NYT Editorial: The Sax and Copyright Laws

For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s.

For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s.

The museum paid for the discs, but cannot distribute the music until it has found a way to compensate the estates of the musicians, many of which may be very difficult to track down after all these decades.

Hawkins’s saxophone solo on “Body and Soul” may be reason enough for Congress to revisit this issue and free historical documents from excessive legal fetters.