Numero Group: By The Numbers

It seems remarkable that I am here on the off-chance that my e-mail was answered by Michael Slaboch, but that is how it happened.  I arrived yesterday in Northport, Long Island not knowing what to expect, but the team from Numero (Michael, Ben, Zac, & Kyle) took me in as one of their own, and the Jarnow’s invited me into their lives.  Soon after I’d learned everyone’s name, I found myself immersed in the visual backstory of Al Jarnow’s films and the rich pictorial history of his life as an artist/filmmaker/husband/father.  I quickly began to gain an understanding of Mr. Jarnow’s personal creative process developed over a lifetime.  So I scanned as much as possible trying to create a digital record of everything in sight (even coming back for a second day, so the team could focus on other aspects of the project), but it is a monumental undertaking when a creative mind has lived in the same house for over 30 years.  Fortunately the quality as well as interest level of even the works-in-progress is high.  These are not left overs.

While scanning Michael kept me digging on live rough mixes of Renaldo Domino (who is treating all the kitty babies from NYC to a show tonight atDig Deeper Soul Party at the Five Spot Soul Food Supper Club in Brooklyn) from the Eccentric Soul Revue, fully orchestrated demos of 24 Carat Black that will finally see the light of day on that mysterious Num025, and a tweaked but not final tracklist for the next volume of Good God! which proves to be more funky and more Spiritual (remember it’s okay “however the Spirit moves you”) it sits well with the records Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens are making.

The highlight of my first day was an evening screening of Al Jarnow’s films.  Which allowed me to revisit many films familiar to me (though I’d see them long ago when first aired); hopefully, to many kids-at-heart who were nursed on programming from the Children’s Televison Workshop, but we were also treated to fragments, experiments, and some live-action source material for future CTW projects.  No longer will we have to suffer from watching those third generation bootleg prints that have found themselves onto youtube.com.  Al Jarnow’s films are coming out of the shadows.

This is a very exciting project for me because I finally have been able to see how archivists and documentarians preserve history, but more importantly I think this project is going to take Numero Group to the next level.  I am very proud to be connected to this project.

Michael Shine