NI 2734

Benny Goodman
Yale University Archives Volume 5, 1936 - 1943

With this album, we come to the end of what has been our Benny Goodman series. None of this would have happened if it had not been for the longtime friendship between Benny Goodman and William Hyland, an accomplished clarinetist and a distinguished lawyer who was also New Jersey's Attorney General. Goodman expressed interest in leaving his collection to Yale University, and even visited there with Hyland just days before his death in June 1986. But that meeting left nothing settled beyond the preliminaries, and it was Bill Hyland who set up the entire matrix that resulted in the issuance of these recordings, as well as the machinery that continues to run the Goodman Estate. He was also obliged to review and approve of the content of these recordings to ensure that they represent Goodman's legacy as BG himself expressed it. Everyone involved in this project also owes a large debt of gratitude to the much beloved Harold Samuels. As Music Librarian at Yale University, it was his fortitude and imminently sane sense of humour that transformed Benny Goodman's collection, at Bill Hyland's behest, from papers and boxes in the storage room of the library's basement into a living, breathing collection of swinging sounds that have pleased Goodman fans worldwide.

NI 2736

Duke Ellington
From His Treasure Chest, 1965 - 1972

Here are 15 previously unissued recordings from the treasure chest that Duke Ellington liked to refer to as the ‘stockpile.’ Although he professed little concern for posterity and always placed emphasis on ‘now,’ he took care of both in incomparable fashion. How wonderful it would be if the work of the greatest musicians of the past had been similarly documented on records! For Ellington has left us not merely finished, definitive versions of his music, but also the experimental, workshop models on which the ideas for masterpieces were explored and developed. In effect, what we have is like a huge sketchbook, where prototypes, alternatives, and variations are shown with fascinating differences of detail, all of which are very well-illustrated in this collection.