The Attila Zoller Collection
Attila Zoller Founded the Vermont Jazz Center in the early 1970s as a means to fuse his love for jazz music with his visceral love for the outdoors. The hills of Newfane, Vermont reminded him of the mountains of his native Visegrád, Hungary. After establishing himself as Europe’s preeminent jazz guitarist in the ’50s, he emigrated to the New York to work with Chico Hamilton, Herbie Mann, Stan Getz and Benny Goodman, among others. Zoller topped polls in Europe for over a dozen years, earned DownBeat international critics poll awards. He released over 20 albums as a leader. Zoller was presented with a Lifetime Achievement award by the New England Foundation for the Arts in June, 1995.
The Zoller Collection of 87 open reel tapes and 57 compact cassettes contains recordings staring in 1955 and proceeding through Zoller’s death in 1998.
Historical Audio Recordings on AVIARY
Zoller was an astute sound technician, guitar and pickup designer. He was an inventor who understood that his contributions, and those of the world-class musicians with whom he played, were well worth recording. Upon his death in 1998 he left a legacy of commercially recorded music along with boxes and boxes of reel-to-reel and cassette and video tapes. These recordings were left to his daughter, Alicia Zoller Carusona who then bequeathed them to the Vermont Jazz Center.
The VJC was awarded a grant by the Council on Library and Information Resources to professionally transfer that burgeoning collection into digital files. The work was done by Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) and curated by VJC archivist John Levin and board president, Julian Gerstin.
Click here to view an article co-written by Karl Fleck, the technician who conducted the digital transfers at NEDCC
Attila Zoller Academic Database (KOHA)
Working with a grant issued by Equinox Opensource Library software, our team led by John Levin organized the tapes that were digitized at NEDCC and cataloged them onto Koha software.
Click on this link to gain access to all the material that the VJC has cataloged to date. Entries include books, CDs and rare recordings from the Zoller Collection.
A sampling of the artists performing with Zoller include Jimmy Rainey, Don Friedman, Harvey S., Albert Mangelsdorff, Joe Chambers, Bobby Jaspar, Scott LaFaro, Pete LaRoca, Don Friedman, Lew Tabackin, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow, Roland Hanna, Eddie Daniels, Fred Hersch, Reggie Workman, Hal Galper, Jimmy Owens, Al Haig, George Mraz, Bob Moses, Jimmy Giuffre, Howard Brofsky and many others.
Click here to assist financially in this project please contribute to the Vermont Jazz Center.