[Dixielandjazz] Folklorist Alan Lomax's collection goes digital--NYTimes 1-30-12

[Norman Vickers]

To: Pensacola Mencken List, Musicians and Jazzfans list and DJML

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Here is 1-30-12  NYTimes story about  Alan Lomax collection coming available
soon.  I have printed below and also given the link.

( Don't know if it will come up for non-subscribers, but worth a try in
order to see photos which accompany the story)

 

Most on the list know that in late 1930s when Jellyroll Morton was in town,
Lomax got him to Library of congress, supplied him with piano, whiskey and
an audience.  Had him talk,  sing and play.  Presumably  recordings were
issued on '78s.  My first experience with them was a series of LPs.  He gave
a lengthy explanation of his concept of jazz-made sense to me. I still own
the LPs.

Some of his remarks were condensed and issued as a book-my memory suggests
that it's title was similar to the song title-Mr. Jelly Lord. (
discographers on the list likely will correct and amplify my observations.)

 

At any rate, a good story which should be of general interest to the
jazzfans list but also to the Menckenophiles.

( Mencken was a serious amateur pianist who didn't like jazz, couldn't play
it, and thought it demeaning  -- we, even Mencken, can't be right about
EVERYTHING;  but his Saturday night group - eating, drinking, conversing-had
a small chamber group and played classical music.  Mencken played second
piano to Max Broedel, a native of Germany who was brought over to Johns
Hopkins  U.as the first professional medical illustrator in the US.)

 

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/arts/music/the-alan-lomax-collection-from
-the-american-folklife-center.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=alan%20Lomax&st=cse>
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/arts/music/the-alan-lomax-collection-from-
the-american-folklife-center.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=alan%20Lomax&st=cse

 

 

 

  _____  

January 30, 2012


Folklorist's Global Jukebox Goes Digital


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/larry_rohter/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> LARRY ROHTER


The folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was a prodigious collector
of traditional music from all over the world and a tireless missionary for
that cause. Long before the Internet existed, he envisioned a "global
jukebox" to disseminate and analyze the material he had gathered during
decades of fieldwork.

A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax's
imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive - some 5,000 hours of
sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs
and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or
inaccessible corners - is being digitized so that the collection can be
accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free
streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for
sale as CDs or digital downloads.

On Tuesday, to commemorate what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday, the
Global Jukebox label is releasing "The Alan Lomax Collection From the
American Folklife Center," a digital download sampler of 16 field recordings
from different locales and stages of Lomax's career.

"As an archivist you kind of think like Johnny Appleseed," said Don Fleming,
a musician and record producer who is executive director of the Association
for Cultural Equity and involved in the project. "You ask yourself, 'How do
I get digital copies of this everywhere?' "

Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the
South,  Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was
the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what
Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his
efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle
booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution
of the 1960s and beyond.

Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness
of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing
concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously.
At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American
culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned,
Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America's greatest
contribution to music.

"It would be difficult to overstate the importance of what Alan Lomax did
over the course of his extraordinary career," said the writer Tom Piazza,
who has written an introductory essay for "The Southern Journey of Alan
Lomax," a book of about 200 of Lomax's photographs that is to be published
in the fall. "He was an epic figure in and of himself, with a musical
appetite that was omnivorous and really awe inspiring, who used the new
recording technology to go and document musical expression at its most local
and least commercial."

Lomax, a Texan by birth, devoted the last two decades of his life to the
Global Jukebox project. Looking for commonalities among musical styles from
all over the world, he early on began using personal computers to help
develop criteria to identify and classify such similarities, in the process
creating something very much like the algorithms used today by Pandora and
other music streaming services.

"Alan was doubly utopian, in that he was imagining something like the
Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he
thought of as predictive," said John Szwed, a Columbia University music
professor and the author of "Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World," a
biography published in 2010. "But he was also saying that the whole world
can have all this data too, and it can be done in such a way that you can
take it home."

That is one goal of the Association for Cultural Equity, which oversees
Global Jukebox and other Lomax-related initiatives from modest offices at
Hunter College in Manhattan, with a budget that was $250,000 last year. The
music Lomax collected has been available in 45-second snippets on the
<http://culturalequity.org/> Cultural Equity Web site for several years but
is now being digitized in its entirety for streaming, a process scheduled to
conclude next month; a similar process is under way for his radio shows,
lectures and interviews. Some music is also being sold in formats ranging
from iTunes and CDs to vinyl LPs. A small proportion of the Lomax material
has been made available on commercial labels like Rounder and Atlantic.

"This project has evolved as the technology has evolved," said Lomax's
daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, who is president of the Association for Cultural
Equity.

Lomax's primary interest was music, and he recorded not just across the
United States but also extensively in the Caribbean, Britain, Ireland,
Spain, Italy and even the Soviet Union. That led to an interest in comparing
global dance styles, and so the archive also has what Ms. Wood said was "the
biggest private collection of dance film anywhere, and from everywhere,"
much of which will be put online.

Even before digitization of the collection is complete, musicians, educators
and others have been dipping into it. Bruce Springsteen's new album,
"Wrecking Ball," due out in March, uses samples from the archive on two
songs, and more than a decade ago Moby drew heavily on Lomax's field
recordings from the South for his hit album "Play," as did the "O Brother,
Where Art Thou?" movie and soundtrack.

"We go from the attitude that we just want everyone to use it, whatever
their budget is," Mr. Fleming said. "If it's educational or for the press,
it's usually no charge, and when someone has a budget, well, then we just
want to get roughly what other people are getting."

Recently Google has come calling, with an interest in setting up a site to
preserve endangered languages, Ms. Wood said. Though the recordings Lomax
collected himself through fieldwork is enormous, the archive also contains
material that he obtained from other researchers around the world, including
spoken samples of languages that are now vanishing.

"Because he was so interested in so many different aspects of singing,
dancing and speaking around the world, he gathered everything he could find,
from disparate cultures," said Todd Harvey, curator of the Alan Lomax
Collection at the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, which
holds much of Lomax's work.

The Association for Cultural Equity also has what it calls a repatriation
program, meant to make Lomax's work available to the communities where it
was obtained and to pay royalties to the heirs of those whose music was
recorded. On Friday recordings, photographs, video and documents are to be
donated to the public library in Como, Miss., where in September 1959 Lomax
made the first recordings of the blues guitarist Fred McDowell, whose songs
were later covered by the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt and Jack
White of the White Stripes.

"My father always felt that part of his job was to give something back to
the people whose culture it was," Ms. Wood said. "It's a way of saying,
'What you do is worth something,' and what we do is an extension of that."

Ms. Wood has been immersed in her father's music collection all her life,
even accompanying him on some field trips when she was a child. But Mr.
Fleming's route was roundabout: originally a member of the punk band Velvet
Monkeys, he has produced records by artists like Sonic Youth, Hole and
Teenage Fanclub before succumbing to the beauty of the music Lomax collected
and especially the ethos associated with it.

"Alan saw immeasurable worth in something off the radar that everyone else
ignored or saw no worth in, and he was against that homogenized Top 40 world
that most people live in," Mr. Fleming said. "Just the idea of him out in
the field with his Presto recorder, dusting the thing off as it's running,
it's all kind of punk rock to me."