Whenever some new discovery of historical interest is made, it always fascinates me to think that the newly uncovered thing was really there all along. After the young pharaoh’s death, Tutankhamun’s tomb didn’t blink out of existence for three thousand years; it slept quietly and out of sight as the Great Wall of China was built, as the Roman empire rose and fell, and as Columbus set out for North America. Even as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made their first records, King Tut’s mummy lay undisturbed and unknown in its dark hidey-hole in the Valley of the Kings. When Howard Carter and his team “discovered” it in 1922, they didn’t conjure it from nothing; rather, they simply exposed a secret that had been there for more than a hundred generations—if only anyone had known where to look.
I got a taste of what Howard Carter must have felt when, in the summer of 2020, I received an e-mail from my friend Dan Levinson telling me of a musical treasure buried deep in the archives of New York Public Library and long forgotten: master tapes of an unissued album celebrating the music of Frank Teschemacher and the Austin High Gang, recorded in 1992 at RCA’s flagship studi
The Rise of a Jazz Vibraphonist: Evelyn Yosmali
Garry Berman
