In 1989, Mel Lewis was invited by Loren Schoenberg of WKCR radio in New York Cit y, to do a series of radio interviews discussing his knowledge of historically s ignificant jazz drummers. For the past 20 years, the audio has been available t o only a select number of drummers, existing only in cassette format. As part o f the PAS Drum Set Committee s 50th Anniversary projects, John Riley and Loren Sch oenberg have donated the audio to PAS, where it has been digitized for posting o n the PAS web site. Much of the audio has been transcribed in raw text form by student of John Riley and by Steve Fidyk. Jim Lower, a student at the Universit y of Central Missouri, formatted the Buddy Rich audio transcription into a stand ard interview format. John Riley has recently written a short article about the interviews for Percussive Notes, which includes a section of Lower s transcriptio n and formatting." - Drumset Committee Chair, Michael Sekelsky"MelLewis, 1929-1990, was loved by fellow musicians for his flowing, understated approach. Fortunately his personality was anything but understated. Mel loved to talk about music and musicians, and his recollections and analysis of many o f the great Jazz drummers has been just added to the PAS archive in the form of 24 hours of audio from a series of eight three hour radio broadcasts Mel did wit h Loren Schoenberg for WKCR radio in 1989". - John Riley Photo Rick Mattingly "Hanging out with Mel, listening to him talk about the people he knew, his take on rhythm, led me to do the series in 1984 or so. I don't remember the drummers we did that time but it was probably similar. Over the years, the tapes were los t. I thought Kenny Washington had a set (recorded off the air), he thought I had them. Ultimately, it was my bad, as they say. So in 1989, I asked Mel to repeat the series with me" - Loren Schoenberg