National Jazz Museum, Apple to Release “The Savory Collection, Vol. 1”

[Ron Thorne]

National Jazz Museum, Apple to Release “The Savory Collection, Vol. 1”

09/28/16

By Carolina Worrell

The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, New York and Apple Music have partnered up to release The Savory Collection, Volume 1 – Body and Soul: Coleman Hawkins and Friends, an 18-track collection featuring never-before-heard material by swing era jazz artists recorded between 1936 and 1940 and taped from radio broadcasts by sound engineer Bill Savory, available Oct. 14.



"The Savory Collection, Vol. 1" will be available Oct. 14

Featuring tracks by Coleman Hawkins and his orchestra, such as “Body and Soul,” and “Dinah,” a Lionel Hampton jam session, as well as recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Carl Kress and Emilio Caceres, the album, which was produced by Loren Schoenberg, founding director and senior scholar of the National Jazz Museum, and Ken Druker, includes a foreword by historian-filmmaker Ken Burns.

“The Savory Collection is the story of a buried treasure,” said Schoenberg in a press release. “Imagine finding an unknown play of Shakespeare’s or an unknown novel by Mark Twain—that’s what this is! It’s as close to a musical time capsule as you’ll ever find—you are right there, in the moment, hearing never-before-heard sounds in truly remarkable fidelity.”

According to the press release, Schoenberg, with the help of Savory’s son Eugene Desavouret, discovered 975 discs and “hundreds of hours of music that no one knew about, which the museum immediately acquired with the goals of restoring the music and making it available to the public.”

“The superior sound of the tracks makes you feel as if you were in the room, with phenomenal pick up, due to Savory recording from in-studio lines coming directly from the radio networks on professional equipment,” according to the release.

The Savory Collection, Vol. 2 , featuring tracks from Count Basie’s band with saxophonist Lester Young, is expected to be released later this year, with subsequent volumes to follow in 2017.