Jazz treasure trove revealed
p2pnet news | Music:- Great news, if you’re a fan of Billie Holiday, indisputably one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time.
Or maybe not.
What’s being described as a virtually unknown bootleg has been unearthed.
But that doesn’t mean people who love her and her music are in for a treat.
With about 100 cubic feet of additional reel-to-reel audio tapes are, “newspaper clippings, films and boxes of a writer’s working files” and they’re part of, “historical material accumulated by musician, producer and critic Leonard Feather in his half-century association with jazz royalty like Holiday,” says Associated Press, going on:
“He donated it to the University of Idaho’s International Jazz Collection following his death at age 80 in 1994.”
But, “copyright laws have stymied efforts to make the recordings available to a broader commercial audience,” says the story.
However, music lovers may get a taste.
The school, in Moscow, Idaho, “plans to make at least a sampling of Holiday’s party performance and other Feather materials available to those attending this February’s Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival,” says the story.
Feather was a British-born jazz pianist, composer and producer best known for his music journalism and other writing, says the Wikipedia.
The university has had Feather’s recordings since 2003, “but their contents weren’t known until the school finally sent them away to Philadelphia last year to be converted into digital files, a form that could be more easily accessed by historians,” continues AP, quoting Michael Tarabulski, an archivist at the International Jazz Collection.
While some of the material, “would be a seminal part of any jazz aficionados’ personal collection,” Tarabulski says copyright laws may prevent that from happening soon.
“Our problem is in making it accessible,” the story has him saying.
“He didn’t obtain their permission, he was just using it to write his articles. We’re loathe to put it out on the airwaves, because people could copy it. “And yet, what a shame.”
What are the chances of the copyright owner saying, ‘No Worries – enjoy’?
Big 4 organised music cartel member Sony BMG which, with Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal is trying to sue its own customers into become good little consumers of corporate ‘product,’ owns Legacy Recordings, holds the rights.
Say no more.
Also See:
Associated Press – RIAA ‘expert’ Doug Jacobson’s ‘new’ evidence, December 20, 2007
Want to help p2pnet stay online? Please click here.
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
December 27th, 2007 at 3:56 am
This is why I think copyright should expire after five years from creation of the work. There is no excuse for this type of silliness.