Stan Warnow, who’s working on a film biography of quirky electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, reports on finding a treasure-trove of Scott source material in Kansas City:
Along with the Raymond Scott brain trust of Irwin Chusid, Jeff Winner and Gert-Jan Blom, I spent last week in Kansas City, MO at the Marr Archives at the University of Missouri Kansas City Miller Nichols Library. This is the location of thousands of hours of Raymond Scott recordings—he recorded virtually everything so there are rehearsal recordings, air checks, interviews, phone conversations and of course commercial releases.
Also, in the Special Collections at the Library are thousands of Raymond Scott documents, schematics for the musical inventions and personal and professional still photos. The whole experience was fascinating! I shot a lot of material there and am now beginning to integrate it into the rough cut of the film.
I wonder how these materials made it to Kansas City. If you’ve got any info, let me know in the comments.
Here’s the URL for the Scott Collection at the archives:
http://library.umkc.edu/spec-col/raymond.htm
I found the link to the article from May 1, 1994, which tells the story of how the archives ended up here – I read it years ago and was fascinated. If you’re interested I’m afraid you’ll have to set up an account and pay to read the story:
http://nl.newsbank.com/nojavascript.html
or
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=list&p_topdoc=71
I hope this proves informative and entertaining.