Archives and Records

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares199 Views

    Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67

    by

    He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research on the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own.Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who over a long career at the Library of Congress helped make it a leading center for research into the history of jazz, discovering a number of important recordings along the way, died on Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67.His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress’s most complex tasks: the preservation of recorded speech and music, often involving its transfer from one format to another. As part of that effort, he acquired and processed collections of old recordings, a job that offered no end of drudge work, but also the opportunity for serendipitous finds.His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings — fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.“There was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,” he recalled in an interview for the D.C. Jazz Festival.As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, “Thelonious Monk Quartet,” with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.“It was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, ‘That’s John Coltrane,’” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Jonas Mekas, Master of Avant-Garde Film, Shows His Tender Side

      by

      Mekas’s diaristic film clips, left behind when he died, fuel a new documentary that renders an intimate portrait of a man who often trafficked in the abstract.For 70 years Jonas Mekas, widely seen as the godfather of American avant-garde film, created nearly daily visual documents that showed elements of his life.He called them “film diaries.” They were recorded on film reels and tapes that were stored in cardboard sleeves with labels like “angry dog,” “small memorabilia” and “Warhol.” Those were stacked throughout Mekas’s loft in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, organized in a way that only he fully understood.After Mekas died in 2019 at 96, a re-creation of the cluttered loft was installed on the fifth floor of an arts center in New Jersey, including the recordings and other possessions: Mekas’s old film editing equipment. A cardboard box with trimmings from the beard of his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. A scarf he brought when fleeing his home country, Lithuania, in the 1940’s and held onto while surviving a Nazi labor camp.In the summer of 2020, the filmmaker KD Davison started sifting through those archives to create a documentary about Mekas. That film, “Fragments of Paradise,” will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 13.The documentary draws heavily from Mekas’s visual diaries, which Davison said seemed to reflect the rootlessness he experienced as a refugee during World War II and his enduring search for moments of beauty or calm.“I began to see this melancholy that I think isn’t often associated with Jonas,” she said. “It was like watching someone through the course of their life reconcile themselves with loss and begin to find freedom and joy just in the present moment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      How Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

      by

      Five recent books collect photographs, memories and ephemera from the hardcore band Agnostic Front, the mysterious dance artist Aphex Twin, the rap collective Odd Future and more.Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.Roger Miret with Todd Huber, ‘Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives’Roger Miret and Todd Huber; via American Made KustomThe early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. “Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives” is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band’s tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages. And brief personal recollections from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.‘Liquid Sky’via Emperor Go!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      A Lost Silent Film About Lincoln Was Unearthed by an Intern

      by

      “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 movie directed by the pioneering filmmaker Francis Ford, was found at a stock-footage library on Long Island.No intern task is too small. Not getting coffee, not running errands and certainly not rummaging through piles of old films only to dig up a long-lost piece of history.When Dan Martin was asked to sort through dozens of old film cans, some of which were rusted shut, at Historic Films Archive, a stock-footage library on Long Island, he was happy to do the unglamorous work. He described the company’s climate-controlled storage vault as a “dark, concrete basement” flush with films.“This is the sort of thing that you go to school for as a film preservation student,” said Martin, 26, who is studying at Toronto Metropolitan University.Standing in the vault during the final week of his internship last August, Martin could have picked his next stack of films from any number of shelves. The one he happened to select included a remarkable discovery: five film cans containing 16-millimeter film of “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 picture that was one of more than 7,000 silent films considered lost by the Library of Congress.“The Heart of Lincoln,” directed by and starring Francis Ford, was among roughly 10,000 films donated about 20 years ago from a university in the Midwest, said Joe Lauro, the owner of Historic Films Archive. “Most of the films from that collection were educational films that were shown in classrooms,” he said. Those films were typically discarded by the institutions when they became worn out.It is the second Lincoln film by Ford — a pioneer in early Hollywood and the older brother of John Ford, the Oscar-winning director — that has been found in recent years. In 2010, a copy of his “When Lincoln Paid” (1913) was discovered by a contractor during a demolition of a New Hampshire barn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      How to Plan a Family Heritage Trip

      by

      In the second season of the TV show “The White Lotus,” three generations of a fictional American family travel to Sicily to try to reconnect with their ancestral roots. Though their journey goes hilariously wrong at times, heritage trips like theirs have become serious business.Decades ago, Americans who were interested in traveling to explore their roots had to rely on family lore, sort through dusty books and, often, follow their gut. But DNA-testing sites, online genealogical databases and social media have made searching far easier, fueling a growing interest in heritage travel.Global heritage tourism is a nearly $600-billion-a-year industry, which is expected to keep growing by about 4 percent annually through 2030, according to market analysis by Grand View Research. And TV programs like “Who Do You Think You Are?” and “Finding Your Roots,” which follow mostly celebrities as they discover their heritage, are continuing to inspire other journeys.Not everyone goes on a heritage trip for the same reason: Maybe you want to meet living relatives to swap photos and stories. Maybe you are tracking down official documents to obtain dual citizenship. Or you could simply be looking to connect with a place your family once called home.Here are some tips for planning your own heritage trip.Follow your DNAServices like Ancestry.com, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage and the struggling 23andMe use your genes to decode your family’s likely places of origin. Other DNA-testing websites cater to specific ethnic groups, like African Ancestry or Somos Ancestria, for Latino origins. The cost of the DNA test kits, which usually require a saliva sample, can vary from about $40 to $300, depending on the company and how detailed you want your results to be.Do some free online sleuthingBirth, death, marriage and census records can help you narrow your search to specific places. You can dig into these sources through the U.S. Census Bureau or the National Archives and Records Administration. If you don’t know where to start, FamilySearch is an easy-to-use, free website funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (You don’t have to be a member of the church to use it.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Michael Cuscuna, Who Unearthed Hidden Jazz Gems, Dies at 75

      by

      Possibly the most prolific archival record producer in history, he was a founder of the Mosaic label, which became the gold standard of jazz reissues.Michael Cuscuna, who brought an artist’s level of devotion and a scientist’s attention to detail to the work of exhuming and producing archival jazz recordings — work that vastly expanded access to the buried treasures of American music’s past — died on Saturday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 75.The singer and songwriter Billy Vera, a friend of more than 60 years, said the cause was complications of esophageal cancer.Mr. Cuscuna may have been the most prolific archival record producer in history. Starting in an era when midcentury jazz experienced a resurgence of interest, his name showed up in the fine print on over 2,600 albums, most of them reissues, many of which included his painstaking liner notes.The Mosaic label, which he founded with the music-business veteran Charlie Lourie 41 years ago, has become the gold standard of archival jazz releases. Its first issue was an exhaustive boxed set of old material that Mr. Cuscuna had found in the vaults of the famed Blue Note label.Soon after that, he helped to revive Blue Note, which had been dormant for years. Working with Bruce Lundvall, who became Blue Note’s president in 1984, Mr. Cuscuna took charge of the label’s back catalog. He released unissued gold by John Coltrane, Art Blakey and numerous others, ultimately combing through the entire catalog and putting out virtually every lost track that seemed fit to be heard.Mr. Cuscuna in the 1970s with Bruce Lundvall, center, who was the president of CBS Records at the time, and the saxophonist Dexter Gordon. When Mr. Lundvall took over the venerable jazz label Blue Note, Mr. Cuscuna took charge of its back catalog.via Cuscuna familyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.

      by

      For decades, recordings left at studios have languished in storage rooms and basements. Master Tape Rescue, a company of two industry vets, is coming to save them.In late 2020, Brian Kehew was working at the venerable Hollywood studio Sunset Sound when the owner asked him to help identify some tapes the Who had left behind. It was not an unusual request for Kehew, who has done tape transfers and mixes on hundreds of archival recording projects over the last 30 years, and serves as a tech and sometime backing musician for the band. He expected to find some overdubs or a safety copy of a master, nothing particularly important.When he got his hands on the reels, he was shocked: The studio was sitting on all the original two-inch multitracks of the group’s 1975 album, “The Who by Numbers,” as well as previously unreleased songs from those sessions.“I immediately contacted Pete Townshend, and we arranged to send the tapes back to England,” Kehew, a blond-haired Southern California native, said in a recent interview at his North Hollywood studio, which was lined with rare, vintage and obsolete tape machines. “The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check.”For Kehew, a producer of Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and an expert on both the Beatles and Moog synthesizers, the recovery of the Who recordings underscored the fact that significant tapes “might be sitting in someone’s attic or barn or basement” and not where they belong, in a record company vault or an artist’s archive. “The obstacle to getting these tapes back in the right hands has always been the time and effort involved,” he said. “But what if there was a facile way to connect everyone that doesn’t involve a lot of hassle or red tape?”The answer may be Master Tape Rescue, a company recently started by Kehew and his partner, Danny White, a fellow music industry veteran. The company acts as an archival matchmaking service of sorts, cataloging recordings from studios or private collections and then vetting and connecting rights holders with tape holders.Shelves of recordings in an archive room above Sunset Sound, a studio in Los Angeles.Tag Christof for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Arc of Oblivion’ Review: Trying to Stop a Future Tide

      by

      A documentary about building an ark turns into a funny, thoughtful rumination on the nature of human preservation.The phrase “arc of oblivion” sounds apocalyptic, as if it ought to be uttered in the unmistakable voice of Werner Herzog and accompanied by grave proclamations about the end of all things. “The Arc of Oblivion,” a documentary directed by Ian Cheney, in fact delivers both of those things. But they’re delivered in such a lighthearted, weird, thought-provoking manner that it’s less frightening than fun. And if you’re left thinking about disasters, it’s only natural: Cheney’s building a literal ark throughout. (Wordplay!)A mass-extinction flood is the ur-apocalypse in many ancient texts, but Cheney isn’t building an ark to rescue humanity, or to talk about Noah. Instead of what passes away, he’s thinking about what can be rescued from some nameless, shapeless future obliteration. “What from this world is worth saving?” he asks in voice-over near the beginning of the film, the first of many semi-rhetorical inquiries throughout. Having hired a carpenter to build an ark the size of a guesthouse in his parents’ rural Maine backyard, he feels like he owes us, and probably them, some answers. Is he building the ark because he’s examining this question, or vice versa? And does he expect any resolution?I don’t think he does. Instead, he invites us to start pondering questions — queries about why humans always want to save things, what kinds of things can be saved, and what we even really know about time, space and permanence. “The Arc of Oblivion” is a documentary, which means it captures something about life right now, archiving it for the future. But Cheney is also exploring the meaning of archiving itself, a query that takes him from the Sahara to the Alps, consulting a ceramics expert, a paleontologist, a speleologist (cave scientist), a dendrochronologist (scientist who studies tree rings) and many other specialists in fields I didn’t realize had their own names. Each provides a new way into thinking about why and how the human species tries to preserve its memories, alongside the futility of the task.Cheney got interested in the question because he’s a filmmaker in this digital age, which means he possesses piles of hard drives containing his footage that could be easily destroyed by a disaster, or even a brush with a very large magnet. Storing your memories in a relatively unstable form — which is to say, storing your memories at all (except, as one expert points out, on certain ceramics, which are basically permanent) — can in turn prompt a bit of instability in your sense of self. Who are you without your memories?I find this question of the permanence of things is arresting, particularly in an age where everything is easily disposable, and it’s more striking the older I get. That Cheney’s middle-aged quest started with his own digital footage is no mistake. Consider, for instance, the chilling headlines about studios permanently shelving their own movies, which means we’ll just never see them. In the past, a movie might be destroyed when a film canister caught fire. But there’s something disquieting about, essentially, a keystroke having the potential to wipe out labor that was years in the making, with hundreds of participants involved. We live in a world in which our movies, photos, music and more are essentially one wrong button push away from disappearing entirely. It’s hard not to feel like we could just as easily be deleted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

      by

      An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More