FAU sound archive has free vinyl records up for grabs Jan. 6-10
By Scott Travis, Sun Sentinel

Florida Atlantic University is offering a free and legal way for music lovers to add to their collections, with no downloading required.
By Scott Travis, Sun Sentinel

Florida Atlantic University is offering a free and legal way for music lovers to add to their collections, with no downloading required.

You may ask yourself… how did a Yiddish story by Sholem Aleichem, based on a surrealistic painting by Marc Chagal, become one of the world’s most popular shows?
You may ask yourself…. how could a 1964 Broadway musical touch audiences after 50 years?

Further proof that vinyl records are reasserting themselves in the collections of audio junkies are figures from music sales-tracker Nielsen SoundScan, released last week, which revealed that retailers moved 6.1 million wax units in 2013. That’s a 33 percent upswing over 2012’s haul of 2.55 million, making vinyl the fastest growing music format of the year.So there may be abundant interest in the free records that Florida Atlantic University’s Recorded Sound Archives are slinging starting Monday at the Wimberly Library (777 Glades Road, Boca Raton). About 2,000 retro records are in FAU’s third annual giveaway, harvested through private donations and duplicates that don’t fit with the university’s own collection.Up for grabs are albums from Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Glenn Miller; Broadway recordings from “Fiddler on the Roof,” Gilbert and Sullivan and others; and genre music spanning jazz to polka. The giveaway runs 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday, Jan. 10, on the library’s fifth floor, and then resumes Jan. 27-Jan. 31.
Original article – http://www.southflorida.com/events/sf-best-events-this-week-20140106,0,4156324.photogallery?index=sf-go-best-events-this-week-010614c-20140106
Yet, despite this year’s rare opportunity to celebrate a double dose of survival and gratitude, some things will always remain the same. The Story of Chanukah reaches back in time way past the struggling Pilgrims on New England’s rocky coast. It reaches back to 167 BCE when the Syrian king Antiochus desecrated the Temple and outlawed Jewish practices. The five sons of the Jewish priest, Mattithius, were incited to revolt. Chanukah celebrates their victory and the miracle of the light that lasted for eight days during the Temple’s re-dedication.

By the early 1920’s new advances in piano-roll technology gave rise to a complex, performance-oriented style of music that became the soundtrack of an era.
All types of music were recorded on piano rolls, from Ragtime to folk songs; from Jazz to Cantorial masterpieces. So….can these “Boardwalk Empire” era Jewish piano rolls still find an audience in today’s fast-paced electronic world?