New York AES Section Blog

October 6, 2015 at 7:00 pm

Location: The New School for Jazz Performance 5th floor?55 West 13 Street?between 5th & 6th Avenues New York, NY

Moderated by: Robert Auld, AuldWorks

Speaker(s): Vincent Pelote, Director of Operations, The Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University; Seth B.Winner, President, Seth B. Winner Studios

Benny Goodman's January 16, 1938 concert in Carnegie Hall was one of the most important musical events of its era. It signified a major cultural shift, in which jazz was accepted as more than just entertainment played in "low" venues like brothels and speakeasy's.  The recording of the concert, first released in 1950, was an immediate hit and has never been out of the catalog since.  It is, simply, the largest selling jazz album of all time.

There have always been mysteries and misconceptions about how the concert was recorded and what source was used for the initial 1950 LP release.  Further, when Columbia reissued the concert on CD in the 1980's, it appeared that the original transcription disk recordings made in 1938 had been lost, so the first CD issue used the 1950 tapes.  In the 1990's, Phil Schaap, backed by the resources of Sony (who now owned the Columbia catalog), finally tracked down the original disks and produced a reissue from them in 1999.  That reissue was controversial, as many of the problems of reproducing 1930's era transcription disks were not dealt with as well as they might have been.  

So matters stood until recently, when Seth Winner, one of the most experienced historical transfer engineers around, came into possession of the original transcription disks.  At this AES New York section meeting Vincent Pelote and Mr. Winner will discuss the importance of this concert, the origins of this particular set of discs, and the problems that are present in this source as well as in all the previous re-masterings.  We will hear audio examples illustrating both the problems that are present and the digital techniques that can be used to restore the sound for possible future reissues.