Complete discographical data on these and many thousands of other Victor records, compiled from the original Victor Talking Machine Company files, can be found in John Bolig’s Victor Discography Series, available from Mainspring Press.
If you’ve ever wondered why Pathé and Perfect 78s from the mid-1920s rumble worse than earlier releases, here’s the answer.
Until Pathé began recording electrically, the company recorded its masters on oversized cylinders from which it transferred disc masters using a pantograph. The device allowed a recoding to be remastered in any format, the trade-off being that it introduced mechanical noise — the characteristic Pathé “rumble-and-clank” — in the disc master.
In the summer of 1925, Pathé announced it was using a new transfer process. The cylinder masters were still recorded acoustically, but the transfer to disc was now done electrically, at slow speed. The process added some detail in the upper registers, but imparted even more mehanical noise than the acoustic transfer process.
This series of photos, from The Talking Machine Journal for September 1925, shows Pathé president Eugene Widmann with the master cylinder, disc master, and finished pressings. The huge disc in the lower photo was a special product developed for the Music Service Company. It didn’t play any longer than a standard 10″ disc, but was considerably louder for use in public places.
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Bill Bryan’t Perfect Records Discography is currently in development by Mainspring Press for a 2013 release.
Leeds & Catlin did a good business in England with their Imperial records. Leeds openly infringed Columbia’s Jones and Victor’s Berliner patents in the United States (and were eventually driven out of business by those companies), but their records were perfectly legal in Great Britain. The market was so strong overseas that Leeds even brought British singer Ian Colquhoun to their New York studio to make records for the foreign market. The Colquhoun records were also sold in the U.S., although they’re rarely encountered here today.
Here are a couple of ads from the British Sound Wave and Talking Machine Record of February 1908 (top) and Phono Trader and Recorder for May 1907 (bottom). Leeds’ English distributors could just as devious as Leeds itself; note the thoroughly bogus claim that ten-inch Imperial discs played as long as standard twelve-inch discs!
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The whole story behind the selling of Leeds products in Great Britain, and how the old Imperial trademark was later revived for a purely British label, will be told in Bill Bryant’s Leeds & Catlin Discography, the first volume of which is scheduled to release later this year.
A detailed history of Leeds’ operations in the U.S. can be found in A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900-1919, available from Mainspring Press.
One of our major upcoming projects is the completion and publication of Bill Bryan’t Perfect Records Discography, covering the label’s complete output right up to its end in 1938.
Good file documentation exists for Perfect records produced by the American Record from late 1929 onward. That’s not the case with the Pathé-era issues. The Pathé recording ledgers have not survived, but fortunately another component of the Pathe files has — Form No. 19. These cards show the master numbers, label credits (which were sometimes pseudonymous), and miscellaneous other data for Perfect as well as Pathé.
Form No. 19 solves one of the most vexing problems in documenting Pathé products. Pathé’s matrix numbers appear (or all too often disappear) under the labels, and discographers have made more than a few bad guesses in trying to decipher them. They’re missing entirely on the later sunken-label pressings. The data on Form No. 19 solve that problem nicely, and also offer a glimpse into the inner workings of American Pathé, which was a liberal borrower of masters from outside sources.
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This is a Form No. 19 card for Perfect 12276, a typical “pure Pathé” issue. Nothing tricky here — The masters are Pathé’s, and the label credit is non-pseudonymous. The corresponding Pathé catalog (32197) number has been entered by hand
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Here things get a little trickier (especially for a couple of discographers who apparently hadn’t seen the card, and consequently made a mess of this particular record). Side A is easy enough, another Pathé master. But side B uses an old Federal master, and the label credit has to be one of the great pseudonyms of all time — the very appropriately named “George Morbid.” Somebody at Pathé (Russell Hunting, maybe?) had a great sense of humor.
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Finally, here’s a Pathé release entirely from an outside source. The matrix numbers are shown as Cameo’s on a hobbyist website, but they’re not. In this case, they are electrical recordings from the Compo Company in Canada, a company with which Pathé sometimes worked. Before Pathé installed its own electrical equipment, it used Compo’s electrically equipped New York studio for sessions by several of its celebrity artists (also confirmed on Form No. 19).
So overall, a mighty handy set of cards. Look for the Perfect Records discography in 2013.
Baltimore used to be awash in Oriole records, those ultra-cheap pressings made for McCrory’s dime-stores. Less-knowledgeable collectors usually passed them up — All no-name artists and noisy pressings, the conventional wisdom went. They were right about the pressings, but some of those no-name bands were really big-name bands in disguise
It was fun to watch collectors who had never opened a discography descend like starving vultures on Fletcher Henderson’s Banners and Regals, while overlooking the very same recordings on Oriole, where Henderson was disguised as “Sam Hill.” Here are three of Mr. Hill’s best, including the very scarce Oriole-only issue of “Naughty Man.” They came from a Baltimore County dealer who kept his Red Seals in a locked case but tossed all the Orioles on the quarter pile (understandably a short-lived business). Louis Armstrong is featured on the last two titles, Coleman Hawkins on all three.
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FLETCHER HENDERSON & HIS ORCHESTRA (as Sam Hill & his Orchestra): Feeling the Way I Do
Independent Recording Laboratories (New York): May 1924
Oriole 245 (mx. 5497-1 / control 35497)
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FLETCHER HENDERSON & HIS ORCHESTRA (as Sam Hill & his Orchestra): Naughty Man
Independent Recording Laboratories (New York): November 1924
Oriole 437 (mx. 5749-3 / control 35749)
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FLETCHER HENDERSON & HIS ORCHESTRA (as Sam Hill & his Orchestra): How Come You Do Me Like You Do?
Independent Recording Laboratories (New York): November 1924
Oriole 304 (mx. 5728-2 / control 2110)
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Want to know who’s behind the thousands of other aliases on early jazz records? Check out Brian Rust’s classic Jazz & Ragtime Records, 1897-1942 — out-of-print in book form, but available as an affordable, fully searchable CD from Mainspring Press.
This morning we received approximately 80,000 record-data cards that were maintained by a group of prominent collectors and researchers from the 1950s into the 1980s. Members of the group acquired and warehoused a vast number of 78s for research purposes. They painstakingly transcribed all data from the labels and pressings, and that information was cross-checked by other members.
The data cards were works-in-progress — Members investigated tie-ins to other labels, noted even slight variations in labels and pressings, and checked for differing takes by a process they called “SAC-ing” (short for “simultaneous aural comparison”), using a synchronized turntable set-up.
The resulting data were of the highest quality, far more accurate than what appears in even some current jazz and dance band discographies. But managing it in the days before personal computers was a daunting task, and much of it went unpublished.
Besides supplying information for upcoming Mainspring Press discographies, this data will form the core of our Master Discography Database, which is in preliminary planning and development. When completed, it will link the output of a large group of producers who shared masters, including Arto-Bell, Plaza-ARC, Emerson-Consolidated, Grey Gull, Jones Recording Laboratories, the Criterion group, the Fletcher-Olympic group, the New York Recording Laboratories, Cameo, American Pathé, and Federal, among others.
Progress reports to come…Stay tuned!
Some more scarce dealer promo materials from the American Record Corporation. The 1933 mock telegraph was an advertising piece for a Zora Layman release, with the Frank Luther Trio on the reverse side.
The two nearly identical hand-outs for the Maple City Four (1933) are a good example of the redundancy that plagued ARC, which sometimes issued the same recording on four, five, or more different labels. ARC president Harold Yates finally discontinued many of ARC’s overlapping budget and client labels before the company was sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1938.
The Patsy Montana placard is a later piece, from 1937. By then, ARC had taken the first steps toward consolidating its labels, assigning the same three-part catalog numbers to Oriole, Perfect, Romeo, etc. (although Sears’ Conqueror label was exempt). The numbers indicate year-month-order of release.
If you enjoy 1930s 78s, be sure to check out Recording the ‘Thirties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1930-1939, available from Mainspring Press.
Brunswick issued this flyer for highlights from the movie “Top Hat” in August 1935. These were not sound-track excerpts, but studio re-creations on which Astaire tapped and sang along with two popular dance bands. “Cheek to Cheek” and “No Strings” were recorded in New York on June 26, 1935. The next day, Astaire returned to the studio to record additional selections with Johnny Green’s Orchestra. Then on July 15 he recorded the vocal of “The Piccolino” with Reisman’s Orchestra.
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If you enjoy recordings from the 1930s, be sure to check out Recording the Thirties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1930–1939, from Mainspring Press. It covers all types of recording — from swing, jazz and blues, to country, classical, and even recordings for the Mexican-American market, Communist labels, and adult-only “party records.”
A grab-bag of ads for phonographs, horns and accesories. These undated clippings (c. 1899-1905) are from Bill Bryant’s archive.
For more on sound recordings from this period, be sure to check out A Phonograph in Every Home: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1900-1919, from Mainspring Press.
Some undated French cards featuring cylinder machines (from reproductions):
