Shellac for 2020, Part 1 (1904-1920)--Dan Kildare, Don Richardson, Charles A. Prince, Earl Fuller

I've already featured shellac this year, but we'll just pretend this is the first time.  Hence, "Shellac for 2020." This latest 78-athon was inspired by Buster, who's working with software similar to mine--specially, the "Equalization Page" on my VinylStudio program, which I've been using to fine-fine-tune 78s (great for producing eye strain), and the results have made me very happy.  For instance, I was able to bring out the buried percussion on 1914's When You're a Long, Long Way from Home (featuring an African-American band led by led by Dan Kildare) by focusing on the lowest frequency range (starting at 250 Hz), and I was able to make the aggressive drumming on the Victor Military Band's High Jinks and Laughing Husband sound even more in-your-ear.  As opposed to in-your-face.   I start with a word about Earl Fuller's very interesting Texas by David W. Guion, who worked with Ferde Grofe and Paul Whiteman.  Click on the link for his amazing story--the thing to know for this playlist is that the song is actually Guion's The Texas Fox Trot of 1915.  Nowadays, and maybe for a number of decades now, we would expect music about Texas to have a "cowboy" sound, but the Bolero rhythm and minor-mode verse tells us that Guion is evoking the territory's past, not its Hollywood future.  Whatever I just typed.

I decided to start the list with some early dance band music--some of the earliest I know of, at least.  In fact, Joan Sawyer's Persian Garden Orch.--actually, as I noted above, a group led by Dan Kildare, not dancer Sawyer--is, per my own take on jazz history, an example of the kind of string bands that predated the "Dixieland" bands we incorrectly cite as the first jazz.  String bands and "clubs" (mandolin, banjo, etc.), a tradition dating back at least as far as the 1880s, were dominated by stringed instruments but were also often augmented by percussion, a cornet or two, woodwinds--whatever.  These musicians weren't working from a rule book.  I believe that the massed string orchestras mark the dawn of jazz, if only because more and more of the things--banjo orchestras, etc.--are being uncovered on recordings.  The interweaving of parts/lines/voices which characterizes Dixieland and the performances by James Reese Europe, Art Hickman, Dan Kildare, and even Joseph C. Smith (think of him as genteel jazz) is exactly what we'd expect to have evolved from large outfits which, weak on music-reading skills, would have negotiated their way through a given song, with multiple musicians doing what, come Dixieland, would be assigned to one.  Dunno if that made sense (I'm fighting a respiratory bug, so I may be feverish), but anyway, if the acoustic/acoustical process didn't make it necessary to limit the number of musicians playing at any single time, we'd have audio documents of string bands (augmented and otherwise) in their full glory.  But acoustically record an orchestra or "club"'s worth of strings or percussion, and the results were sonic mush.  Total loss of detail.  That pre-electrical era engineers did as well as they did with percussion is something of a miracle.

My outlier position regarding early jazz is that the music showed up in any number of guises, that we should be trying to document all the discrete manifestations of early, early jazz--as opposed to looking for "the first jazz recording."  Tim Gracyk writes that one Walter Rogers arranged many of the Victor label's early dance records,  and, judging from the sides I put in today's playlist, Rogers must have been listening to black orchestras.  (Wish I had the dough to buy the history book I'm sample-reading right now.)  Rock journalism, which patterned itself on jazz criticism, has Elvis as the first genuine/complete/real/viable/sustainable example of rock and roll, just as jazz critics seem to regard Dixieland as the first form of jazz which had a future.  I find that take pretty odd, given that Dixieland became obsolete within less than a decade from its first appearance on disc.  Later jazz wasn't built on its foundation, though some historians do seem to think so.  But I think a comparison of King Oliver to the Fletcher Henderson arrangements of the next decade sort of sink that notion.

Anyway, many of these sides impress me as strongly jazz-influenced.  Some can even be considered jazz, I think.  Not Don Richardson's A Perfect Day, however (and why "Don" is placed in quotes on the label, I do not know).   Don was a songwriter and a fiddler who made some extraordinary country fiddle sides in 2016 that I need to re-rip for the blog.  Wikipedia notes that Don "may have made the first country music recording in 1914."  They mean this one.  And, no, it's not country.  Oh, well.  Now we know.  However, it's great to have any example of dance music from this early, so I'll take it.  I was years waiting for it to turn up, hoping for some 1914 country, though that did seem unlikely, given the waltz tune.

After all that, we end with three nothing-to-do-with-jazz sides, starting with 1904's Come Take a Trip in My Airship (in a rip greatly improved over my Halloween rip), which features a male vocalist singing a woman's lyrics--a phenomenon that lasted into the vocal refrains of 1920s dance sides.  (I used to have two The Man I Love versions sung by males.)  Then, Victor Herbert's delightful Lanciers Figure 5 from Miss Dolly Dollars--and all I know about a lancier is that it's a type of dance (from France, looks like).  Herbert uses the rondo form, and the music is simple in an ingenious way.  Happy Heine dates from a period in which ethnic slurs were the rage.  Actually, they didn't stop being the rage until pretty recently in our popular culture.  To the shellac....




DOWNLOAD: Shellac for 2020, Part 1



When You're a Long, Long Way from Home (Meyer)--Joan Sawyer's Persian Garden Orch. (Dan Kildare) (Columbia A5642; 1914)
A Perfect Day (Intro. "Dear Old Girl")--"Don" Richardson's Orchestra (Columbia A5644; 1914)
Bugle Call Rag (Carey Morgan)--Victor Military Band (Victor 35533; 1916)
Some Sort of Somebody (Kern)--Same
Chinatown, My Chinatown--Medley (Schwartz-Cobb)--Prince's Orch., Dir. G. Hepburn Wilson (Columbia A5574; 1915)
High Jinks--One Step or Trot (Friml--Arr. Savino)--Victor Military Band (Victor 35376; 1914)
Singapore--Medley (Gilbert and Friedland)--Earl Fuller's Rector Novelty Orch. (Columba A2686; 1918)
Laughing Husband Medley--One-Step or Trot (Kern)--Victor Military Band (Victor 35376; 1914)
Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (Medley Turkey Trot)--Victor Military Band (Victor 35277; 1912)
When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam'--Medley--Turkey Trot--Same
Dance it Again with Me--One-step (Wallace)--Art Hickman's Orchestra (Columbia A2899; 1919)
Oriental Stars--One-step (Monaco)--Prince's Dance Orch. (Columbia A 2906; 1920)
Bound in Morocco (Herscher)--Same
I Ain't Got Nobody Much (Graham-Wilson)--Earl Fuller's Rector Novelty Orch. (Columbia A2547; 1918)
Arabian Nights--One-Step (David and Hewitt)--Columbia Band, Dir. Charles A. Prince (Columbia A6099; 1918)
Oriental--One-step (Vincent Rose)--Earl Fuller's Rector Novelty Orchestra (Columbia A6075; 1918)
Texas--Fox Trot (David W. Guion)
Hello, My Dearie--One-step--Prince's Band (Columbia A5986; 1917)
That's Got 'Em (Sweatman)--Wilbur Sweatman's Original Jazz Band (Columbia A2721; 1919)
Come Take a Trip in my Airship (Geo. Evans)--J.W. Myers, w. Orch. (Columbia A320; 1904)
Miss Dollar Dollars--Lanciers Figure 5 (Victor Herbert)--Prince's Orchestra (Columbia A5063; 1906)
Happy Heine--March and Two-Step (J. Bodewalt Lampe)--Arthur Pryor's Band (Victor 4633; 1905)



Lee