[Dixielandjazz] Library of Congress National Jukebox

[Robert Ringwald]

Library of Congress National Jukebox
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2011
The older a recording is, the historian Tim Brooks has shown, the less likely it
is to be commercially available. "Less than 4% of historically important recordings
made before 1925 are available from the rights holders," he found in 2005. But the
Library of Congress has now taken a serious step toward making historical recordings
available online -- for listening only, though, not for downloading -- with the National
Jukebox, introduced earlier this month.
Upon launch, about 10,300 tracks originally released by the Victor Talking Machine
Co. between 1900 and 1925 became available as streaming audio at
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
 . According to Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded-sound collection, in the first
two days more than a million people logged on; within a week, visitors had racked
up 600,000 plays. Listeners can play individual tracks or precompiled playlists,
or assemble their own.
No wonder people are so interested: The first 25 years of the 20th century represent
the birth of jazz, the blues, the Broadway musical, the big band, country music,
pop singing and the Great American Songbook, not to mention a golden age of opera
and a flowering of ethnic music. Superstars from the era still loom large: Enrico
Caruso, Al Jolson, Bessie Smith.
Mr. DeAnna says that the Jukebox had been in progress for nearly a decade, having
been developed by himself and his predecessor, Sam Brylawski, the Library of Congress's
David Sager, David Seubert of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and
others. "At one point, it was restricted to a hard drive that researchers could listen
to in the LOC reading room," he says. The hardest part was not the technology or
even the sheer labor of transferring more than 5,000 78s and cylinders, but negotiating
the rights issues.
"Most people assume these early recordings are in the public domain, but they're
not," says Mr. DeAnna. The majority of early records were released by two companies,
Victor Talking Machine Co. and Columbia Records. The Library of Congress approached
their corporate heirs, BMG and Sony Music, even before the two companies merged in
2004. (The question why 85-year-old recordings are not public domain will be examined
in a public hearing at the Copyright Office in Washington on June 2 and 3.)
The foundation for the National Jukebox is the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor
Recordings (EDVR) maintained by the UCSB --
http://victor.library.ucsb.edu
 -- which includes detailed information for all Victor records produced through 1927.
"We really needed their data to make this a reality," Mr. DeAnna says. "That's what
makes us different from iTunes." Where much of the info on individual tracks and
albums from Apple's music purchasing site is wildly erratic, the National Jukebox
strives for consistency in terms of proper artist info, song titles, composers, personnel,
date, etc.
Essentially, the Jukebox combines the EDVR data with sound files generated by both
the Library of Congress (the discs are cleaned and transferred at the Library's A/V
Conservation Facility in Culpeper, Va.) and by UCSB. The National Jukebox is not
only a collaboration of a government organization, a media conglomerate and an academic
institution, but of private collectors. David Giovannoni and Mark Lynch have jointly
assembled the world's premiere archive of pre-1903 Victor recordings. "They loaned
us about 800 discs, in beautiful condition, that nobody else had," Mr. DeAnna says.
"So we were able to engage expert collectors, and that's something we really want
to do going forward, to fill in the gaps."
One key showcase in the Jukebox is the digitized version of the 1919 "Victrola Book
of the Opera." This 445-page publication -- part catalog, part guidebook -- was already
multimedia for its day, offering synopses of more than 110 operas, photos of sopranos
and tenors, and listings of what selections were available. "The really neat thing
is that we have embedded links for all the citations in the catalog that we have
in the Jukebox," Mr. DeAnna says. The book's most often covered tune may be the "Quartet"
from "Rigoletto," recorded not only by Caruso but by, among others, an accordion
soloist and the Six Brown Brothers Saxophone Sextet -- all of which are playable
with a click.
The Jukebox has an agreement with Sony that will allow it to stream any track owned
by the company dated 1925 or earlier. It plans to fill in Victor tracks that aren't
already available even while it starts to compile the song data and sound files for
thousands of Columbia records. The Jukebox also has obtained the rights, from Universal
Music, to stream certain Decca sides from the mid-1930s on. "Now we just have to
see what we can do with the music publishing rights," Mr. DeAnna says. "We have some
ability to do blanket licensing with ASCAP and BMI. We'll see how that goes."
Given the current 1925 cut-off and inability to download, says the historian Mr.
Brooks, the Jukebox is "kind of like a movie theater that is only permitted to show
silent films, and then frisks you on the way out to make sure you didn't record anything."
Still, he sees it as a marvelous beginning. "It's certainly wonderful that the Library
has been able to make these resources available."
By and large, this is the most attention these discs and cylinders have received
in 85 years. And to hear these recordings from the early days makes you wonder how
they could have been overlooked for so long.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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