Forgotten Music, Found In The Archives

September 12, 2009 - It's safe to say that albums like Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will ne'er be forgotten. But for every group like The Beatles, scores of additional acts record music that's, for all its merits, destined to be pronto forgotten. This music does not get remastered; it just goes away into attics and yard-sale bins, awaiting to be dusted off. If these melodic unknowns are lucky, they'll irritation the interest of human at the Archive of Contemporary Music in Greater New York — a collection of two million records, both celebrated and obscure. The archive began as the personal collection of its flow director, Bob George, who recently apportioned some outstanding commanded music.
George's appeal includes music by all genres and covers the history of entered pop music. Did You Ever Hear the Blues, from 1959, features Big Miller; George says it illustrates the Kansas City audio. "I bought this book because I started to assemble a separate section at the archive of songs and executions by writers," George says. "And then I had, like, Sandburg and Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. And I only really bribed the record because Hughes had written all of the songs. And so, usually these forms of things are a springboard for doing a lot of research, and then I had no idea that Langston Hughes had written over 800 songs, and that he was by Kansas City. And Big Miller built his reputation pretty much called a Kansas City... that kind of shouter with the booming baritone." Tokyo-born Anna Domino's In the Land of My Dreams back-number described as "betwixt Eros and entropy," agreeing to George. "There are sealed records that, over decades, I've come back to again and again. And, you know, it's a guilty pleasure," George says. "You play it, you know, 30, 40 clips in a row." George's last selection hails from the ballrooms of coastal Colombia. The music is addressed "terapia," which is Spanish people for "therapy." "It's an unbelievable scene," he says. "It's alfresco, it's 120 degrees, it's diaphoresis, hot. They've no midrange speakers anywhere, but this giant four-by-six-foot bass speakers are all around. And so, strung like Chinese lanterns are tweeters up above your heads, with flashing lights and everything." Some of the times, a good party is the best therapy you are able to get.