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

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    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

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

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      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

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      in Movies

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

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      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

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      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

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      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

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      in Music

      Satchmo’s Wonderful World: Louis Armstrong Center Amplifies An Artist’s Vision

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      New jazz and exhibition spaces, and an inaugural show curated by Jason Moran, feature the trumpeter’s history, collaged onto the walls.You can find anything in Queens. And yet for decades, the Louis Armstrong House Museum has been a well-kept secret on a quiet street in Corona. The longtime residence of the famed jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader, it is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.The museum’s new extension, the 14,000 square foot Louis Armstrong Center, blends in a little less. It looks, in fact, a bit like a 1960s spaceship landed in the middle of a residential block. By design, it doesn’t tower over its neighboring vinyl-sided houses but, with its curvilinear roof, it does seem to want to envelop them. And behind its rippling brass facade lie some ambitious goals: to connect Armstrong as a cultural figure to fans, artists, historians and his beloved Queens community; to extend his civic and creative values to generations that don’t know how much his vision, and his very being, changed things. It wants, above all, to invite more people in.“The house is relatively small,” said Regina Bain, executive director of the House Museum and Center, speaking of the two-story dwelling where Armstrong lived with his wife, Lucille, from 1943 until his death in 1971. “But his legacy is humongous. And this is the building that will help us to launch that.”The Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas, and, for events, a 75-seat performance space whose blond wood and intimacy recall Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue.“I think that this will do something that we haven’t quite seen in a jazz space,” said Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer, who was the Center’s inaugural exhibition curator. “That’s also something that my community needs to witness, too. It needs to watch, how can we take care of an artist’s history? And what else can it unleash in a community that might not even care about the art, but might care about something else related to it? Armstrong gives us all those opportunities to do that.”The new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona, Queens, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, whose roof recalls a grand piano. The architects wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings in his voice and music.Albert Vercerka/EstoThe longtime residence of the jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader Louis Armstrong is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor the architects, Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, the project was a puzzle in how to link two structures — the Center is across the street from the Armstrong House Museum — with the spirit of a musical legend. Their inspiration came by going back to the music, and to Armstrong’s street-level roots. “That kind of neighborhood that jazz actually emerged from — that wasn’t an elite creation, it was a popular creation,” Caples said. “And yet it was the music that revolutionized how we think, how we listen, how we think about nonmusical things, even.” They rounded the front of the Center to nod to the Armstrong house; its brass curtain echoes the color of his horn, and — the musically fluent may notice — the staggered hoop-shapes and columns in the entryway map out the notes of his most celebrated songs, like “What a Wonderful World” and “Dinah.”They also wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings, the smile that you can feel in his singing voice. When they started the project, Jefferson called an uncle who’s a jazz saxophonist to ask — really, what made Armstrong so special? “And he said, you know, when you hear his music, you feel like dancing down the street,” Jefferson said.At the ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this summer, trumpeters performed on the Armstrong house balcony and, across the road, on the upper deck of the Center, a fanfare that started with the opening bars of “West End Blues” and ended with “It’s a Wonderful World.” “It was an incredible moment — the building participated as a reflector of sound back to the street,” Caples said. Afterward, schoolchildren were invited in to plonk around on a Steinway.Visitors in the interior of the Louis Armstrong Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas and a performance space.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOn display is Armstrong’s Selmer Trumpet, engraved mouthpiece and monogrammed handkerchief. The gold-plated trumpet was a gift from King George V.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesIke Edeani for The New York TimesBuilt on the site of a former parking lot, with $26 million in mostly state and local funding, the new Center encompasses Armstrong’s 60,000-piece archive, including 700 tapes that were once housed miles away at Queens College. From that collection, Moran has curated the first permanent exhibition, “Here to Stay,” with a multimedia, interactive centerpiece of audio, video, interviews and songs. There’s Armstrong’s gold-plated trumpet — a gift from King George V — complete with his favorite imported German lip balm and the mouthpiece inscribed “Satchmo,” his nickname — and his collage art. (He made hundreds of pieces, paper cutouts on tape cases.) His first and last passports, among the ephemera, show his evolution from New Orleans-born youth player to a global icon in a tuxedo and an irrepressible grin.Armstrong was himself a documentarian, traveling with cameras and recording equipment and turning the mic on himself, his friends and loved ones in private moments — telling jokes backstage, opining at home. As a Black artist with an elementary school education, who was born into segregation, he went on to hobnob with presidents and royalty and to meet the pope. “He really marks a way of being a public figure,” Moran said. “And he has to weigh how he does that. If he’s getting a chance not only to tell his story with his trumpet in his mouth but through these microphones, then what are the stories he wants to tell, not in public? Those become important.”Jason Moran, the jazz musician, curated the opening exhibition, “Here to Stay” at the new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOne place his vision is most evident is in his reel-to-reel tape box collages, rarely displayed publicly until now. Armstrong used them as an outlet for years.“If he has a press clipping, maybe it wasn’t favorable, he could cut it up and make a collage,” Moran said. A photo in the exhibition shows him, after a trip to Italy, pasting his art work on the ceiling of his den, fresco-style. (Lucille Armstrong, a former Cotton Club dancer who was his fourth wife, put a stop to that.)Moran recalled that when Armstrong talked about his process and why he liked making collages, he explained that with just the push-pull of material on a small canvas, you can change “the story that you were given.” It echoed his expertise as a musician, Moran said, learning how to play background, on the cornet, with King Oliver, his early mentor, or foreground as he redefined what it meant to be a soloist, upending his destiny along the way.The exhibition also has the artist Lorna Simpson in a video reflecting on Armstrong’s collages and how they compartmentalized an enormous and complex life into the manageable and portable square of a tape case. “Armstrong archives and recontextualizes his public life by hand, to be layered and collaged onto the walls of his private life,” she said.Most of Armstrong’s collages were made in the den of his Corona, Queens home, from reel-to-reel tape boxes. In the 1950s, his love of collage spilled onto the walls of his den, which he adorned with photographs, newspaper clippings, and anything else he had at hand, eventually covering portions of his ceiling.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesLouis Armstrong created over 500 collages as covers of his tape collection, generating a priceless art and music catalog. Left: The box for Reel 27 features a German publicity photo of the musician, a snapshot of an unidentified man and “Gems from Buenos Aires.” Center: Reel 18, a photograph of Armstrong preparing to dine and Bing Crosby’s Musical Autobiography album on Decca. Right: Reel 68, with a reproduction of a photo of him with his mother and sister in New Orleans.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe gallery display (by C & G Partners) is full of circular motifs, reminiscent of musical notes or records. In determining the palette for the Center, Jefferson and Caples, the architects, looked at Armstrong’s art and his wardrobe; his home, with rooms in shades of electric blue or creamy peach, was mostly styled by Lucille. But he loved it — especially the spaces with gilded or reflective surfaces. “So it gave us the cue that we should not be too mousy,” Caples said, “and that this was a public building where there could be some expansiveness.” The club space at the Center, which recently hosted a rehearsal of trumpeters for the Newport Jazz Festival’s Armstrong tribute — taking place this weekend in Rhode Island — is a vibrant red.Moran made sure there was a book from the Armstrongs’ vast collection in every vitrine. “They had that kind of political library that was investigating their role in society,” he said. (They also were creatures of their era: The full archives include Playboy anthologies and vintage diet recipes; a guide called “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way” — heavy on the lamb chops — is displayed in the exhibition.)Lucille and Louis Armstrong traveled the world with customized luggage. Left: Armstrong’s passport for his first tour of England in 1932. Under occupation, Armstrong listed himself as an “Actor and Musician.” Right: Armstrong’s final passport in 1967, after years of being “America’s Ambassador of Goodwill.”Ike Edeani for The New York TimesEven a longtime Armstrong devotee like Marquis Hill, one of the Newport trumpeters, was moved by these personal mementos. (He snapped a picture of the handwritten recipe for Armstrong’s favorite dish, red beans and rice.) A half-century-old recording of Armstrong discussing how important it was to listen to all kinds of music inspired a Hill composition for Newport, commissioned by the Center. Its jazz club, he said, is “going to be a new space for what Louis Armstrong wanted, to keep pushing the music forward.”As part of an artist in residence program this fall, the Grammy winning bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding will present her project with the choreographer Antonio Brown that explores the era when people danced to jazz. Rooting herself in Armstrong’s history, and expanding his vision, Spalding said in an email, would “develop ways to re-merge and re-awaken the dialogue between these essential modalities of human expression — the improvising body and the improvising musician.”Under Bain, the executive director,the Center is also hosting new programming, including dance and yoga classes, trumpet lessons and events that engage the mostly Spanish-speaking community, whether through music or social activism.“Louis and Lucille were two Black artists who owned their own home in the ’40s,” Bain said. “Why can’t we have a workshop here about homeownership for our neighbors? If it’s in the legacy of Louis and Lucille — that’s what this space can also be.”Since it opened on July 6, the Center has exceeded visitor estimates and is adding more hours and drawing fans from across the country. “He was one of the heroes I was taught about,” said Jenne Dumay, 32, a social worker from Atlanta who plans music-oriented trips with friends, focusing on Black history. “This museum gives me insight that I didn’t learn in my textbooks.”Among the final work Armstrong created, after a lengthy hospital stay in 1971, was a six-page handwritten ode to Corona, and his happy, quotidian life there. In looping script, he extols the virtues of his Schnauzers as watch dogs (“When the two start barking together — oh boy, what a duet”), and his favoriteChinese restaurant.It is one of the treasures that Moran — who said Armstrong’s spirit-lifting music helped him through the pandemic — cherishes most. Armstrong’s handwriting, he noted, slants upward on every page. “The text is just so inherently aspirational,” Moran said. “It’s in line with how he holds his trumpet” — pointing up to the sky — “how his eyes look when he plays. It’s a slight thing, but it tells us: this is how he thinks about life.”Additional reporting by Chris Kuo.The Louis Armstrong Center34-56 107th Street, Queens, N.Y.; 718-478-8271; louisarmstronghouse.org. More

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      in Theater

      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

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      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

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      Earl McGrath Was a Character. His Closet Was Filled With Rare Recordings.

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      When the art and music world figure died in 2016, he left behind a trove of reels from his years scouting for his own label and the one he ran for the Rolling Stones.An outsize character, Earl McGrath had variously worked as a record company head, film executive, screenwriter and art dealer before he died in early 2016 at age 84. Afterward, the contents of his Midtown Manhattan apartment were carefully cataloged and valued. His art collection, including prized works given to him by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Ed Moses, was sent to auction at Christie’s. His papers, containing correspondence with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Stephen Spender, were donated to the New York Public Library’s archives.But the boxes stored at the top of McGrath’s large walk-in closet — filled with old reels of recordings — were largely overlooked. They were about to be sold blind to a record wholesaler when the journalist Joe Hagan stepped in.Hagan had been researching “Sticky Fingers,” his biography of the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, when he stumbled upon McGrath. “Little known outside a rarefied ’70s jet set of rock ’n’ rollers, movie stars, socialites and European dilettantes,” Hagan would write, “his name was once a secret handshake.”Rummaging through McGrath’s closet in the spring of 2017, the first tape Hagan discovered was an unedited master copy of the Rolling Stones’ 1978 album, “Some Girls.”“I instantly broke into a cold sweat,” Hagan said in a phone interview. He also found rare and unreleased recordings from Hall & Oates, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, Terry Allen and the Jim Carroll Band. “It was like peeking through a keyhole in time. I thought, This is a real treasure trove — wouldn’t it be great if people could hear this stuff?”After purchasing the roughly 200 tapes from the McGrath estate, Hagan spent several years researching and compiling the material, along with a co-producer, Pat Thomas. This week, “Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980” will be released by the reissue label Light in the Attic. Its 22 tracks feature material collected by McGrath during his years as an Atlantic Records executive, where he operated his own imprint, Clean, before he later ran the Rolling Stones’ label.Moving musically and geographically through the 1970s, from California country-rock to New York post-punk, “Earl’s Closet” is a fittingly eclectic sampler that places the hillbilly soul of Delbert & Glen alongside the surrealist warbling of the Warhol “superstar” Ultra Violet.“I wanted the record to capture Earl’s spirit,” Hagan said. “He’s really the muse of the whole thing. It’s almost like being at a party at Earl’s house: You don’t know who you’re going to meet.”To that end, the collection’s through line is McGrath’s role as an exuberant social connector.“If you were to add up Earl’s achievements in terms of record making or art sales, that wasn’t who he was,” Jann Wenner said in an interview. “He thrived on his friendships. He loved talented people, interesting people — and his range of acquaintances were remarkable, literally from Zen masters to Z Listers.”In an email, the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger remembered McGrath as a “joker,” who “knew everybody in New York and beyond and was a lot of fun to be with.”McGrath introduced the actress Anjelica Huston to her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham, who died in 2008. “He was funny,” Huston said of McGrath. “He was daring. In his own way, Earl, he was the glue that held a lot of people together.”From left: The poet-turned-rocker Jim Carroll, McGrath and Mick Jagger. Camilla McGrathMcGRATH’S HUMBLE CHILDHOOD in the Midwest was far from the A-list world he would navigate so easily as an adult, but he could spin it into a more stately tale.“If you asked Earl, ‘Where are you from?’” the artist Ed Ruscha said, “He’d say, ‘I’m from Superior — of course — Wisconsin. And I lived on Grand — naturally — Avenue.’ That’s the way he talked.”McGrath’s blithe manner belied the troubled home life he endured as a youth, which included physical abuse at the hands of his father. “He would get drunk and beat him,” said Valerie Grace Ricordi, a family friend who now serves as executive director of the McGrath family foundation. “Earl never understood what he’d done wrong in his father’s eyes.” According to interviews with several of McGrath’s friends and biographical details included in Hagan’s liner notes and an essay in a 2020 photo book, at age 14, after his father broke his arm, McGrath left home for good — moving into a local YMCA and supporting himself as a dishwasher until he could get out of town.Largely self-educated, McGrath found solace devouring literature, poetry and philosophy, and came to see himself as a Proustian character. Transforming from dishwasher to aesthete, as a young man McGrath evinced the qualities that would carry him through life: a disarming sense of humor and an uncanny ability to befriend the cultured, the famous and the wealthy.In between stints as a merchant seaman, McGrath drifted out to California, corresponding and visiting with Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles and Henry Miller in Big Sur. He also developed an unlikely friendship with the English poet W.H. Auden, who would provide introductions for McGrath when he moved in the early ’50s to New York City, where he fell in with a lively crowd that included the writer Frank O’Hara and the pop art godfather Larry Rivers.In 1958, the 27-year-old McGrath began working as an assistant to the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, helping organize the inaugural Spoleto Festival in Umbria, Italy. There, he struck up an unlikely romance with an heiress, Camilla Pecci Blunt, the daughter of a Florentine marchesa and an American financier. The couple married in 1963 against the wishes of her family, and while they endured long stretches of physical separation in subsequent decades, he remained committed to their union.One of his next moves was to Los Angeles, where McGrath found his way into the movie business and developed a tight social circle of Hollywood literati, including Joan Didion, who dedicated her 1979 essay collection, “The White Album,” to McGrath. The writer Eve Babitz’s biographer, Lili Anolik, said McGrath “was one of the most influential and damaging people in her life,” explaining how Babitz was working as a fine artist and album designer in the early ’70s when McGrath offhandedly questioned one of her color choices. Her confidence shot, “she switched her focus to writing,” Anolik said. “So, we, the culture, owe Earl big in a way.”Joan Didion and McGrath in the early 1970s. The writer dedicated her essay collection “The White Album” to him.Camilla McGrathBUT McGRATH MADE perhaps his biggest impact with Atlantic Records.When he met the label’s co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in the early ’60s, the two sparked an immediate friendship. “Earl made him laugh,” Hagan said. “Ahmet really just loved having him around.” McGrath’s European society connections also helped Ertegun impress Mick Jagger, who brought the Rolling Stones into the Atlantic fold in 1971.That same year, Ertegun — along with Robert Stigwood, manager of the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton — decided to back McGrath and give him his own Atlantic-distributed label, Clean Records (the company motto: “Every man should have a Clean record”). McGrath’s West Hollywood home became Clean’s headquarters, where he’d regularly throw parties — attended by a mix of Cool School artists, Old Hollywood grandees and New Journalism figures — in lieu of A&R meetings.“He’d have these afternoon soirees where there’d be some 18-year-old musician on the edge of OD’ing in one room, and outside Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina would be strolling through the lawn,” said the Texas singer-songwriter Terry Allen, among the first artists McGrath signed. “You never knew what was going to happen when you went to Earl’s.”One of the groups that McGrath discovered was a fledgling folk-soul duo from Philadelphia, Daryl Hall and John Oates, who had been struggling to find a record deal when their music publisher flew them out to meet McGrath in 1972.“There was all these interesting people hanging out,” Hall remembered in an interview. “One of the Everly Brothers was there and I think a young Harrison Ford, too.” They played McGrath a few songs. “Next thing we knew, we were signed.”Clockwise from left: Robert Stigwood, Ahmet Ertegun, McGrath and Eric Clapton returning from Barbados in 1974.Camilla McGrathThe history of Clean Records might have turned out quite differently had Hall & Oates actually recorded for the company. Ertegun, sensing the duo’s hit potential, snatched them from McGrath and put them on Atlantic proper, where they sold millions of records. Clean, meanwhile, would release just a handful of poorly selling titles before ceasing operations in 1973.Moving to New York in the early ’70s, McGrath became an omnipresent figure on the city’s pre-punk scene. “I used to see him everywhere,” said Johansen, the New York Dolls singer whose earliest solo work appears on “Earl’s Closet.” “Funny thing is, I didn’t know Earl as a music business guy — it was just one of the things he did.”McGrath’s real passion was bringing together his many fabulous friends. The McGraths’ West 57th Street apartment, opposite Carnegie Hall, would become the site of endless dinners and parties attended by a cross-section of cultural giants: where the cast of “Star Wars” might run into Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg; where the poet-turned-songwriter Jim Carroll mingled with the silent-film-era pioneer Anita Loos; and where Jagger first laid eyes on his future partner Jerry Hall. (The gatherings were often photographed by Camilla McGrath, with a collection of the photos published in a 2020 book from Knopf, “Face to Face.”)In 1977, the Rolling Stones were looking for someone to run their record label, replacing the longtime company head Marshall Chess. With Ertegun’s backing, McGrath lobbied for the gig in a letter to Jagger, admitting that he hadn’t been very successful in the music business, but “I was successful enough to marry a princess in Italy.” He got the job.“He was a very unusual choice to run a record company,” Jagger said. “But he had a great flair.”A number of the artists represented on “Earl’s Closet” are acts McGrath considered for the Stones label — including the Detroit saxophonist Norma Jean Bell and the Texas soul combo Little Whisper and the Rumors — but whose signings never came to fruition. “Earl was good at recognizing talent, but he wasn’t much for following through,” Hagan said.McGrath’s tenure did ultimately produce some successes: He negotiated a deal to bring the acclaimed reggae star Peter Tosh to the label in 1978, and a year later, he signed Carroll. Carroll, who died in 2009, noted in a 1981 interview with Musician magazine that McGrath was an anomaly in the music business. “He understood very well what I was doing,” Carroll said then. “He had some literary references that no other record executive would’ve had.”McGrath and Jagger after one of the legendary dinners at the McGrath home, where artists of different types mingled.Camilla McGrathAfter a few years in the Stones’ employ, McGrath found himself caught in the middle of the increasingly fractious relationship between Jagger and Keith Richards. As the guitarist recounted in his 2010 memoir “Life,” at one point he threatened to throw McGrath off the roof of Electric Lady Studios if he didn’t rein Jagger in. Angling to launch a solo career, Jagger was more than happy to let band relations, and the label’s business, sour. McGrath resigned his post with Rolling Stones Records in 1981, effectively ending his career in the music business.OVER THE NEXT three decades, McGrath would bounce between coasts, opening and closing art galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Although he and Camilla never had a family of their own, over time McGrath became godfather to nearly 30 children. Late in his life, McGrath’s older sister finally revealed the secret that had been kept from him: His birth had been the result of an affair between his mother and his father’s brother.As McGrath reckoned with his complicated past, an even bigger blow came with Camilla’s death in 2007, following a series of strokes. Within a few years, McGrath developed serious health problems. On Jan. 7, 2016, he died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage.McGrath had been happy over the years to remain out of the spotlight. “He didn’t want to be a public figure, he only wanted to be well known amongst the well-known,” Hagan said. With the release of “Earl’s Closet,” McGrath’s legacy — his unique gifts as a kind of artistic alchemist — is finally being given its due.“It feels like we tapped into some kind of core sampler of the ’70s,” Hagan said. “It’s the story of the culture and where the artistic emphasis was going, about the end of a certain period and the beginning of another. And, of course, the element that threads everything together on this record — just like he did in life — is Earl McGrath.” More

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      Lesley Gore’s Archive Arrives at the New York Public Library

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      The collection, which includes family photos, scrapbook pages and annotated music, traces the singer’s arc from releasing bubble gum hits to creating a powerful feminist statement.As a teenage singer in the 1960s who fit the all-American girl mold, Lesley Gore may have seemed like an unlikely figure to carve out a lasting legacy of feminist resilience and independence. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has now made the musician’s archive available for anyone interested in her artistic evolution, giving fans a chance to browse through notated music sheets and an unfinished memoir.Lois Sasson, Gore’s partner for more than 30 years, began working with the library in February 2016, sifting through storage boxes and cataloging each object with help from the singer’s family and friends. Sasson emphasized that the collection should remain free to the public and housed in New York, where Gore lived, said Jessica Wood, the assistant curator of music and recorded sound at the Library for the Performing Arts. Gore died of lung cancer in 2015. Sasson, a fierce defender of women’s and gay rights, died of Covid-19 in 2020.The archive, which contains scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, fan club files, music theory books, a birthday invitation, family photographs and album covers, was first made available on May 31, and all printed and written works can be examined on request. The library is still working to digitize the audio and movie image recordings that document Gore’s rehearsals, performances and television appearances, as well as visual works like a 1968 Robert F. Kennedy ad campaign.“By studying her archive, it elevates all of the women performers who sang other people’s materials but really brought a lot of genius to the way they animated those songs,” Wood said.Gore, known for bubble gum classics like “It’s My Party,” the No. 1 hit from 1963 recorded by Quincy Jones, and “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” focused largely on love and heartbreak until the 1963 release of “You Don’t Own Me.” The song, written by John Madara and David White, became an early feminist anthem, rebuking the idea that the singer should bend to the whims of a man. “I’m free and I love to be free,” Gore sang, “to live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please.” All three songs were recorded before she turned 18.Brad Schreiber, an author who chronicles social change through music, said that while Gore lacked power as a young female recording artist, “You Don’t Own Me” echoed a strong statement about reclaiming respect and dignity.“She didn’t have to dedicate her entire career to do socially conscious music,” Schreiber said. “She did one very important song that has had a far-reaching effect.”The archive includes music scores of “You Don’t Own Me” that were used for performances to promote Gore’s 2005 “Ever Since” LP (her 11th and final studio album), along with musical arrangements of the release by Claus Ogerman, Joe Glandro and Mariano Longo.Susan Kahaner, Sasson’s sister, said Gore admired the activism of the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan and was particularly drawn to the civil rights advocate and politician Bella Abzug, who chanted, “This woman’s place is in the House, the House of Representatives!” as she ran and won a seat in the House in 1970.“Bella and that whole group of feminists opened up Lesley’s eyes to what is possible,” Kahaner said.Gore was devoted to her education, majoring in English and American literature at Sarah Lawrence College during the peak of her pop career. Kahaner said that as an avid reader of fiction and nonfiction as well as a lover of jazz and pop music, Gore would be proud to share her work with researchers and students at the library:“We couldn’t be happier that this is the home that will keep Lesley’s legacy alive.” More