[Dixielandjazz] The Savory Collection Part 3

[Stephen G Barbone]

These were sent in 3 parts because they ar too long to get popsted in  
one shot. I apologize for their length but felt this is an important  
bit of information.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

 From Disc to Digital

“This has been on my mind for 30 years,” Mr. Schoenberg said. “I  
cultivated and pestered Bill Savory, who never let me hear a damn  
thing and wouldn’t even tell me what was in the collection besides  
Benny Goodman,” for whom Mr. Schoenberg, 52, used to work.

But because of deterioration, converting the 975 surviving discs to  
digital form and making them playable is a challenge. Mr. Schoenberg  
estimates that “25 percent are in excellent shape,” he said, “half are  
compromised but salvageable, and 25 percent are in really bad  
condition,” of which perhaps 5 percent are “in such a state that they  
will tolerate only one play” before starting to flake.

The transfer of the Savory collection from disc to digital form is  
being done by Doug Pomeroy, a recording engineer in Brooklyn who  
specializes in audio restorations and has worked on more than 100 CD  
reissues, among them projects involving music by Louis Armstrong and  
Woody Guthrie. The process involves numerous steps, beginning with  
cleaning the discs by hand and proceeding through pitch correction,  
noise removal, playback equalization, mixing and mastering.

“As fate would have it, a couple of the most interesting Count Basie  
things are so badly corroded that it took me two afternoons and 47  
splices just to put one of them back together again,” Mr. Pomeroy said  
while working on yet another Basie tune, a shuffle featuring Lester  
Young on clarinet rather than saxophone, his main instrument. “In  
almost every case I’ve been able to get a complete performance, but it  
can be very fatiguing to hear the same skip over and over again and  
have to close the gap digitally.”

Initially, Mr. Pomeroy was reluctant to take on the project, saying he  
had too much of a backlog to accept new work. But as Mr. Schoenberg  
recalled their initial conversation, standing in Mr. Pomeroy’s studio  
one morning last month, “when I said ‘It’s Bill Savory,’ he said,  
‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ ”

Mr. Schoenberg said the museum planned to make as much as possible of  
the Savory collection publicly available at its Harlem home and  
eventually online. But the copyright status of the recorded material  
is complicated, which could inhibit plans to share the music. While  
the museum has title to Mr. Savory’s discs as physical objects, the  
same cannot be said of the music on the discs.

“The short answer is that ownership is unclear,” said June M. Besek,  
executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts  
at the Columbia UniversitySchool of Law. “There was never any  
arrangement for distribution of copies” in contracts between  
performers and radio stations in the 1930s, she explained, “because it  
was never envisioned that there would be such a distribution, so  
somewhere between the radio station and the band is where the  
ownership would lay.”

At 70 years’ remove, however, the bands, and even some of the radio  
networks that broadcast the performances, no longer exist, and  
tracking down all the heirs of the individual musicians who played in  
the orchestras is nearly impossible.

In the meantime Mr. Pomeroy is plunging ahead. He has digitized just  
over 100 of the discs so far, and knows that additional challenges —  
and delights — await him.

“Every one of these discs is an unexpected discovery,” he said. “It’s  
an education for me. I can hardly wait to transfer some of this stuff  
because I am so eager to hear it, to find out what’s there and solve  
all the mysteries that are there.”