The National Jazz Museum in Harlem:
It’s a jazz lover’s dream come true. Created by recording engineer William Savory, the Savory Collection includes more than 100 hours of recordings made from live New York City radio broadcasts between 1935 and 1941 and never heard since their initial airing. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Lennie Tristano and Bunny Berigan are all showcased in The Savory Collection.
My grandmother was of this era and loved these musicians so I heard a lot of them when I was a kid and still have a soft spot for this music. These two albums, “The Savory Collection, Vol. 1: Body and Soul: Coleman Hawkins & Friends” and “The Savory Collection, Vol. 2: Jumpin’ At the Woodside: The Count Basie Orchestra featuring Lester Young“, are part of a legendary private trove of nearly 1,000 recordings that haven’t been heard by the general public since the 1930s.
This is why Jim is dead wrong about the level of care Apple puts into its streaming catalogue. If you care about music, there’s no contest between the streaming services, it has to be Apple Music. Even though Apple is really savvy about using popular tastes to get more subscribers and push the service ahead of rivals, they absolutely have not ignored genres outside of hip-hop, the way Jim has implied. Spotify, for example, never puts as much care into niche exclusives like this one. I mean, let’s leave aside the truth, uncomfortable for some, that hip-hop is in a creative golden age right now (funnily enough, the same is true of metal, just not the long-past-their-prime metal acts that keep getting talked up on this blog). Even if you don’t care for popular genres, Apple Music absolutely has you covered. And their discovery features may have had teething troubles initially, but now they’re top notch, far better than the iTunes music store. Jim may insist on letting his bad experience with the technical side of the service cloud his judgment – to be frank, his adamance is almost comical at this point – but that doesn’t change the fact that to those of us who are paying attention, Apple’s institutional love for music is clearer than it ever has been in their streaming service.