Aadam Jacobs’ collection of 6,000 cassette and DAT tapes that capture an epoch of live music.
Aadam Jacobs talks about his massive archive of taped concert recordings from recent decades and the grassroots effort to get them digitized.
Jacobs captured these moments in Chicago, mostly at small venues when iconic bands were just getting started. He's the curator, collector and archivist behind a massive collection of more than 2,000 concert recordings from the 1980s to 2019, featured on the website Internet Archive.
Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times
Once a month, Brian Emerick (left) drives to Aadam Jacobs’ house to pick up about 10 to 15 boxes full of 50 to 100 tapes each, brings them home, rips them to digital files, and then sends them off to a team of about 10 fellow volunteers around the world.
The Monarch Youth Center in Lincoln is operated by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. The facility houses incarcerated young men, prioritizing youth from Central Illinois. State officials tout the center as a model for other juvenile prisons to follow.
