Salvaged From Flood Waters, a Jazz Legend\'s Recordings Draws New Listeners

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Ben Young, a D.J. at WKCR-FM, the campus radio station at Columbia University, held one of the records containing music by the jazz musician Roy Eldridge on Wednesday. The records were rescued from a Queens home flooded during Hurricane Sandy.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Eldridge performing in an undated photo.

The great trumpeter Roy Eldridge did not throw much out.

“Roy was a keeper â€" he kept stuff around,” said Ben Young, a jazz aficionado and the director of broadcasting at WKCR-FM (89.9), the campus radio station at Columbia University.

Eldridge, who died in 1989, saved laundry slips, Christmas cards, canceled checks and thousands of jazz photographs and homemade recordings in the cluttered basement of his house at 194-19 109th Avenue in Hollis, Queens.

Mr. Young noted this as he held a dilapidated record from the 1940s on Wednesday, inside the radio station’s studios on Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights. The station plays Eldridge’s music regularly and on Wednesday is playing its annual Roy Eldridge 24-hour birthday memorial broadcast to the jazzman, who was born on Jan. 30, 1911.

Mr. Young held a dilapidated o! ld record with a handwritten label: “Heckler’s Hop,” from an Eldridge performance in the 1940s.

The disk, cracked and splotched with mold, was one of about 350 homemade records made for, or by, Eldridge dating back to the 1930s - mostly of Eldridge performing â€" that have never been heard by the public.

How this crumbling old record got into Mr. Young’s hands is a tale that intersects with Hurricane Sandy and a homeowner in the Rockaways named Kurt Schneck.

After Eldridge died in 1989, his daughter, Carol, continued to live in the Eldridge house in Hollis until her death in January 2009. With no immediate relatives nearby, the contents of the house were thrown out, but a junk man pulled out some items and sold them to Mr. Schneck, an antiques collector who lives in the Belle Harbor section of the Rockaways. Mr. Schneck stored the collection in his basement, someday hoping to sell them.

“I’m more of a Louis Armstrong guy,” said Mr. Schneck, an amateur drummer, “but I new this stuff was valuable.”

When Hurricane Sandy hit last October, floodwaters filled Mr. Schneck’s basement, submerging the Eldridge material and many other items.

A day or two later, a photographer, Elizabeth Leitzel, happened to shoot the many items Mr. Schneck had dragged out of the basement and onto his front lawn. She told an acquaintance, Phil Schaap, about the Eldridge items. Mr. Schaap, the curator for Jazz at Lincoln Center and also the curator for WKCR, told Mr. Young about the items. Mr. Young called Mr. Schneck and persuaded him to loan the station the items to see if they could be cleaned and restored.

“It was a match made in heaven,” Mr. Schneck said. “What’s the chances I meet some guy who loves Roy Eldridge and knows how to rescue recordings.”

So a week or so after the hurricane, Mr. Young and a team of student D.J.’s arrived in a van to pick up the items and take them to the station. He showed some of them on Wednesday: a Christmas card from! the trum! peter Buck Clayton, some canceled checks to band members from the Roy Eldridge Orchestra; 50 pages of an incomplete autobiography Eldridge started writing in the 1950s; a laundry receipt from a London hotel; and a French magazine that featured topless women. Mr. Young also pulled out a photograph of Eldridge performing with Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk from 1945.

Then there were audio recordings of Eldridge playing, including 200 hours of reel-to-reel tapes and 350 78-r.p.m. records. The music ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s and includes private sessions in musicians’ homes and big-band concerts recorded from live radio broadcasts. One tape was a recording of Woody Allen playing clarinet with Eldridge and Gerry Mulligan.

“They all have that spark of Roy as an improviser, which makes anything he played worth having - he’s always going for it,” Mr. Young said.

The oldest and rarest of the music was on the disks, which had been badly damaged by the flood - especially the 100or so that were made of metal.

Mr. Young and Mr. Schaap realized that if these discs were allowed to dry, they would crack and rust and become unplayable.

“If it dries, it dies,” said Mr. Schaap, who had known Eldridge since 1958 and who often invited him to the radio station for interviews.

Mr. Young put the damaged discs on a turntable in the studio and while continually dousing the disks with water, let the phonograph needle run through the delicate grooves and pull the old music off, so it could be recorded digitally â€" essentially extracting one last play from these one-of-a-kind crumbling discs. On Wednesday, he was preparing to play some of the rescued recordings during an afternoon segment.

“It’s a tragedy that they got dunked in the ocean, he said, “but then again, it took a hurricane to finally flush the collection out into the open.”