At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. As it’s the festive season I’ve decided to use the new function on Patreon to do a couple of membership offers. Firstly I’m offering a 10% discount on all tiers, monthly and annual, just go to patreon.com/centuriesofsound and sign up with the promo code 8AA78 – Secondly, if you buy a gift membership for anyone ($5 p/m tier, annual) then I will give you a CD version of the mixes for the year of their birth (only pre-1950/1972/1989)– so cut up into CD-sized chunks each with its own artwork. For gift memberships – patreon.com/centuriesofsound/gift – then send me a message either on Patreon or by emailing james (at) centuriesofsound.com, I will get those to you within three days.

Happy Holidays everyone, here is your new Christmas mix, this one covering the shorter period of 1955-1961. I have been cutting it dangerously close because there was simply so much to pick from, this being the peak period for famous records, as far as the US is concerned at least (though you will notice a few of them missing – the aim here is to make a good mix, not to tick off all the boxes, and certain favourites are, in my opinion, just a little too annoying.) I found this to be quite an odd era, there are rock & roll Christmas records of course, but there were a lot of religious records too, recorded in luxurious high-fidelity as presents for audiophiles, and some truly great jazz records which happened to have a festive theme. So, there are roughly three movements here – a half hour of pop and novelty records, a half hour of a very religious Christmas, and a little under half an hour of cool jazz – if any of these are not your cup of tea, I’ve labelled them below, so you can skip to the part you need.

There will also be a radio version of this show (featuring my son Theo) broadcast on Cambridge Radio (formerly Cambridge 105) on Sunday 22nd December at 19:00 GMT, you can listen by following this link at the right time – https://consoles.radioplayer.cloud/8261297/index.html

I hope you all have a great break, whatever you are celebrating around now, or even if you are celebrating at all. 2024 has been yet another tough year for many, and I hope this is an enjoyable way to finish it.

Part One

0:00:00 Daphne Oram – Winters Journey (Intro) (1956)

Part Two

(Clip from Christmas in Bethlehem – 1961)

Part Three

0:59:52 Laurence Welk – I’ll Be Home For Christmas (1961)

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. As it’s the festive season I’ve decided to use the new function on Patreon to do a couple of membership offers. Firstly I’m offering a 10% discount on all tiers, monthly and annual, just go to patreon.com/centuriesofsound and sign up with the promo code 8AA78 – Secondly, if you buy a gift membership for anyone ($5 p/m tier, annual) then I will give you a CD version of the mixes for the year of their birth (only pre-1950/1972/1989)– so cut up into CD-sized chunks each with its own artwork. For gift memberships – patreon.com/centuriesofsound/gift – then send me a message either on Patreon or by emailing james (at) centuriesofsound.com, I will get those to you within three days.

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

1949 Part Two – The 12″ Mix

How do you listen to recorded music? I feel like every phase of my life has a different answer here – the record player at home, a Walkman, a Discman, the stereo system I had when I went to university, the mp3 player that went around Asia with me, then years of phones, laptops, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, car stereos. Sometimes I would listen privately, sometimes on speakers, sometimes it would be in the background, sometimes it would have my full attention. These days it seems like, aside from the car radio, all my listening is private, streamed from computer or phone, and something feels missing. Centuries of Sound started when I was in an environment where nobody wanted to listen to music so I had to retreat into this private experience, and have I ever emerged from that? Only through sharing with you, really.

Putting on a longer piece of music, sitting down and just experiencing it – that’s just something I don’t have time for any more. It is something I miss, but it’s also something I can live without. When end of year polls come around, this is why I focus on the tracks. I like things bite-sized, not because I have a short attention span, more because there’s so much out there and only so much time I can spend with it. And yet, this thing, what is it but very long-form listening?

Putting on an LP seems like such a fundamental part of music listening for so many people, it seems odd to note that as we approach the middle of the 20th century, it’s only now that this is really becoming an option. If you were listening to a record before 1949, it was probably a 10” shellac disc with not much more than three and a half minutes of music per side, and unless you had an elaborate disc-changing machine, that’s how long you had before you had to get up and change the record. There were “albums” though, and had been for quite a while. The earliest I can find is a 1907 recording of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera “I Pagliacci,” starring Puerto Rican tenor Antonio Paoli, and supervised in its production by the composer himself. But these were “albums” as in a “photograph album” or a “stamp album” – a large book of separate discs. Frank Sinatra’s first album, 1946’s “The Voice of Frank Sinatra” is in this format, eight songs across four discs.

When Columbia introduced the 33? rpm 12” vinyl LP in late 1948, the focus was naturally on what it could do that shellac records couldn’t. With around 26 minutes per side, the initial focus was naturally on classical music – and of course it helped that buyers of classical music had more money and a taste for better quality recordings – LPs had “microgroove technology” that allowed for higher fidelity. Next followed Broadway shows, the more respectable kinds of jazz, and more sophisticated pop music – Frank again. What did not appear at first was the music made by and listened to by poor black people (R&B) or poor white people (country) – neither were the right sort of market. Of course, as we will be seeing in a decade and a half, their descendants would lean into the LP so much that, well, you know.

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

Track list

Intro

(Clip from Dragnet)

July

(Clip from The Shadow)

August

(Clip from The Hitchhiker)

September

0:58:09 Sidney Bechet – September Song

October

(Clip from The Third Man)

November

1:50:07 Ivory Joe Hunter – I Almost Lost My Mind

December

(Clip from Sir Alfred Munnings’ valedictory speech at The Royal Academy of Art)

Ending

(Clip from Reviewing The Year 1949)

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.

1949 Part One – The 7″ Mix

2024 has been the year of my 45th birthday (yes, still so young, I know) and the number has set me thinking about the importance of the 45RPM 7” single in my life. I’ve been playing them as long as I can remember, receiving packages of remaindered singles in the 1980s, buying a few every week at Magpie Records in Worcester in the mid-90, traveling with me in a big stripy box as I moved around, and now there they sit on my shelves still, though I don’t have a functioning stereo system now. My LPs, undoubtedly worth more, were left in the locked room of a friend in Southampton nearly 20 years ago and never recovered, it’s annoying, but not something I lose sleep about, the singles are much more important. Beside all the memories, there’s something about the format that seems kind of perfect. Small enough to comfortably carry around, each side just containing a few minutes of music, there’s something at once unfussy and potentially extravagant about both form and content. Singles like the one you see in the picture here often have larger holes, indicating their use in a jukebox, this little disc adaptable enough to be used as a replicable part in any number of mass produced machines. And that of course means b-sides, a chance for the act to try out something new without the risk of a negative reaction, and in many cases the disc would be flipped by a dj, and the b-side could be the hit that changed everything.

In short, the 7” vinyl single is one of the most important inventions of the 21st century, and it all started in 1949, when RCA released their new format, replacing the larger, more brittle shellac discs with a new compound – polyvinyl chloride. As when most new formats are introduced, RCA were engaged in a war with a competitor, Columbia’s 12” vinyl LP – only in this case the two formats had very different niches, and could (after a couple of years) be played by the same equipment, so both survived.

The original 7” single wasn’t in exactly the standard form we know today. The larger, jukebox-sized hole in the centre came as standard, as did coloured vinyl. The idea was that each genre would have its own colour, with red for pop music, green for country, yellow for children’s records, and a confusion of other shades for jazz, R&B, classical and so on. As should be clear to anyone listening to this mix, the differences between these genres were particularly muddy in 1949, and the idea was soon dropped.

The change was not, of course, immediate. Most of the music in this mix was still issued on 78RPM shellac discs, and they would continue to be manufactured all the way through the 50s, and in some countries even into the 70s. But the time was certainly ripe for a cheap, portable, harder to shatter format, and even if rock and roll had not already begun in all but name, early 1950s pop music would also suit it well. We are three years away from the introduction of the UK singles chart, and the 7” record’s abilities and limitations would do a great deal to set the parameters of popular music as we know it.

Track list

Intro

(Clip from interview with Johnny St. Cyr)

January

(Clip from 1949 Year In Review)

February

(Clip from 1949 The Year in Review Headlines)

March

(Clip from NBC TV News)

April

(Clip from Review of News From The Year 1949)

May

(Clip from Reviewing The Year 1949)

June

(Clip from 1949 The Year in Review Headlines)

Outro

(Clip from Suspense)

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.

Tracks

0:00:00 Jeff Alexander & Alfred Hitchcock – Music to Be Murdered By (1958)

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.

Support Centuries of Sound and access a treasure trove of bonuses at http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

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)