At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

It will be spring soon –

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

As we saw in part one, the middle of a century is a time for looking back as well as looking forward, nostalgia for the unremembered past of previous generations mingled with excitement at progress both technical and social. The flipside of this is a lack of concern with what’s popular now. The music business tends to jump on bandwagons whenever it can, but in 1950 there isn’t a clear bandwagon to jump on, so musicians seem more than ever to be given the leeway to mess around to find out what the next thing might be.

The story of the last few years has been the rise of rhythm and blues / jump blues, but as we turn the decade it seems to be in a lull. Of course, we know this will not last – in January 1950 Sam Philips opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, initially in order to bring R&B artists to a mainstream (i.e. white) audience. In 1951 the studio would record “Rocket ‘88”, in 1952 Philips would found Sun Records, and in 1953 they would make the first recordings of Elvis Presley.

In New York, meanwhile, Charlie Parker’s trumpet player had decided to branch out on his own after attending discussions and jam sessions at Gil Evans’ place on 55th Street. Through 1949 and 1950 he got some of these likeminded people together to record a series of sides for Capitol. Sadly, the record company had very little idea what to do with this music, first releasing two 78RPM singles, then an EP in 1954. By 1957 Miles Davis had become famous enough that Capitol finally put out all of the tracks bar one, under the name “Birth of The Cool.” Was ‘Cool Jazz’ a real genre at this point? Would it ever be a proper genre? Hard to say, but if it has a foundational text, this is it.

If you were to pinpoint a single genre to represent the year, however, it would probably be pop music, currently in a Hollywood musical-influenced style with no pretentions to be anything more than a commercially successful novelty. However winsomely cheesy the taste of the public might be, jobbing songwriters were ready to cater for them, in a way reminiscent of the Tin Pan Alley days of 50 years prior. “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” – one of the best-selling records of the year – is a great example, an almost sickeningly twee song with a title in the third conditional, written by three men – middle-aged veteran songwriter Al Hoffman, Broadway writer Bob Merrill and comedy musician Al Trace – and performed by TV and radio star Eileen Barton. Within a decade this sort of thing will in theory be all in the past, but in reality will have been supplanted by a similar, if more sophisticated operation around The Brill Building.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Fumio Hayasaka – Clip from Rashomon OST