◦ Saturday, July 05, 2008 ◦

A vast collection of 78 rpm records - valued at $1 million, weighing 50 tons and representing more than a half-century of American music history - is being donated to Syracuse University by the estate of a prominent New York City record shop owner.

The more than 200,000 records represented the entire inventory of "Records Revisited," a landmark Manhattan store owned by Morton Savada, who died in February from lung cancer at age 85.

Savada's collection included recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. It also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and "V-disks," which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II.

Even though they don't yet know what gems await them in Savada's collection, university officials were ecstatic about the donation, which boosts the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive's collection of 78 rpm records to about 400,000 - second in the United States only to the Library of Congress collection. His family also donated Savada's collection of catalogs, discographies and other materials.

Sound recordings are a rich resource for researchers, faculty and students in a variety of disciplines - musicology, history, filmmaking, journalism and political science - said University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Suzanne Thorin.

Besides documenting the musical styles and performance practices of the day, these sound recordings provide a glimpse into social, political and cultural history, she said.

"The Savada collection is truly an archival wonder," said Theo Cateforis, assistant professor in Syracuse's Department of Fine Arts, who also makes extensive use of sound recordings in teaching.

"For students whose relationship with music and technology rarely extends beyond the confines of the iPod, it is always eye-opening to see and hear the original 78s that were the mainstay of the recording industry for many decades," he said.

With its collection of more than 340,000 items, Belfer is the fourth largest sound archive in the country and includes formats from the earliest experimental recordings on tinfoil to modern digital media.
Its collection of 22,000 cylinder records is the largest held by any private institution in North America, and one of the largest in the world.

The Savada collection has been packed into about 1,300 boxes and will be taken to Syracuse next week on six 20-foot-long Federal Express trucks, Elias Savada said. The collection is estimated to weigh about 50 tons in total, he said.

Records Revisited was the last store exclusively selling 78 rpm recordings and was a frequent haunt for those in the film and music industries, including actor/directors Woody Allen and Matt Dillon.
Savada often lent his 78s to movie and music producers rather than selling them, and never sold the last copy of a recording because he regarded his collection as an archive, not an inventory.