Category: Good News

Archives are not necessarily a money sink

October 4th, 2010 · · Archives, Good News No comments - Tags: ,

Great news story about Ray Charles leaving his estate and masters to a charitable organisation who have managed to double its value, while contributing millions to worthwhile causes.

Ray Charles leaves soul to kids

His entire estate was turned over to the foundation after he died of cancer in 2004, aged 73. None of Charles’ 12 adult children is involved with it.

A few years before he died, Charles advised he would bequeath US$500,000 to each of them and warned them not to challenge his wishes. One did sue in 2008 for Charles’ intellectual property rights but was rebuffed in court.

Foundation president Valerie Ervin’s main job is to increase the value of the foundation’s investments – a task she aced by ensuring it was not affected by the 2008 stock market crash – and to give away about US$5 million annually.

Its reach has been broadened to education in general, including grants totaling US$5 million to Morehouse College, a university for black men in Atlanta.

Ervin demands quarterly reports from beneficiaries and makes surprise visits to see how funds are spent. A board of directors provides an extra level of oversight. The foundation’s overheads are low with five employees.

The foundation also has a licensing arm, which handles post-1960 recordings. Through a venture with Concord Records, it will release the album Rare Genius: The Undiscovered Masters on October 26. Among tracks is a duet with Johnny Cash on Kris Kristofferson’s Why Me, Lord?

“We own everything,” said Ervin, who ran Charles’ affairs in the last decade of his life. “Mr Charles was adamant that he own everything that was related to him.” (In fact, Atlantic Records owns recordings from the 1950s, but the foundation controls usage.)

Numero Group are, frankly, heroes

September 23rd, 2010 · · Archives, Good News No comments

Chicago’s Numero Group record label prides itself on digging up obscure soul, funk and R&B treasures:

Indeed, Robert Pruter, author of “Chicago Soul,” calls the research and archival work that Numero does “superlative.” “They do an extraordinary job of documenting,” he says. Pruter, a librarian at Romeoville-based Lewis University, says soul and R&B rarely get the same attention from academics that jazz and blues do, but he predicts that someday it will, and he believes that Numero’s compilations will be key when that day comes.

“Twenty years from now, the sort of people (Numero) is talking to will be dead, and history will die with them,” says Pruter.

For anyone who’s wondering, Shipley and company don’t go about producing historic documents by digging through old records. Any used records of use to Numero have already been picked up by someone else, explains Rob Sevier, Numero’s arts and repertoire guru. Instead, Numero goes through primary sources like producers, artists and label execs to find the music it’s looking for.

Thanks, Bernie Andrews, for breaking the rules

September 16th, 2010 · · Archives, Good News No comments - Tags: ,


Bernie Andrews, who has died aged 76, was the maverick producer behind the early BBC radio appearances of many of the leading pop artists of the 1960s, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

Obituary: Bernie Andrews:

In his dimly-lit production cubicle, Andrews painstakingly strove to secure the best performance possible from his musicians, frequently letting them overrun their strictly allotted studio time. His nocturnal working habits earned him a reputation as a nine-to-five man — 9pm until 5am.

After these sessions, instead of lodging the master tapes in the BBC library, Andrews invariably — and crucially — took them home. This was in breach of the rules, but it meant that much precious material escaped the BBC’s infamous policy of “wiping” tapes to save money.

(Read more in The Telegraph)

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music “free”

September 13th, 2010 · · Good News No comments - Tags:

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music “free”:
A radio host recently “referred to me as a Communist,” says Musopen’s Aaron Dunn. Music professors berate him by e-mail because his project is “like Napster.” Dunn’s crime? Setting music free.

In fact, though, Dunn’s version of “freedom” looks little like Napster. Instead of distributing a recording without permission, Dunn raises money, hires orchestras to record terrific classical music (“I was a bassoon student,” he says) that has fallen into the public domain, and then makes those recordings available to anyone, for any reason.

Read the rest of this article...

(Via Ars Technica.)