Group of seven original Boris Rose acetate discs.

Engrossing small collection of original acetates cut by Boris Rose from radio broadcasts, capturing live performances by Charlie Parker at various club dates in New York, the Dizzy big band at Cornell University, Bud Powell at Birdland during an extended residency in 1953, and Tadd Dameron at the Royal Roost in 1948, the club dubbed "The Metropolitan Bopera House". The history of jazz is sprinkled liberally with entrepreneurs driven by a passion for the music, figures such as Teddy Reig and Norman Granz, and those zealous amateur recordists such as Dean Benedetti who become an integral part of jazz lore. One such figure was the "voluble and erudite" Boris Rose, described as such by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix in their Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History (OUP 2005, p. ix). Subsequently they relate how, from his "crowded studio in New York City on 15th Street east of the Third Avenue El" Rose "sold dubbed acetate discs of rare sides". In a piece about the Rose archive for the Wall Street Journal the distinguished jazz writer Will Friedwald remarked that "Boris Rose was one of those legendary characters who seem to proliferate in the world of jazz. He was tall, articulate, always very well groomed - and by all accounts an outrageous character. An inveterate prankster, he dreamed up a dizzying array of fake label names (including "Titania," "Ambrosia," "Caliban," "Session Disc," "Ozone" and "Chazzer Records"), many of which he tried to pass off as European imports. Most of his albums bore an address on the front, such as "A Product of Stockholm, Sweden." But if you looked closely on the back, it would say something like "Manufactured in Madison, Wisconsin" in much smaller type. 'I always felt something about jazz,' Mr. Rose said in an undated interview with historian Dan Morgenstern that was taped for German television. 'As far back as 1930, I listened to broadcasts from the Cotton Club. I heard Duke, I heard Don Redman, I heard Cab Calloway'. During his years at City College, Mr. Rose practiced the c-melody saxophone but began to find his calling when he got a job at the MRM Music Shop on Nassau Street. 'As far back as 1940, I purchased a home [disc-cutter] recorder and I began to dub records,' he told Mr. Morgenstern. 'For the next few years while I was in the Army, I was able to dub records for collectors who couldn't find the originals'. From there, he branched out to recording radio broadcasts and then live bands in clubs. 'Getting out of the Army in 1946, I had professional equipment, and began to take down all of these jazz broadcasts,' he explained. 'First on 16-inch acetate discs. Later on, when tape came into the picture, I was able to record on tape'. Mr. Morgenstern remembers Mr. Rose as 'a man who never sat down - he was always monitoring three or four tape recorders or disc-cutters at any given time'. For decades, Mr. Rose ran a thriving business, recording jazz wherever he could, then making and selling copies or trading them for rarer material. Over time he amassed a spectacular library of modern jazz from the glory years - the 1950s. His friends found this amazing since he rarely listened to the stuff himself; his own tastes ran to Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory. Still, he documented an entire era of music, the great majority of which hasn't been heard in 60 years" (4 December 2010). Rose's work as an archivist is covered in the scholarly Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century by Alex Sayf Cummings (OUP 2013): "Boris Rose, a compulsive collector and sound engineer from the Bronx. recorded performances from the radio, making homemade acetates and LPs available to fans of jazz, classical, country, and countless other genres for decades. Each featured a unique cover, designed and Xeroxed by Rose himself. 'We should thank goodness that someone was documenting these broadcasts,' [Down Beat columnist John] Corbett writes, 'or they might have been l.…