Tony Schwartz: Snapshots in Sound

Children's games, taxi drivers, music from an open window--Schwartz's recordings are an auditory love letter to a bygone New York City

A born and bred New Yorker, Tony Schwartz (1923-2008) was enamored with his city. Though a popular campaign designer for Madison Avenue clients such as Johnson & Johnson and American Airlines, and later creating the sound for hundreds of political advertisements (including the infamous Daisy spot for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign), his first and truest love was the sounds of the streets around him. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the agoraphobic Schwartz ventured only a few blocks from his Hell's Kitchen apartment yet captured an encyclopedia of sounds. Many of these tapes were broadcast on his perennial WNYC radio show "Around New York" from 1945 to 1976. Though the term may seem an oxymoron, Tony Schwartz truly was an audio visionary.
Sampling from Schwartz's voluminous catalog of recordings and coupling them with the poetic descriptions he gave to them, Snapshots in Sound assembles an A-Z of Schwartz's vivid practice. Filled with candid images of his documentation in action, cover art from his many records and his own writings, this charming volume also includes an appreciation of Schwartz's work from the legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff.