This project hits me right in the heart. I do a ton of live, one mic recordings at festivals, and am trying to produce an album from them. I own a bunch of old acetate 78s (and let me tell you, finding a turntable to play them is a PITA) and they're fantastic bits of history.
Anyway, a couple of thoughts.
The Alan Lomax recordings are a national treasure. We wouldn't know half of the old traditional we do if he hadn't gone out to the fields and recorded them. So having another group of folks go and do the same thing is laudable. But what I don't like about this is that they're trying to do it with the *same equipment.* That tells me that the project is more about the nostalgia than the music, which is a bummer.
What is missing from those old Lomax recordings (and any pre-stereo recording, for that matter) is fidelity. In my dreams, I go back in time with a $150 digital field recorder and hand it to the man. I'd do that for dang near any pre-stereo artist. Can you imagine how cool it would be to listen to early Billy Holiday, or Dizzy Gillespie, or Django Reinhardt or Louis Armstrong in full, modern fidelity? Today, we don't really know how awesome those artists sounded because the recording technology didn't exist to capture it. So I'm always mystified as to why someone would find these world class artists, put them in world class venues, and then record them with tin-whistle technology.
There is a similar project called "Upstairs at United" that does all analog processing (record to tape, analog mix, analog master, cut to record) of one take live recordings of great artists, too. I've got several of their records, and they sound fantastic.
Someday we'll win this thing...
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