his compositions–“Nuages,” “Djangology,” “Manoir de Mes Reves”– are in the basic repertoire. He was memorialized by John Lewis with one of the greatest jazz compositions, “Django.” The spirit and style of Reinhardt’s playing influenced innumerable guitarists, and several groups have patterned themselves on the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, but there has never been anyone like Django. If you need a reminder of or an introduction to his artistry, go to redhotjazz.com, scroll down to “Oh, Lady Be Good” and hear the joy Reinhardt and Grappelli generated shortly after they found each other in 1934. The site offers thirty-eight other QHCF tracks as RealPlayer downloads (complete recordings, not mere samples). This four-CD set at a bargain price is a fine survey of Reinhardt with and apart from the QHCF

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Thanks to Bill Vitka for alerting Rifftides to a BBC music-and-slide show of pictures by the master photographer who died over the weekend. The production lasts less than three minutes, but it includes some of the major works in Leonard’s portfolio. To see and hear it, go here.

This a couple of days old, but in case you missed the news of the unearthing and restoration of a cache of important recordings, see this New York Times article about the National Jazz Museum. Then read this followup. It will probably be a long time before the trove of new old music by Lester Young, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and others can make its way to the public in commercial albums.
In the meantime, the museum offers a few tantalizing samples.

Herman Leonard died last Saturday in Los Angeles at 87. A master of backlighting in smoky atmospheres, and of meticulous darkroom wizardry, Leonard photographed images that caught the mood of music-making by some of the most significant jazz artists of the 20th century. For an obituary, see the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s website. Leonard lived and worked in New Orleans for more than a decade until Hurricane Katrina ruined his house and studio and he moved to L.A.
On a wall of my music room is a prized signed print of Leonard’s shot of Dexter Gordon at the Royal Roost in New York at the height of the bebop era. The picture was widely known as an album cover, but like much of Leonard’s early work created for utilitarian purposes, it took on larger fame as a symbol of the spirit of jazz, and as a collectors’ treasure.
Herman Leonard, RIP.

With too many Rifftides posts lately about the deaths of prominent figures in jazz, it was good to hear from someone who documents the work of young musicians. The message came from Randy Cole in Montreal.

I’ve been making a number of short films, and I wanted to share one with you. Most of my films thus far feature two wonderful Montreal musicians, Al McLean on sax and Kevin Dean on trumpet.

Mr. Cole’s communique contained a link to one of those films. I was unfamiliar with him or the musicians in his feature. I am glad to know about them, as Rifftides readers may be. McLean’s and Dean’s rhythm section is bassist Morgan Moore and drummer Hans Verhoeven. Following a spoken word section and an impressive unaccompanied interlude by McLean, the quartet plays Dizzy Gillespie’s “Birk’s Works,” with comments interspersed.

Let’s hear it for Canada.
There are several other clips of Randy Cole’s film work on this You Tube page.