Jazz Time Capsule: Bill Savory's legendary transcriptions of 1930s jazz radio broadcasts have finally gotten into the hands of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. They're cleaning up the sometimes badly deteriorated aluminum and acetate discs. What's neat about this is that these jazz artists couldn't stretch out when recording for a 78 RPM record; they had to fit their performance on one side of the record. On the radio, however, they could play as long as they wanted, for all practical purposes. And because Savory had larger discs and was sometimes recording at 33 RPM, he could fit in these longer performances.

Take a listen to some excerpts, which have been digitally cleaned up by the renowned Doug Pomeroy, who comments, “As fate would have it, a couple of the most interesting Count Basie things are so badly corroded that it took me two afternoons and 47 splices just to put one of them back together again.” Here are more excerpts.

I love stuff like this!