AES Show 2024 NY

Last year saw the release of the Grammy-nominated album “Evenings at the Village Gate – John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy” on Verve. It was the result of many years of intensive detective work by Jessica Wood, Assistant Curator at New York Public Library’s Music & Recorded Sound Division. A long-missing cache of tapes from Richard Striker’s Institute of Sound, recorded by legendary New York engineer Richard Alderson, had been discovered and located by Wood.

Wood, Alderson, and NYPL Audio Preservation Engineer Jeff Willens then went through hundreds of tapes. Among them were unreleased studio and/or live recordings by Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, and many other jazz and classical artists, as well as performers as diverse as Tom Paxton, Moondog, and poet Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy).

In this talk, we will explain how this collection of vital, previously unknown recorded documents of the 1960s New York music scene was “lost,” located, and reclaimed by NYPL. We will also tell the story about how two of these unheard reels were brought to the public, filling some gaps in the Coltrane canon. And we will also share why a maverick NYC engineer at the top of his game, left the city and his invaluable tapes behind.

We will be playing samples from the Striker Collection during the talk and inviting attendees to help us “crowdsource” some of the unidentified recordings therein.