Laughing Bee selects live performance recordings from the Aadam Jacobs Collection for vinyl and digital release. The Aadam Jacobs Collection is an incredibly extensive archive of live music, preserving thousands of concert recordings captured over four decades by legendary Chicago taper and club staffer Aadam Jacobs. Documented in the film, Melomaniac and recently covered by The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Consequence, Paste, and many more, nearly 10,000 recordings from Jacobs’ collection are being carefully digitized, restored, and cataloged by a team of volunteers and made freely available through the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive. The collection documents performances from iconic artists alongside countless influential independent and local bands whose music might otherwise have been lost to time.

The Laughing Bee project is a partnership of longtime friends who met in the early ‘80s at WNUR in Evanston, IL and bonded over their shared passion for music. Together, they’re carefully curating, engineering, and mastering a selection of Aadam’s recordings, with the goal of getting these historically significant live performances into your ears, while supporting the archive's ongoing preservation efforts. 

Laughing Bee releases from the Aadam Jacobs Collection will be co-branded as “Dead Bird Records” - the label Aadam operated in the ‘90s.