[Dixielandjazz] The Savory Coillection -Part 2

[Stephen G Barbone]

Glimpsing the Jazz Hierarchy

Asked if the Savory recordings were likely to prompt a critical  
reassessment of some jazz musicians or a reordering of the informal  
hierarchy by which fans rank instrumentalists, Mr. Morgenstern  
responded by citing the case of Herschel Evans, a saxophonist who  
played in the Count Basie Orchestra but who died early in 1939, just  
before his 30th birthday. Evans played alongside Lester Young, who was  
one of the giants of the saxophone and constantly overshadowed Evans  
on the Basie group’s studio recordings.

“There can never be too much Lester Young, and there is some wonderful  
new Lester Young on these discs,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “But there are  
also some things where you can really hear Herschel, who is woefully  
under-represented on record and who, until now, we hardly ever got to  
hear stretched out. What I’ve heard really gives us a much better  
picture of what he was all about.”

The collection has already shed new light on what is considered the  
first outdoor jazz festival, the 1938 Carnival of Swing on Randalls  
Island. More than 20 groups played at the event, including the Duke  
Ellington and Count Basie orchestras, and though newsreel footage  
exists, no audio of the festival was believed to have survived — until  
part of performances by Count Basie and Stuff Smith turned up on Mr.  
Savory’s discs.

Other material consists of some of the most acclaimed names in jazz  
playing in unusual settings or impromptu ensembles. Goodman, for  
example, performs a duet version of the Gershwins’ “Oh, Lady Be Good!”  
with Teddy Wilson on harpsichord (instead of his usual piano), while  
Billie Holiday is heard, accompanied only by a piano, singing a rubato  
version of her anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit,” barely a month  
after her original recording was released.

“The record is more like a dance tempo, whereas this version is how  
she would have done it in clubs,” Mr. Schoenberg, a saxophonist and  
pianist who is also the author of “The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to  
Jazz,” said of the live Holiday recording. “You have the most inane  
scripted introduction ever, but then Billie comes in, and she drives a  
stake right through your heart.”

Because Mr. Savory liked classical music, the discs also include a few  
performances by the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, taken from one  
of her very early tours of the United States, and several by Arturo  
Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. There are even speeches, by  
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII, and a broadcast of James  
Joyce reading from his work.

The collection also provides a glimpse into the history of  
broadcasting, thanks to the presence of Martin Block, a WNEW announcer  
who hosted a show called “Make Believe Ballroom,” on many discs.  
Walter Winchell coined the term “disc jockey” to describe Block, whose  
citation when he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame gives him  
credit for being “the first radio disc jockey to become a star in his  
own right.”

Mr. Savory himself played piano and saxophone, and his choice of what  
to record reflects a musician’s refined tastes. “We’re lucky that he  
was such a jazz fanatic, because he really knew who was good and who  
wasn’t,” Mr. Schoenberg said.

According to his son Eugene, Mr. Savory was born William Desavouret in  
June 1916 aboard the ocean liner Mauretania, where his parents were  
passengers immigrating to the United States from France. (Mr.  
Desavouret, Mr. Savory’s son, said he did not know why his father  
changed his name.) He grew up in New Jersey and Southern California  
and showed an early fascination with technology, which led, while he  
was still a teenager, to his entry into the recording business.

A Mysterious Man

As best as can be reconstructed, Mr. Savory went into a Manhattan  
recording studio to make a demo for a group he played in, found that  
the equipment was not working and offered to repair it. That led to  
his being hired to maintain the gear and eventually to a contract with  
a studio that specialized in transcribing live performances off the  
air for radio networks and advertisers.

“He was doing these air checks, he told me, to get the balance in the  
recording, and recorded the shows on his own,” said Susan Schmidt  
Horning, a historian of technology and culture who teaches at St.  
John’s University in Queens and who interviewed Mr. Savory several  
times. “I think he was just interested in recording and loved music.  
He did it because he could do it. He knew the value of these  
recordings, artistically and commercially, and wasn’t going to let  
them go. “The recordings that the museum acquired end around 1940,  
when Mr. Savory moved to Chicago to work for Columbia Records and CBS.  
During World War II he was initially assigned to the Naval Research  
Laboratory, where, Mr. Desavouret said, he helped develop radar for  
all-weather fighter aircraft, but later also served as a test and  
combat pilot.

At war’s end, Mr. Savory went back to work for Columbia, where he was  
part of the team that invented the 33 1/3-r.p.m. long-playing record.  
In the 1950s he moved to Angel Records, EMI’s classical label;  
engineered or produced numerous albums there under the name W. A.  
Desavouret; married Helen Ward, a former singer in the Goodman band;  
and eventually moved to Falls Church, Va.

“As an engineer, Bill was remarkable, the guy who developed the  
technique for cutting the masters” of 78-r.p.m. recordings that were  
being transferred to the new format, said the jazz record producer  
George Avakian, 91, who worked with Mr. Savory at Columbia in the  
1940s. “He was an all-round character, a humorous, delightful guy who  
never got as much credit as he deserved, and he did so much.”

Mr. Avakian said he remembered hearing a few songs from the collection  
in the late 1950s, when he visited the Savory home, and still recalled  
the excitement he felt then about the quality of the music on the  
discs. “I asked him once, ‘How much more have you got?,’ and he said,  
‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Avakian said. “He was really vague about it.”

When he moved to suburban Washington, Mr. Savory took a job with a  
defense contractor, working, Mr. Desavouret said, on electronic  
communications and surveillance devices designed to pick up audio and  
data signals. His son also said his father told him that he was “a  
spook, connected with the C.I.A.,” an assertion he is inclined to  
believe because “when I’d come for Thanksgiving, we’d go out with six  
retired C.I.A. guys,” and because, on retirement, his father was given  
a memento calling him “the master of mysterious projects.”

After Mr. Savory’s death, his lawyer and heirs were not sure what to  
do with the meticulously annotated collection. Some of the boxes with  
discs had been sealed in 1940 and never opened again, and others had  
been damaged by exposure to water or were covered with “50 years of  
mold and gunk,” as Mr. Schoenberg put it.

Mr. Desavouret, a musician and retired computer scientist who lives  
northwest of Chicago, said, “When he died, I felt overwhelmed,”  
because “there was a danger it was all going to be thrown away.” In  
fact, he added, “Dad’s lawyer hired a couple of people to clean things  
up, and they dug through everything and threw away some stuff that  
they thought was not useful. So I had to issue instructions to  
preserve all the recordings and writings until we found out what the  
hell it is.”

Eventually, Mr. Desavouret had the recordings shipped to his home in  
Malta, Ill., where Mr. Schoenberg, who had been trying to track him  
down, finally heard them this spring and immediately realized that “we  
have struck gold.”