The story of how the Library found a rare Dec.
29, 1940, lacquer disc recording of one of the premier
saxophonists of all time and the first "jazz hipster,"
Lester Young, illustrates how research and discovery in
one Library collection can lead to another collection
with surprising results.
The existence of this previously unknown jazz
recording, mysteriously labeled "Jam Session, December
29, 1940," was revealed on April 11 before some 20
reporters and press cameras gathered in the Members'
Room of the Jefferson Building for the Librarian's
announcement of the fourth annual National Recording
Registry.
Gene DeAnna, head of the Recorded Sound Section in
the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division (MBRS), told, "the rest of the story" behind
the story, tracing the Young discovery to MBRS
cataloger Arlene Balkansky's research, during the late
1990s, in the Library's Margaret Mead Collection,
which, in several different formats, resides in
various Library divisions.
Balkansky was searching for information about a
silent film that was made by writer and folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston and anthropologist Jane Belo as
part of their study of religious ceremonies in a rural
African American community in Beaufort, S.C. They had
filmed services in the Commandment Keeper Church in
May 1940, in Beaufort.
Among Mead's papers Balkansky found letters to Mead
and Belo from one Norman Chalfin, who mentioned audio
recordings he had made part of the Hurston Beaufort
expedition. Balkansky tracked Chalfin to Pasadena,
Calif., located him with a call to telephone
information service for Pasadena and within three
minutes was talking to him. Chalfin acknowledged that
he was the audio technician who had accompanied
Hurston and Belo to South Carolina to record the
music, religion and language of a people before their
heritage and culture were lost to history. Chalfin
told Balkansky he still had his Hurston sound
recordings, among others dating from the 1940s, made
while he was pursuing a career as a professional audio
engineer. Eventually, his entire collection of 150
16-inch lacquer discs came to the Library in 2002, as
the Norman and Ethel Chalfin Collection.
While going through these discs to catalog them and
prepare them for preservation, DeAnna said, MBRS
researchers found not only the Beaufort church
recordings but also a disc with a recording on one
side of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony
in a performance of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis." The
Beethoven label had been scratched out on the other
side, which had been left blank, and someone had
written "Jam Session, December 29, 1940."
"The outer sleeve had some pencil marks showing first
names that would be of great interest to jazz
aficionados—Doc, J.C., Shad and, most intriguing, L.
Young," DeAnna recalled.
"When our audio engineer Larry Appelbaum cued the
disc, we were delighted to find a jam session
featuring Lester Young leading a small band in an
unidentified club," DeAnna said. Accompanying Young
were trumpeter Shad Collins, drummer Doc West,
trombonist J.C. Higginbotham and pianist Sammy Price.
The jam session recording lasted about 30 minutes and
filled the backside of the Toscanini recording,
probably made of a broadcast, and one side each of two
additional 16-inch discs.
Young made this recording in his prime, not long
after he had left the Count Basie Band, with which he
had been the featured sax soloist, and sometime before
he entered the Army at a time that began a downward
spiral in his health and career.
Of this recording, Loren Schoenberg, executive
director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, said: "Yes,
this was Lester's absolute zenith, and there is
precious little extant from this period. Imagine a new
Shakespearean sonnet, a Chopin nocturne or a Hemingway
short story—that's what we have here, an American
master, a true iconoclast, at his very best."
Engineer and jazz expert Appelbaum described Young as
"the first cool-jazz musician" who coined phrases
adopted by jazz musicians at the time and gave blues
singer Billie Holiday her nickname, Lady Day. The 1986
film "'Round Midnight" featured a main character based
on the life and music of both Lester Young and Dexter
Gordon.
"Lester Young was the link between the swing sound of
Coleman Hawkins and the bebop of Charlie Parker,"
according to Appelbaum. "He invented a new style, his
own saxophone language. The way he played then is now
the standard repertoire among sax players of today."
DeAnna compared the Lester Young recording with that
of a Carnegie Hall concert recording that Appelbaum
had discovered while listening to a Voice of America
tape selected for preservation at the Library.
Announced at last year's National Recording Registry
event as a recent discovery, this rare recording of
Thelonious Monk in concert with John Coltrane at
Carnegie Hall was made on Nov. 29, 1957. "You can
imagine that audience, in formal dress, listening
quietly and applauding politely. Even though they
played with improvisations, the Monk quartet obviously
had practiced; it was a tight performance," DeAnna
said.
By way of contrast, Chalfin made his three-disc
recording of Young and the others at a noisy
nightclub, which some speculate was the Village
Vanguard in New York City. While club guests smoked,
drank, chatted and probably danced, Young and his
group, were "loose," improvising on standards such as
"Royal Garden Blues," and the listener can hear Young
creating new sounds that were to influence the next
generation of jazz musicians. Heard in the Chalfin
recording is a club announcement that "the chili con
carne is ready."
A CD of the Monk recording, titled "Thelonious Monk
Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall," was a
top-selling jazz recording in 2005.
DeAnna said no one has come forward yet to release
and market the Lester Young recording, but the Library
will make a digital master to preserve the sounds from
the fragile lacquer discs. The entire Chalfin
collection is a leading candidate for preservation in
digital format, and the Young recording, "in our
priority for preservation, is at the top," DeAnna
said.
The electronic transcription technology that Chalfin
used to make field recordings in the 1940s was the
most advanced at that time. Amplifying sound to
literally "cut" grooves in lacquer-covered discs was
the next step up from acoustical recordings made with
wax discs. According to DeAnna, the Germans invented
magnetic tape technology during World War II, but the
Americans had not yet acquired tapes as a recording
medium in 1940.
When Chalfin took his "portable" recording equipment
to South Carolina, he had to string electrical wire
600 feet from a barn to the Commandment Keeper Church,
which had no electricity, DeAnna said.
"Thank goodness, these discs were aluminum-based,
coated with a thin layer of lacquer. After the war
started and aluminum became scarce, transcription
discs were made of glass and covered with a layer of
lacquer that peeled easily," DeAnna said. The Chalfin
discs are in danger of peeling, too, if they are not
maintained in cool, dry conditions.
The next step is to make a digital master directly
from the lacquer discs. However, noise and vibrations
from recent construction projects at the Library's
Madison Building have made it nearly impossible to
record analog discs at preservation quality, so this
digital-preservation project may have to wait until a
state-of-the-art digital preservation laboratory opens
at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in
Culpeper, Va., sometime next year.
MBRS preservationists also are in the slow,
painstaking process of restoring the Hurston film and
trying to synch the sounds captured by Chalfin's
recordings with the action in the film. Both the film
and three Chalfin discs are cataloged and awaiting
discovery and use by scholars.
