How A Pair of Unreleased John Coltrane Tapes Surfaced at NYPL
Album cover of Impulse Records release of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy recordings that were found in the Music and Recorded Sound division.
On July 14, 2023, Impulse Records released an album featuring live recordings made in 1961 of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy at the Village Gate nightclub in New York City. The recordings came from tapes in the Music & Recorded Sound Division at the Library for the Performing Arts. News coverage has described the tapes as being “lost” and then discovered. But stories of disappearing recordings in archives are never simple. How exactly were these unique recordings found? Here is the story of how those tapes were unearthed.
On January 30, 2017, the archivist for the Bob Dylan Music Company, Parker Fishel, posted a message to the listserv of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, a leading organization for both professional and amateur devotees of sound recordings. The query read: “Trying to find traces of a collection that was deposited into the Institute of Sound at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (when the donor went abroad) but had disappeared - seemingly along with the Institute - by 1975.” (See the original query here).
At that moment, I was knee-deep in a project to organize the 1960s to 70s acquisitions files of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound (now part of the Music and Recorded Sound division at the Library for the Performing Arts). Acquisitions files are the backbone of maintaining large archives like we have at NYPL and (ideally) include correspondence between collection donors and library curators, inventories, deeds of gift, and acknowledgment letters confirming a collection’s arrival at the Library.
Because the acquisitions file for the Institute of Sound was so large, it stuck in my mind as I encountered the ARSC listserv post. So, I responded privately saying that yes, we at NYPL had the collection, but that it didn’t yet have an online description. I offered to set the archivist up with parts of the acquisition file in our reading room.
The archivist, it turned out, was writing on behalf of legendary sound engineer Richard Alderson. Alderson may be best known for doing live sound design for Bob Dylan’s first tour with electric (as opposed to acoustic) guitar in 1966 and has an array of other groundbreaking projects to his credit. In 1962, Alderson set up an in-house mic for the Gaslight nightclub in Greenwich Village and captured Dylan’s now-famous performance there. He engineered landmark albums by Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, Muddy Waters, Roberta Flack, and the Ebony Hillbillies, among others. He also recorded musicians in Chiapas, Mexico, which resulted in albums released by Smithsonian Folkways. A fascinating interview with Alderson was published in the 2012 book Always In Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk', the Most Outrageous Record Label in America (available online with a library card).
The Institute of Sound
In the early 60s, Alderson also participated in an organization called the Institute of Sound. Headquartered on the seventh floor of Carnegie Hall, the Institute of Sound was founded in 1961 by Richard Striker as a membership-based recordings library and audio technology engine. It consisted of three departments: archival recordings, commercial recordings, and engineering. The latter department was headed by Alderson, who, under the auspices of the Institute, pursued innovations in loudspeaker design and de-noising filters (for removing surface noise from transfers of historical recordings), among other projects.
Staff member and tape collection at the Institute of Sound, from Stereo Review, November 30, 1963.
Richard Striker and singer Regina Resnik. From Time magazine, Nov. 19, 1965.
Striker rented three studio units at Carnegie Hall, two for the Institute (apartment numbers 908 and 909), and one for his apartment (apartment 707). It seems that recordings were stored in all three units. We know little about him, except that he was in his 20s when he started the Institute, he had a previous career as an actor and writer, and he was a personal friend of Judy Garland. He may have been responsible for introducing Garland to the songwriter John Meyer, with whom she had an affair. In his book Heartbreaker: A Memoir of Judy Garland, Meyer describes visiting Striker’s apartment in Carnegie Hall in October 1968:
“…Spacious, with a high ceiling and a sleeping platform at the top of a flight of stairs. Along the walls, piled haphazardly into shelves, were hundreds of boxes of reel-to-reel recording tape (this was before cassettes) and an enormous collection of records, both LPs and 78s.”
Institute of Sound membership information. From *L-CLP (Institute of Sound).
A regular membership to the Institute cost $5 and allowed patrons to listen to items from the collection in one of the booths for 12 hours. Each additional 12 hours cost another $5. The membership fee also covered admission to listening concerts of rare recordings in the Institute’s concert hall.
Concert hall at the Institute of Sound with listening booths on the left. From Musical America, October 1962.
In 1974, Striker died of a heart attack. Left with the task of finding a new home for the Institute’s thousands of recordings, Striker’s widow contacted then-curator of the Library's Recorded Sound Division, David Hall, to arrange the donation of the entire collection. Incidentally, the elevators at Carnegie Hall were broken at the time, and had to be fixed before the recordings could be moved. NYPL agreed to pay rent at Carnegie Hall for six months until the elevators were repaired.
The donation finally arrived in June 1975 and consisted of 1960 open reel tapes, 10,000 LPs, and 21,000 78rpm discs. Curator David Hall then inventoried the tapes by hand, eventually converted to 32 single-spaced pages of typescript. Many of the tapes were unlabeled, resulting in entries that consisted of a single question mark.
A page from David Hall’s handwritten inventory of the Institute of Sound collection.
In a 1991 article on the history of the Recorded Sound division at NYPL, Hall mentioned this collection as contributing to a massive backlog of uncataloged recordings at the Library. He also summarized the contents of the collection as containing musical theater, soundtracks, and opera.
“The growth rate of the Archives’ sound recordings holdings,” he wrote, “versus problems of user access became compounded with acquisition by [Recorded Sound] of the holdings of the then defunct Institute of Sound that had been housed at Carnegie Hall… much of which consisted of Broadway shows and film soundtrack repertoire, plus large quantities of opera.” (Published in Libraries, History, Diplomacy, and the Performing Arts: Essays in Honor of Carleton Sprague Smith).
Meanwhile, in 1969, in response to the result of the 1968 presidential election, Alderson moved to Mexico, leaving part of his tape collection with Striker for storage. When he returned to the U.S. in late 1975, he visited Carnegie Hall to retrieve his tapes only to discover that Striker had died, and the Institute of Sound was gone. In addition to the recording of Dylan at the Gaslight in 1962, he suspected there were also recordings of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins in that batch of missing material.
It seems that Alderson returned to New York City only months after the Institute of Sound collection arrived at NYPL in 1975. Although an internal NYPL memo in the acquisition file mentions plans for a press release, there is no evidence to suggest that one was issued, or that the acquisition was ever publicized. With the focus in Recorded Sound being placed on classical music and Broadway, library staff likely was not primed to flag potential jazz or folk music gems. Collections featuring classical music and live theater took priority for preservation and cataloging. Thus, it seems likely that NYPL and Alderson never knew about their mutual connection.
Forty-two years later, in 2017, we at NYPL started our hunt for the Alderson tapes first by looking in an internal database for the Richard Striker-Institute of Sound collection. The entry gave us the quantity of tapes and stated that the collection as a whole contained Broadway and opera recordings. This didn’t inspire confidence, but it wasn’t hopeless either. We also confirmed that the collection had recently been sent to our processing facility to be inventoried and barcoded (the first steps before a collection can be digitized).
Next, I went to the acquisition file and pulled the typescript version of David Hall’s inventory. My hopes were dwindling until the last page, which listed just the 10” reels—the rest of the tapes were 7” reels. There, I noticed several jaw-dropping entries:
- Bob Dylan club date ca. 1961
- [Bob Dylan] Carnegie Hall 9/21/62
- …
- Village Gate 1962, Th. Monk
- Village Gate Spring 1962 [Th. Monk]
- Coltrane Village Gate 1961
- Nina Simone date?
- Th. Monk 11/72 source?
Page 32 of the inventory for the Inventory of Sound collection. From the Music and Recorded Sound division's acquisitions files. The Coltrane-Dolphy tape is listed as entry number 42.
On February 1, 2017, the day after I wrote to the Dylan archivist and Alderson, they came to our Special Collections Reading Room to view the inventory and confirmed that these were likely the missing batch of tapes.
Next, my coworker and I rushed to the processing facility, pulled the 10” tapes, and routed them to the library’s Media Preservation Labs to be prioritized for digitization. We found that, not only were there original recordings of Dylan, Coltrane, and Monk in the 10” reels, but also unreleased Sonny Rollins, Reverend Gary Davis, Tom Paxton, and Hugh Romney (aka “Wavy Gravy”). The Coltrane reel also contained part of a live set by Art Blakey. Once the tapes arrived at the Library for the Performing Arts, we invited Alderson back to see them in person.
The first Coltrane-Blakey tape to be unearthed in NYPL's Institute of Sound collection. Available in Music and Recorded Sound division as IDF 644216.
Then, we set to digitizing the 10” reels. Jeff Willens, the NYPL engineer doing the transfers, had a previous career as a remastering engineer and had worked on Nina Simone’s entire catalog of published reissues. To him, the Simone recording did not sound like one he’d worked on before. This suggested that the Alderson batch might contain other unreleased recordings.
Once we had all the audio files, I invited jazz scholar and author of The John Coltrane Reference, Lewis Porter, to listen to the recordings of Coltrane, Monk, Rollins, and Simone to help determine whether they had ever been released. Determining that they were unique, Porter contacted Ken Druker, Senior Vice President, Jazz Development for Verve Records, to see if Verve might be interested in pursuing the Coltrane recording. Druker came to the Library for the Performing Arts to hear the material, but felt it wasn’t quite long enough to make a full album’s worth of audio.
Over the next couple of years, NYPL inventoried and digitized most of the Striker collection, along with other massive collections of magnetic tape. Inventorying in this context consists of transcribing whatever is written on the tape boxes. In many cases (and especially with the Institute of Sound collection), this means the title field is blank—all we know is the collection from which the tape came. For us, full cataloging of archival audio typically occurs after the material is digitized, so that our staff can describe the contents based on the actual audio of the recording. Just this morning, while listening to files from the Institute collection, I came across a stunning on-air performance by Nina Simone in 1967 of a J.S. Bach prelude and fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. One might not know that this performance by Simone exists, unless one listens six and a half minutes into the minimally-titled audio file.
By 2020, we had thousands of digitized A/V files ready for cataloging, amounting to thousands of hours of listening for our staff. While we waited for full cataloging, researchers were encouraged to contact our librarians to ask if we had recordings matching certain parameters. We would then search our internal databases (and sometimes the shelves) to see if anything relevant came up. If so, we’d set them up at a secure on-site station to listen to the uncataloged recordings.
Starting in January 2020 jazz drummer George Schuller became a frequent library patron, using this librarian-facilitated method to explore uncataloged Eric Dolphy and Gunther Schuller recordings from our George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers. With each visit, he identified more audio that he wanted to study. Schuller’s knowledge of jazz discography, of idiosyncratic timbres and improvisation habits of particular musicians, and of the signature acoustics of different venues, made him a special kind of sleuth, particularly when the tape boxes were blank or else mismatched with the recordings.
So, several months into his work as a patron, I recruited Schuller as a volunteer. He would come every couple of weeks for a marathon listening session, gradually making his way through hundreds of hours of digitized recordings, comparing them against published releases, taking copious notes, and flagging for us anything that seemed particularly noteworthy. Sometimes he arranged informal listening sessions at the library with jazz performers and scholars to hear their thoughts on select recordings. At some point, I told him about the Striker-Alderson saga and shared the inventory.
In November 2021, Schuller stumbled across a second tape on the Striker inventory that I had overlooked in my fevered excitement of 2017.
Entry 1294 indicated the second Coltrane tape. (Incidentally tape 1291 contains what sounds like the Miles Davis Quintet at Carnegie Hall on May 19, 1961; this recording was released commercially in 1998. The recording was likely made from the audience and the sound quality is quite poor).
After hearing the file, Schuller suspected that this was the only known live recording of Coltrane and his ensemble playing “Africa.” He and I arranged a listening session at the library with Ravi Coltrane (John Coltrane’s son), Ken Druker, and Lewis Porter. That afternoon in April 2022 was among the most memorable of my NYPL career.
The box for the second John Coltrane tape, containing the only known live recording of “Africa.” The handwriting is likely Richard Alderson’s. Available in the Music and Recorded Sound division as IDF 742240.
The 7" tape reel for second Coltrane-Dolphy recording found in NYPL's Institute of Sound collection, after it had been digitized and wound for long-term preservation. Available in Music and Recorded Sound division as IDF 742240.
Back at Verve Records, with this newly identified material, Druker felt there was now enough material to fill an album. A year later, on July 14, 2023, Evenings at the Village Gate was released by Impulse Records (part of the Verve Label Group).
Needless to say, I cataloged the CD and LP versions immediately. They are available to hear in our 3rd-floor reading room as *LZR 76592 and *LDC 58193. The original tapes are available for viewing by appointment in our Special Collections Reading Room, along with the library’s unmastered audio files.
It will be many months before we’ve added the Institute of Sound tapes to our online catalog. That said, patrons are welcome to reach out to our librarians at recordedsound@nypl.org and we will set up a listening appointment on our third floor. We are also happy to share any internal inventories for collections not yet described online, upon request.