In the 1930s American jazz nerds banded together in local “hot clubs” counting among their charter members the likes of Milt Gabler, Marshall Stearns and his protege George Avakian: “Stearns played drums in his teens, and attended Harvard University both for undergraduate and for law school (1929?-1934). Following this he studied medieval English at Yale University, where he took his Ph.D. in 1942.” [Marshall Stearns ] “He (Avakian) managed to meet and interview (Benny) Goodman for the Horace Mann School Record during his senior year. This is when he began amassing his enormous collection of Jazz recordings. He also began writing letters to such companies as Decca and the American Record Corporation (ARC). ARC had acquired the catalogs of the bankrupt OKeh and Brunswick Records labels, both of which had recorded jazz extensively in the 1920s. Avakian began writing letters lobbying them to reissue those recordings.” [George Avakian] We know at least one of Avakian's famous letters crossed Milt Gabler's desk. No Charlie Stinson contacts so far but it appears from the Gabler interviews above at least the gist of one other letter made its way down the corporate pipeline to Charlie Stinson who first approached Gabler, not the other way around.
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