by guarachon63 » Sun Mar 21, 2010 2:48 pm
Hi Vasik
Like you, I got the songbook first, and when I finally got the tapes it was a bit of a disappointment - full of so many quick jolting edits without pause I found it hard to follow.
(The references you see in the right hand column each correspond to a recording on the tapes from which the transcription was taken.)
The whole thing wasn't made any easier by the fact that by the time the tapes got to me they were so many generations removed from the originals that the audio was buried deep in a sea of hiss.
Given all that, I found them fairly useless so I eventually lost track of them.
That said, it would be great to put them together again on CD or mp3, even for historical purposes, as I consider the work as sort of a landmark effort in US Afrocuban music studies.
(I put scans of the rumba section on my scribd account.)
If anyone still has good cassette copies, I'd be willing to do the transfer.
Regarding Jerry's upcoming book, I don't think he ever finished it. In my version of the songbook there is a foreward in Spanish that tells that Jerry died in a car accident when 95% of the book (we have) was complete. His friends and collaborators got together to finish it in his memory.
saludos
Barry