TRANSCRIBED FROM PHIL SCHAAP’S RADIO SHOW, 2013
I’m telling you the story about Roy Eldridge, his stuff that was stuffed into his basement in a mess and went unattended to in his lifetime. He died February 26th of 1989. His daughter and I discussed many times the rather lengthy undertaking it would be to go through it, and we didn’t do it, and I was sitting in this chair in January of 2009, nearly 20 years after Roy Eldridge’s death, and the phone rang and it was another neighbor of mine from jolly Hollis, Craig Haynes, Roy Haynes’ oldest child and he was, of course, still in contact with Carol Eldridge and he told me Carol was dead, that she had died suddenly and that, that shock, that she was gone just was starting to sink in when he informed me of even graver concerns to the Roy Eldridge collection.
Now Carol Eldridge’s death is the tragedy. She was, I can’t say that we were friends in 1958 ‘cause I was kind of scared of her, but I got over it and we were buds. And you know she’s gone and then Craig said she hadn’t really paid her taxes since Roy’s death. I said what? And I don’t know whether it was New York City or New York State, but the house was taken for those tax payments, they had no interest in the contents of the basement and there it sat in a dumpster on 109th Avenue and it was going to the dump. And it was going to be lost. Roy Eldridge’s collection. And Craig said “It’s gone but I don’t know what to do and I’m climbed up into the dumpster, you know about dumpster diving, you know, I grabbed a few things, man, but it’s you know, there’s not enough time for me to get whatever. I don’t even know what it is, man, what should I look for? What can I yank out?” I said, well do the best you can, and that was the end of it and I knew that this massive cache of great art, Roy Eldridge’s art, was gone and she was gone, boy, Roy’s been dead for 20 years. We had a belated funeral service for Carol Eldridge in Hollis at the same church as her mother’s funeral had been in February of ’89, 20 years later, and while it wasn’t the end of the grieving process and certainly not over the magnitude of the loss of this astounding collection of art, Roy Eldridge’s art, that seemed to be the final scene.
AND then over three and a half years passed, and we get to this time of year in October of 2012, and I know a photographer named Elizabeth Leitzell. And her husband is a big WKCR fan and he listens to my radio show and she’s had me on the phone with him a number of times and he’s a jazz musician, too, and you know whatever reason he’s decided he really likes me a lot so I like them a lot because they love jazz. And they’re young and they’re just wonderful people and they’ll, you know, when they, you know, make some effort to attend my courses at Swing University, and Kyle will be a jazz expert and Elizabeth Leitzell will always love jazz, and she might become a jazz expert.
So anyway, she, she calls me in the wake of Sandy, and you know it was hard to call people, it was hard to get around. I’ve walked to the station. I still remember the Clifford Brown birthday broadcast, which is coming up this coming Wednesday, this year’s version. Last year’s, you know, people were so thankful that we were on the air and that there was some alternative to the repetition of the devastation news of Hurricane Sandy. So, we were doing our thing, and the station functioned in this particular area of Manhattan, electricity did exist. It was difficult to get here but once we were here, we played you Clifford Brown, we played you everything.
In any case, Elizabeth Leitzell reached me and she said she’s on the beach in Rockaway and she’s standing a few feet away from a man in tears whose home is devastated and whose world is ruined by the super storm and that she’s a photographer so she’s doing some freelance journalism, you know it was difficult to get people to go out into the storm and become part of the coverage of it, and there she is, and she contacts me that this man is in this situation and of course, she’s sad. Well, why would you call me? I mean, I’m…you know, maybe have some Good Samaritan potential, but you know I’m just some guy sitting on a pile of records on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she’s out with the guy who’s losing his home to the super storm in Rockaway and it’s not really a logical connection until comes the punchline. He had Roy Eldridge’s collection.
The man, Kurt Schneck is his name, had gotten wind of the tragedy of Carol Eldridge’s death and the shocking development of Roy Eldridge’s super collection in the basement of the home right out there on 109th Avenue in Hollis since the year zero and it stayed there until nineteen thousand nine when it got tossed as the house was taken over for the back taxes problem, that I wasn’t even aware of that. My dear friend Carol Eldridge had, well, had become her circumstance. So, of course, the bottom line was that the collection was taken to the dump, and it was gone. But no. This man had interceded and brought his own dumpster to take away the dumpster and made his negotiation with the dumpster person who was working for the clearance of the property, and he brought the collection to his home in Rockaway. So, unbeknownst to us, it had been saved or at least a significant component of it had been saved, enough to fill a dumpster. That should give you an idea of just how huge the collection was and what an astounding mess it was in the basement of Roy Eldridge’s home in Hollis. So, it had been saved, it had not disappeared in January 2009. Instead, it had been saved to die a watery death in October of 2012. Great victory, huh? So, you didn’t die, then you died the other time, and you’re still dead. It’s kind of rough. But the collection wasn’t completely gone, it just was waterlogged. This is not good for records, tapes, papers, photographs, drum sets, it just was really an unfathomable mess even when you were looking at it.
And at this juncture I contacted the uh, well, he was once an exceedingly young gentleman, we used to call him the esteemed teen, and, of course, he’s no longer in his teen years but he’s just as ardent about this whole case we are in business, in the arts that we represent. His name is Ben Young and at this point he basically took over, using our station staff, we’re all volunteers here, and vans the waterlog collection, that survived Sandy, that had survived the dumpster of a 109th Avenue in January of 2009. That it survived the 20 years between Roy Eldridge’s death and Carol Eldridge’s death, was brought to this station and was like bringing the, at least the smell of, the Atlantic Ocean and a good deal of its water, at least a sizable significant example in illustration, to the station and every room stank. And a drying process was at first burdened by the fact that…., and I’ve got this technical thing to tell you. An acetate disc, it’s kind of hard to explain, that these would be the actual cut discs, not the press records that were your 45s or your LPs or if you remember the 78 rpm, but the concept in the original form carving into it. They’re one-of-a-kind, they’re the recording format of the original days. And Roy Eldridge had a lot of them. And the way they’re made is that the soft compound that’s hard enough to stick around for a while but soft enough to carve into, is that here too a much harder inside, typically an aluminum platter –and that’s the acetate disc. And water is not a good idea.
First of all, if you put a label on it the glue on the back of the label, in the ink that you wrote on, the label, that’s gone, so you don’t even know what’s on the disc. But also, the water can get between the acetate compound and the hard, typically aluminum, sometimes glass, occasionally cardboard center, and if it’s saltwater the process of destroying the disc and whatever its contents are is rapid. It’s going to die anyway. “When it dries, it dies” is the expression I was saying that to the press a lot in October of 2012 and into November. And so, our first goal was that all these saltwater discs had to be dubbed instantaneously because they were going to die when they dried. And then we turned to the stuff that was just waterlogged and it, I want you to understand the massive amount of effort that was made and again to give the kudos to Ben Young who nevertheless harnessed all of us. I spent one significant day at the very beginning dubbing, drying discs as they died, and literally they would die on the turntable as we tried to save their contents, and I would say that sadly somewhere like 15 to 25%, somewhere in there, were transferred safely and 75% of it is gone. But then again in January of 2009 I thought 100% of it was gone. So, the process continued and an arsenal of people devoting their services have done their stuff and it’s the collection, that which survived superstorm Sandy, has pretty much been returned to Mr. Schneck who, I’m hoping, is happy. He said to the New York Times, you know, imagine you’re devastated by Hurricane Sandy and you’ve lost everything and you’re outside and you’ve got this waterlogged collection of jazz memorabilia that no one knows about, nobody understands what it is, or how to use it when it’s properly functioning, and now you’ve got to find somebody who can save it. And he did. He found us and we did as much as could have been done. It’s really an amazing thing and that brings us now to the music that you were listening to. And admittedly it’s now 20 minutes ago, 25 minutes ago probably, that I was playing the alternate “Heckler’s Hop.”
And pretty close to the end of the restoration process, which was all but 12 months, it’s funny that you know, the, the real news world this is, we don’t really have news on WKCR or we do have cultural affairs, and news and events in a certain sense, you know we’re about the art form. But you know it’s a year since Sandy. What do you got? What’s your story? This is our story. We played a huge part in this, if you like jazz, Little Jazz, and a lot of it. There’s a lot more in existence now than had heretofore existed, and even though the real story is the tragedy that in a one-two punch of January ’09, in October 2012, it was lost. Some of it’s been saved and at the end of the saving we found these alternate takes from Roy Eldridge’s first issued records, the Vocalion dates, and it’s one of the greatest things that’s ever happened. It made all of the effort worth it, even if we hadn’t saved anything else, and we saved the whole gang of stuff. About 50 pages of Roy’s unpublished autobiography, for instance, which it could be all of it, something, and we saved this. And if it was 1978, I’d be contacted now by the London Times, “We hear you just played a heretofore unknown supreme record by the Roy Eldridge fellow Little Jazz,” and I would give them an interview while playing another record on the air. And this is not gonna stop the presses or change the world but it sure is great and I got one more for you.
Roy made, it’s really a pair that is one thing, but five days apart, these two record dates for Vocalion with his working band at the Three Deuces and on the second date he recorded “Where The Lazy River Goes By”’ a minor key thing called “That Thing” and one of his deluxe tour de forces called “After You’ve Gone.” And I don’t know how many of you have looked in the wax of Vocalion 3458 but it says “Take Two”, there really is a Take One of “After You’ve Gone” and you’re gonna hear it is the penultimate track in this largely if not entirely unnoticed miracle.
The great art has been salvaged. An alternate painting of the same woman by Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa, alternate tape, we’ve discovered it. I’ve discovered 105 new episodes of The Honeymooners. I have found an entirely unreleased finished album by the Beatles, and an extra play by Shakespeare and the lost Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach and some extra copies of the Declaration of Independence.
The YouTube “Saving The Roy Eldridge Estate” video includes ROY ELDRIDGE’S FIRST TAKE RECORDING OF “AFTER YOU’VE GONE”
See More: Roy Eldridge Estate in Photos in The Portal of Texas History
Notes: Phil Schaap (1951-2021) was a jazz historian, curator, educator, radio host, and prominent voice in jazz advocacy and education for over 50 years. He spent over 50 years as a radio host at Columbia University’s WKCR, where he hosted popular jazz shows such as Bird Flight and Traditions In Swing, and conducted interviews with jazz legends of the past and present. Schaap was also the curator of jazz and head educator of Swing University at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, and Juilliard, with an emphasis on the jazz tradition and strategies for deep, informed listening. A 6x Grammy award winner and NEA Jazz Master, Schaap is widely regarded as one of the foremost scholars of jazz music, and a leading figure in providing accurate and explanatory jazz information. – Vanderbilt University