The UBS Culture Foundation has awarded physicist Sebastian Gliga from the Paul Scherrer Institute a grant to digitize an irrecoverable, historical recording of B.B. King from his 1980 concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The funding will support the implementation of an X-ray technique developed by Gliga and his team, aiming to digitize degraded audio tapes in a contactless way that avoids causing any further damage.
In 1980, the "King of the Blues", B.B. King, gave his second concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The sound was captured in stereo on ¼-inch tape by Swiss sound engineer Philippe Zumbrunn. This recording, made in exceptional Nagra Master audio quality, became a precious part of Zumbrunn's private collection until his death in 2020. As part of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project, EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and the Claude Nobs Foundation took charge of digitising the tape, which is now part of the festival collection, to preserve it for future generations. However, the recording is in an advanced state of chemical decay and only about ten seconds can be played back at a time. Any playback on a conventional device will only further destroy the tape. This situation highlights the importance of preserving and digitizing cultural heritage.
At the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Gliga and his team work with collaborators and European partners on an innovative method for retrieving information from heavily damaged and fragile magnetic tapes. This technique uses the synchrotron X-rays from the Swiss Light Source at the PSI, allowing for the readout of fragile and even severely damaged tape fragments without touching them.
The Montreux Jazz Digital Project provided the B.B. King tape to demonstrate the X-ray technique, based on its mission to create added value for archives by conducting innovation projects in collaboration with various labs, start-ups, and partner institutions. The Montreux Jazz Digital Project was launched in 2010 by EPFL and the Claude Nobs Foundation to digitise, preserve and enhance the Montreux Jazz Festival's audiovisual collection. The recovery of the B.B. King recording at PSI is being performed in parallel to efforts by the Montreux Jazz Digital Project and the United Music Foundation to restore similar degraded tapes using physical treatments designed to make the tapes playable again with conventional players.
The CHF 75,000 funding by the UBS Culture Foundation will not only help preserve the historical B.B. King recording, but also pave the way for further development of the technology and the non-destructive digitization of further historically valuable recordings made on magnetic tape.
For over 60 years, the UBS Culture Foundation has been committed to promoting cultural life and artistic creation, fostering exchange between artists and society, and supporting the diversity of cultural expressions.