1,000 Hours of Early Jazz Recordings Now Online

[coleb13]

The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends, 1921-1991 is now available.

 

https://archive.org/details/davidwnivenjazz&tab=about

[PopPop]

Very interesting indeed.

[ESL]

There may be some rare material here that has been preserved forever by the heroic efforts of David Niven and the archivist Kevin Powers, I really hope so for its a lovely story.

I took this for a brief spin on some later material (Coleman Hawkins, Ellington and Bill Evans from Milestone LPs) that I'm familiar with and it sounds, well, like vinyl recorded onto cassettes & left on a shelf. Plenty of flutter, wow, tape hiss plus surface noise from the records plus some random bumps & lumps, distortions and volume variations. I feel rather sad. Can't help but think that tape is the culprit here.

I hope I was unlucky in my choice but for me this is research material and for all I know that's what was intended. Niven's comments/notes are excellent and reveal much about the man through his selections. I wonder where the discs are now?

Marty

[PopPop]

I have enjoyed what I have listened to (side A and B tape 102) and, yes, there is some irregularity in the sound. I like it because it's probably the only way I will ever hear most of this music.

 

Has anyone else had trouble loading the web site? It seems like I log on and then loose my network connection if I change tabs. I get an error message from the David Niven server.

[DaQi]

Was able to download a couple things from the website. Main problem is that each track has to be individually downloaded and that the tracks don't have any metadata on them so the text, the tape track listings etc. are not in the files. This means that unless there are some real gems in here it is not really worth the effort to go through it all. If it was all in curated files and could be downloaded more efficiently I would be interested in downloading larger chunks of it and then casually browsing/listening to it over time.

[PopPop]

Since my laptop PC serves my music files directly to my components, I simply play the files directly from the web site. It woul definitely be a lot of work to download the full length tapes, edit the pieces, then add tags.