Inside a rare collection of 10,000 concerts, from Nirvana to Björk

In 1989, an up-and-coming rock band from Washington called Nirvana played in Chicago for the first time at a club called Dreamerz. In the crowd, with a compact cassette recorder in his pocket, was a music fan named Aadam Jacobs. He surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band two years before their global breakthrough. That nascent Nirvana recording, with the audio cleaned up, is available for streaming at the online repository Internet Archive. It’s one of over 10,000 concerts that Jacobs recorded over four decades. A group of devoted volunteers is methodically researching, cataloging and digitizing them one by one.

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