Department of English

• Thursday, October 20, 2022 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Kelly Writers House Arts Café and on YouTube

Hosted by Herman Beavers
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Join us for Found Sounds: Bringing Lost Audio to Light featuring Ken Druker and Chris Mustazza, hosted by Herman Beavers. This event focuses on the process of bringing new old recordings to public attention, from discovery through digitization, editing, and distribution. Ken Druker, Senior Vice President, Jazz Development for the Verve Label Group, will discuss his work producing John Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, a never-before-heard recording session from the legendary Van Gelder Studios, made on March 6, 1963. Chris Mustazza, Co-Director of the PennSound Archive, will speak about his work editing previously unreleased recordings of poets from the period of early sound recordings, which are sometimes on obscure media, like aluminum records. This event will be of interest to anyone curious about music, poetry, audio production, the history of sound recording, and history more broadly. 

Ken Druker has been professionally involved in jazz for over 30 years as a record executive, educator, presenter and radio host. He is the producer of two recent John Coltrane releases, Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album (2018) and A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (2021). He is currently SVP, Jazz Development at the Verve Label Group where he oversees a vast catalog that includes the historic Verve, Impulse, Mercury, Decca, Commodore and Argo/Cadet labels.

Chris Mustazza is Co-Director of the PennSound Archive, the world’s largest archive of poetry recordings. He teaches in the English department at Penn, and his research focuses on literary audio and sound studies. His book manuscript, Speech Labs: Collecting Poets’ Voices in the Period of Early Sound Recording, is the first history of how poets came to be recorded during the infancy of recorded sound.