A few recent acquisitions in the recordings collection:
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
We recently received this deluxe bound edition of Anita O’Day’s complete scrapbooks that includes a documentary film about the singer and a bonus DVD of outtake interviews and musical performances. The set also includes tributes by jazz writers James Gavin and Will Friedwald, as well as excerpts from Anita O’Day’s autobiography High Times, Hard Times. Many will know of her performance from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, but this edition provides a wealth of new material about her fascinating life.
Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36770.
Eddy Brown (Symposium)
Recently the Marston label featured early recordings (Dec. 1914) by violinist Eddy Brown in its set The Dawn of Recording: The Julius Block Cylinders. Born in Chicago in 1895, Brown studied violin with Jenö Hubay in Budapest and Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg and he made his debut in Germany in 1910. On this new Symposium disc, he can be heard playing Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky from Berlin in the mid-1920s and the Sonata Virginianesque by American composer John Powell around 1940 (with Powell himself accompanying). In the 1930s Brown became active in radio, and he served as director of WQXR for almost twenty years.
Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 37296.
Karl Amadeus Hartmann and the String Quartet (Cybele)
This 3-CD set inaugurates a new series (Künstler im Gespräch) on the Cybele label that will combine a featured composer’s music with spoken word recordings that help to illuminate that composer’s work. Here the focus is on Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s complete works with string quartet – two quartets, the Little Concerto for String Quartet and Percussion, and the Chamber Concerto for Clarinet, String Quartet and String Orchestra. The spoken word material includes Hartmann himself from 1962, an interview with his wife in 1994, and a conversation with his son from 2009. Notes in German and English are also rich with biographical detail and illustrations.
Find it here: Loeb Music CD 37004.
– Peter Laurence
