[78-L] Doug Pomeroy and the Savery collection

[Cary Ginell]

Just saw a brief feature on our local news station on the Bill Savery collection - a series of about 1,000 off-the-radio transcriptions of jazz and swing artists of the '30s that Savery's son is having restored by our own Doug Pomeroy. Unfortunately, water and mold damage appear to have destroyed about 25% of the collection, but the rest sounds pretty promising. The editing of the piece was pretty awful. They announced that recordings by clarinetist Benny Goodman are among the records, but then played a saxophone solo by Lester Young in the background. They also mentioned finding an uptempo recording of "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday, but the version they played in the story seemed as dirgelike as the Commodore recording. And Loren Schoenberg's name was misspelled "Schomberg" in an on-screen caption.

To top it all off, the dumb blonde news anchor introducing the story pronounced Count Basie's name "Bassey."

Sheesh.

Cary Ginell