Centuries of Sound

This time James Errington is joined by John Ashlin to explore the music of 1916. While Europe lies devastated in the midst of the darkest year of the first world war, America is hotting up, with the birth of jazz and blues music imminent, while the old world of Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley is struggling to adapt.

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At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first hour of the mix. 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. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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

1948 Part Two – Move

In part one we saw how tape technology was transforming the sound of the world in 1948. In part two we’ll take a cue from another new development – the long playing record. When I first heard that the LP had been less than twenty years old when Sgt Pepper was released – or just eleven years old when Kind of Blue was released, it seemed hard to believe. I was so accustomed to thinking of music as naturally fitting in this format – two sides of around 20-25 minutes each. But until now, nobody was experiencing music like that. There were “albums” it’s true – there had been since the Edwardian age – but these were “albums” in the “photo album” sense. Booklets of perhaps eight double-sided shellac discs, with sides numbered under the assumption that they would be played as a stack on top of a record player (side one matched with side eight maybe.) These cumbersome things were meant for classical music, and not anything as disposable as jazz. But jazz was one step ahead already. By now of course we have this wave of Be Bop artists, often playing improvised music for hours on end, also very much unsuited to a short side of shellac.

Columbia’s new long playing discs (and RCA Victor’s new 7” singles) do not make up a substantial proportion of this mix, but where last time everything was a tape cut up, this time we’re more in the realm of the sometimes meandering, sometimes slow groove building world made possible by this new medium. This is less of a mix to pay attention to, and more a mix to sit back and enjoy. Which is the way forward? We’ll just have to see. The decade is almost over, we’ve come a long way, but there’s one last shock for us before we reach the heart of the century.

Support the show at http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

Tracklist

Intro

(Clip from Naked City)

Part One – Rock

(Clip from interview with Frank Sinatra)

Part Two – Move

0:21:23 Crown Price Waterford – Move Your Hand, Baby

Part Three – Mist

0:35:07 Pee Wee King – Bull Fiddle Boogie

Part Four – Size

(Clip from Top Tunes of 1948)

Part Five – Twist

(Clip from interview with Vera Hall)

Part Six – Run

(Clip of Edward R Murrow)

Part Seven – Rope

(Clip from Bicycle Thieves)

Part Eight – Hate

(Clip from Bertrand Russell / Fr Frederick Copleston debate on existence of God)

Part Nine – Love

1:54:39 The Orioles – It’s Too Soon To Know

Part Ten – Mirth

(Clip from Hamlet (Gielgud – BBC Radio))

Part Eleven – Stew

(Clip from The Jack Benny Program)

Ending

(Clip from Top Tunes of 1948)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first half-hour of the mix. 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. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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

1948 Part One – Something Big Out Of Something Little

It started with Bing Crosby wanting to improve his golf. Bing was a big golfer (in fact he would die on a golf course three decades later) but it was difficult to find the time for it when he was spending four days a week recording radio shows – and because of the time differences he’d often have to perform the whole show twice. Pre-recording had been suggested, but the quality of a half-hour disc side was not up to scratch. (LPs would also be introduced in 1948, but we’re not in 1948 yet) and the radio stations just would not accept it. So for 18 months, there was an impasse. But luckily there was a way out.

At the end of the second world war, Jack Mullin, a member of the US Signal Corps, had been tasked with finding out about German electronics. One day at the headquarters of Radio Frankfurt, he made a discovery. Magnetic recording had been around for nearly half a century at this point, but it always gave a distorted, inadequate sound. Not here. The AEG ‘Magnetophon’ was capable of recording and reproducing sounds to a fidelity completely unheard of before. You could even speed up or slow down tapes without any significant loss. Mullin took two of these machines back to the USA and spent the next couple of years trying to convince anyone that they were of use, until finally Murdo MacKenzie, an assistant to Crosby, was impressed enough to try them out. Within a few months, he was able to record shows in bulk, edit them at his leisure, and spend more of his time playing golf.

A studio musician often used by Crosby was one Les Paul, these days of course better known for his development of the electric guitar, but in the mid 40s more of a jobbing session guitarist. Paul had played a major role in Crosby’s 1945 number one “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” for example. Crosby showed the new tape-recording devices to Paul and encouraged him to build a studio, where he experimented with the first multitrack tape recordings. Until this point, of course, every record you hear is in essence a live recording. A minor quirk here perhaps is that the two apparently multitracked selections (“Lover” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?”) actually date from before he successfully constructed his multitrack studio, instead they were constructed by recording and altering the speed of acetate discs – on “Lover” for example, that’s eight different Les Pauls playing along at different speeds.

Les Paul wasn’t the only person experimenting with tape recording, of course. In France we also have Pierre Schaeffer, the father of Musique Concrète. Cutting up, rearranging and juxtaposing sounds was not a new idea (is there ever really a new idea?) as you will perhaps remember from the Dziga Vertov sound collages used in the 1925 mix. But Schaeffer’s experiments do mark the start of a movement, and one which will be important to these mixes from now on, starting from this one.

Listening to this mix, you will likely find it noticeably different from those before, and there’s a reason. In this half, inspired by Les Paul, Pierre Schaeffer and even Bing Crosby, as well as the new popular, advertising-supported media, we have a quick-moving cut-up style. This includes all of the year’s news. Next time we’ll be taking a break from all of that in any case.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Violette

January

(Clip from The Jack Benny Program)

February

(Clip from 1948 A Year of Great Decision)

March

(Clip from CBC – The Atom Bomb)

April

(Clip from 1948 Year In Review)

May

(Clip from 1948 Year In Review)

June

(Clip from BBC Archive)

July

(Clip from 1948 Year In Review)

August

(Clip from Strom Thurmond’s Swimming Pool Speech)

September

(Clip from BBC Archive)

October

(Clip from 1948 Television Commercial)

November

(Clips from Cavalcade of 1948)

December

(Clip from 1948 Television Commercial)

Ending

(Clip of Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Violette)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first half-hour of the mix. 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. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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

1947 Part Two – Boptamism

A baby boom – a notable increase in babies born – may indicate many socio-economic factors at play, but most of these factors are refractions of hope. Hope that there will be a good world for your children to become adults in, hope that you will be able to provide everything they need, hope that the path of your new family will not be littered with traps and nasty surprises. As I write this in 2024, birth rates in western countries have been in decline for decades, but in 1947 we were just on the spike of the “baby boom” which was so notable it gave its name to a generation. Is this then a time of hope? Will this mix sound optimistic and hopeful?

There was an idea at one point that these mixes would provide some sort of historical narrative into the years in question. Was it an idea that I had, or was it thrust on me by the war? It’s truthfully hard to say, I was already arranging things (not music) month by month back in 1939, maybe it’s a habit I’ve slipped into. In any case the arrangement has now become fairly meaningless (with a couple of exceptions I’ll come to in a moment), just a way to break up years into more manageable chunks or chapters, for example October is fairly bop-heavy and December is winding down for the Christmas section.

That’s the second exception in this mix, the first is the independence of India and Pakistan, a large public event with newsreels and speeches to sample, but whose ramifications wouldn’t be as easy to capture. In China the civil war turned a corner, with the Nationalists increasingly looking doomed. Communists also officially took power in Poland. The spread of communism triggered The Truman Doctrine, as good a date as any for the start of The Cold War. Is any of this evident from this mix? Well no, not at all. This of course does not mean that these things are unimportant, it just means that they haven’t yet impacted the cultural record, or at least my cultural record.

The people – the musicians – here were interested in exploring their art, they were interested in entertaining, they were interested in making people dance, they were interested in making something new. All art is in some sense political, and their stretching out in this freedom to create and share tells you something about their mood. The prospect of nuclear war, even of the Korean War, were not yet in the air. So to answer my own question, yes, we are still in the brief window of hope, but we can grasp this from the absence. There are other things to write about than existential dread.

If you want to chat as listen, you can join the conversation on discord here – https://discord.gg/5a7f6wqjcJ

Tracklist

0:00:00 George Melachrino Strings – Serenade (Drigo)

July

0:04:24 Danny Kaye – Manic Depressive Presents

August

(Clip from India Breaks Free – British Pathe)

September

(Clip from Fibber McGee & Molly)

October

(Clip from It’s That Man Again)

November

(Clip from British Movietone Review of the Year)

December

(Clip from Odd Man Out)

Ending

3:00:21 Miles Davis – Out Of Nowhere

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first half-hour of the mix. 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. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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

1947 Part One – Cubana Bop

From time to time in music there are sparks which briefly spring to life, then almost immediately fizzle out again, but not without leaving long-lasting reverberations. One of these moments began in the summer of 1947, when 32-year-old dancer, bodyguard, shoeshiner and noted percussionist Chano Pozo arrived in New York on a passenger ship from the rich man’s playground of Havana. Raised in one of the most dangerous slums in Cuba, Pozo had found himself in reform school at the age of 13, only having had three years of education. His crime may have been the accidental killing of an American tourist. While there he learned not only literacy and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería, but also to play a range of percussion instruments. On release he became a “rumbero” – the beating heart of a musical/dance troop at carnival, and after only a few years he had had become perhaps the most famous one in Cuba.

The music that Gillespie and Pozo made together in the next 15 months is so arresting that it’s astonishing that it isn’t better-known. Perhaps the musicianship on display prevented anyone else from easily borrowing. In any case the 75 years since have done nothing to blunt its power. Taking all the unpredictable, stimulatingly jarring musical shapes from be bop and fusing them to this driving, complex Cuban rhythm is nothing short of magical.

The collaboration was cut short prematurely when Pozo was murdered by another Cuban expat outside a Harlem bar, but by that point Pozo and Gillespie had collaborated on Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, Tin Tin Deo and Manteca, all to be featured prominently in these two mixes.

There’s been a bit too much history in Centuries of Sound of late, too many events taking place. This is supposed to be a celebration and exploration of sound. Sure, 1947 traditionally marks the start of the Cold War – and there is one large international event which we’ll get to in part two – but I’m pleased to say there’s little sign of it here. When I listen back to the records (and the sounds) here the joy in experimentation is the biggest takeaway. I hope it is for you too.

If you want to chat as listen, you can join the conversation on discord here – https://discord.gg/5a7f6wqjcJ

Tracklist

0:00:00 Unknown Birds – Birdsong (from Louis Kaufman – Vivaldi Four Seasons intro)

January

0:05:25 Charlie Parker Quintet – Bird Of Paradise

February

(Clip from Bob Hope & Bing Crosby – The Road To Hollywood)

March

(Clip from British Movietone Review of the Year)

April

1:39:10 Ella Logan & Donald Richards – Look To The Rainbow (Introduction)

May

(Clip from Are You Popular?)

June

(Clip from Don’t Be A Sucker)

Ending

(Clip from Odd Man Out)

Previously at Centuries of Sound:

Christmas 1902-1924: Deep Magic From Before The Dawn Of Time

If you enjoy my mixes, please consider supporting the show on Patreon for $5 per month – as well as helping me keep going, you will get access to a load of bonus stuff.

The period between the end of the Second World War and the Rock & Roll craze of 1954 may be strangely absent from popular memory on the whole, but when it comes to the Christmas season everything is suddenly reversed. The age of It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, of Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song, The Andrews Sisters’ Winter Wonderland, the hit version of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, and of course Baby, It’s Cold Outside – these all seem to have been set in amber as the prototypical classic American Christmas experience. But meanwhile, of course, Rhythm & Blues, Western Swing, Mambo and Be-Bop are all at their peak, so don’t expect an entirely mainstream Christmas here.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Red Skelton – Clip from Raleigh-Kool Radio Program – Christmas Stories (1946)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first half-hour of the mix. 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. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

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

1946 Part Two – That’s All Right For You

In the popular imagination the late 1940s is poorly represented. In the 1930s there’s the great depression (which is also somehow the golden age of Hollywood), then WWII takes place, then [SCENE MISSING], then there’s the 1950s, rock & roll, teenagers, fashion, Hollywood glamour, the beat poets, Rosa Parks, the golden age of TV, and you know I could keep on just listing themes here but I’ll stop. These signifiers make the decade easy to get a grip on, and have been constantly revisited on TV, in films and – of course – in music ever since. For anyone under the age of 66 or so, this mythologised version of the fifties is the only fifties you’ve ever known. The late 40s on the other hand have had no such treatment – I can think of only a handful of films set in the period, all fairly obscure.

How can we begin to transition from one era to another then? The soldiers arrive back from the second world war, everyone settles down to keep quiet and do nothing for five years, then BOOM here we are in the modern age? Well, of course that’s not how it’s going to be. Those cultural threads spread out wide, and as our main concern here is music, the headline here is that the musical movements associated with that later era are not being anticipated in 1946, they aren’t starting to get underway, they are in fact already in full bloom. The headline could even be “1946 – The Year Rock & Roll Started!” – but for reasons I will surely go into later, there is no easy start date.

Though the majority of this mix is rock & roll in all but name, plenty does not fit that pattern. Some is in fact quite traditional pop music, but with artistry and production seemingly years ahead of its time. Jazz selections have been picked with a general feel of bubbling excitement. These songs are not so concerned with dreaming or looking into the future as in part one, but they push into the future by being (for the first time in a long time) fully able to immerse into the now. Most of this mix is dance music, though there are also plenty of calmer breaks.

One final thought before I say “just listen” – the reason many of these performers disappeared in the rock & roll era (as we know it) is that many were simply not around anymore. Big Maceo Merriweather had a severe stroke in 1946, and died in 1953. Sonny Boy Williamson I would be killed in a robbery in 1948. Albert Ammons would survive to play Truman’s inauguration in 1949, but then died later that year. Cecil Gant made it no further than 1951. A disappointing truth is that these are still very tough years, and this small sampling of joy tells just one story from many. I could say the same for any mix, of course, but it seems more important to point it out here.

Ok, so if I haven’t ruined it, just listen. And if you want to chat as you do so, you can join the conversation on discord here – https://discord.gg/jw5vZcN8

Tracklist

0:00:00 Charles Mingus and his Orchestra – Shuffle Bass Boogie

July

(Clip from Television Is Here Again)

August

(Clip from Pathe – Very early mobile phone prototype)

September

(Clip from Television Is Here Again)

October

1:30:55 Woody Herman Orchestra (cond. by Igor Stravinsky) – Ebony Concerto Part 2

November

(Clip from Notorious)

December

(Clip from It’s A Wonderful Life)

Ending

3:02:53 Charlie Parker – Lover Man

This Halloween special was first broadcast in 2022 and features music from 1927 to 1938 and also features my son Milan. To get full downloads and a host of extras, and help the show survive, come to http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

When we think of the great depression of the 1930s, the images which may spring to mind – The Grapes of Wrath, the dustbowl songs of Woody Guthrie – are generally from the 1940s. Popular entertainment of the thirties leaned not on realism, but on escapism. This is the golden age, not only of Hollywood musicals, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rodgers, Busby Berkley routines and screwball comedy, but also of horror movies. Aside from the film clips, we naturally have plenty of novelty recordings, original sound effect records, hot jazz, and to close a suite of particularly morbid blues records.

This Centuries of Sound mix comes courtesy of my supporters at patreon.com/centuriesofsound – join them for as little as $5 per month and get a full archive and a host of bonus material.

The 1940s was a scary time, but not really in a way that we can comfortably celebrate at Halloween. Nevertheless there were still a few horror movies being made, and it’s from these that I’ve largely drawn for this mix (the best are of course the works of Val Lewton, a shame there aren’t more.) The most traditionally Halloween-themed musical numbers here are from Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, and along with the lack of Universal Horror monsters except in semi-parody retreads, this seems to indicate that 40s audiences were in no mood to be frightened. If it isn’t already obvious, I’ll leave it to Al Bowlly to explain why.

Tracklist:

It seems like an obvious thing to say that the Second World War was A Bad Time, at least it seems obvious to me. Half a decade of some of the most terrible, miserable events of all time – or more than half a decade, the last war-free mix was 1938 and even that included the ominous events of Munich – and even when things were going the right way for the last couple of years, there was the committing and uncovering of war crimes to deal with. It says something unfortunate about our society that this is the one period we focus on the most – put on a history documentary and there’s a 50/50 chance that it will concerned in some way with WWII. Foolishly, when I started on these mixes I thought it would attract a new audience, but people interested in tanks, military tactics and Hitler’s private life are by no means guaranteed to be also interested in social history and culture of the early 40s – in fact, beyond a couple of totemic songs, the sounds of the era seem to have disappeared from culture more than any time since the dawn of the jazz age. It didn’t help of course that the recording industry was blighted by long-running industrial disputes, lack of resources for recording and touring, with many musicians sent off to fight.

History has not finished by any means in 1946 – this is, of course, the start of The Cold War, the year of the “Iron Curtain” speech – but it has at least faded enough into the background for cultural life to resume. There is a sense here of people getting back on track after a derailment, though if you were dropping in here, you might not even have that sense, so little reference is made to recent events.

We aren’t picking up where we left things in the 30s, of course. The big bands have largely split, and those reforming are already largely nostalgia acts. Their singers have fame and record contracts of their own now, and no need to go on tour with a radio in every home. Tastes have also changed in innumerable ways; blues has become rhythm & blues, swing has become be bop, country has become western swing (all of these much more complicated than that of course – these genres are barely formed, these musicians in dialogue – often literally – with one-another.)

You may find this mix surprisingly relaxed, mellow, yet forward-looking, even futuristic, and more of a world tour than usual. This is deliberate – rather than arbitrarily dividing the year up, the lack of news allowed me to experiment with form a little. As it took shape, I realised that it was settling into a groove that I didn’t really want to disturb – it fitted the feeling of liberation, of finally being able to look to the future, and not dwell on Earthly realities, for the moment.

Part two, of course, has its own distinct feel -but we’ll leave that for next time.

Tracklist

Introduction

0:00:00 Miguelito Valdes With Noro Morales’ Orchestra – Rumba Rhapsody

January

(Clip from BBC – Television Is Here Again)

February

(Clip from Truman Speaks To Pathe News)

March

(Winston Churchill – Iron Curtain Speech)

April

(Clip from World News In Review)

May

(Clip of Albert Einstein on Nuclear Weapons and World Government)

June

2:34:38 Macbeth The Great – Introduction to Do Lai Do / Do Lai Do

Ending

3:05:00 Julia Lee – Lotus Blossom