John William Hardy

Born January 12, 1930 in Murphysboro, Illinois, John William Hardy was both an ornithologist and a jazz expert. As an orithologist, in the early 1960s he started collecting recordings of bird voices and analyzing them using sound spectrographic equipment. In the Seventies he started ARA Records (6) to make available compilations of bird voices. From 1973 to 1995 he was curator of Ornithology and Bioacoustics at Florida Museum. His passion for jazz music dated back to high school. Clubs frequentation in Los Angeles (where he moved to take a post as a professor at Occidental College) allowed him to get in touch with musicians and record-company executives. In 1966, together with Jonathan Horwich, he started operating a record company, Revelation Records (3). Best known as an album annotator, he is also credited as a recording engineer and as a photographer too. He died in Gainesville, Florida, on October 1, 2012. Clare Fischer's composition "Ornithardy" is inspired by him.