Democracy of Sound (9 page)

Intellectuals began to reevaluate jazz during the 1930s, at a moment when the public was embracing swing as popular music. Primarily white readers and writers developed a critical discourse about jazz in magazines such as
Down Beat
, and some on the Left embraced it as a people’s music opposed to the values of fascism.
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In 1934, France’s Hugues Panassié broke ground on theorizing an aesthetics of jazz, and his countryman Charles Delaunay soon inaugurated the project of cataloguing jazz recordings. Americans took note and began publishing “the little jazz reviews,” according to folklorist Alan Lomax, who remembered “frightfully serious and sophisticated jazz critics” descending on Jelly Roll Morton at the Jungle Inn, a club in Washington, DC. Morton saw his early innovations like “The Pearls” and “Wolverine Blues” played on the jukebox.
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Jazz magazines sprouted up in the late 1930s in response to the growing public interest in swing music.

The new craze prompted the emergence of a breed of connoisseurs who preferred small group improvisation and badmouthed the tastes of the mainstream.
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Some critics believed that popular swing was compromised by commercialism and that earlier and less popular forms of jazz were more authentic or artistic. Some perceived jazz as an earthy “folk” genre, while others envisioned it as a high art that could compete with European classical music.
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Whatever their vision, such jazz aficionados in the 1930s and 1940s disdained swing as artless pop music; their journals resemble the tiny, self-published zines of the late twentieth century, which frequently favored independent or avant garde subcultures.
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These small jazz journals cultivated a market for rarities, with the value of a recording determined by the number of copies that had come into the hands of collectors.

Affluent white collectors described searching for the scattered remnants of early jazz as if they were anthropologists doing exotic field research. Often enough, the field consisted of the homes and neighborhoods of black Americans, who made up much of the initial audience for the music. “Many of the collectors’ items were originally issued purely for Negro consumption,” collector Steve Smith wrote in 1939, “and consequently were sold only in sections of the country which had a demand for them.” White men canvassed black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Kansas City, often going door to door. One collector in New York abandoned this method and just left his card “with all the janitors in Harlem,” who would contact him when they came across an item of interest.
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Collector Dick Rieber described one such excursion in an early jazz fanzine. His article “First Thrills in Beulah Land” described a Philadelphia neighborhood that proved to be a “collector’s Eden” because the residents were willing to part with their records for much less than their potential value. The local children followed Rieber through the streets and directed him to homes where records could be found.
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The Beulah of his title could not understand what he wanted
with all the old records. Her collection included sermons, washboard bands, blues, jazz, and much more. Rieber paid $5 for sixty of her records, even though he knew one of the discs to be worth $2 by itself. “Beulah, though she didn’t know it, was giving me one of my biggest collecting thrills,” he wrote. Rieber did not clarify whether it was the joy of discovering unexpected treasures or the thrill of buying someone’s possessions for drastically less than they were worth that excited him so much. In any case, the story is a familiar one. He managed to buy up records from several of Beulah’s visitors, too, who had heard that a white man was looking for the blues. (“And old blues at that!” he added.) He even claimed to find Bessie Smith’s sister living nearby, but she would part with none of her records.
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Observing the jazz scene in 1939, music writer Steve Smith gently mocked the devotees of genuine, original recordings with their “little black books” full of recording dates and master numbers. “I sometimes wonder when there is time for listening to the music,” he wrote.
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If two such collectors were sitting in a club, he said, they would be so wrapped up in competitively comparing notes that they would pay little attention to the music performed around them. Smith credited collectors with contributing to the storehouse of knowledge about the music, but he saw little point in memorizing data or keeping a record just because Louis Armstrong was known to have been in the room when it was made. Similarly, some fans frantically pursued any little trace of their single favorite musician. “These fanatics are the loneliest people in the world,” Smith wrote, “shunned by other collectors who regard them as not fit to talk to.” Rather than having a genuine love of the music, whoever might be playing it, they only paid attention when their idol began plucking, tapping, or blowing away. Worst of all, Smith thought, were the collectors who only got into the game because they heard that old jazz records were increasing in value. They hoped to catch a windfall and did not care for the music much at all. At least the fanatic and the know-it-all listened to jazz.
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Some fans focused on history and authenticity, and would only accept original recordings. A diehard follower of a particular performer such as Bix Beiderbecke, on the other hand, might settle for any reproduction of an unheard recording, no matter what it looked like. For his part, Smith defined mainstream collectors in contrast to both these kinds of men of narrower motivations. “The majority of hot collectors are quite normal human beings who do not go to extremes,” he wrote. “They look mainly for the classics of hot, for the thrill of possession and enjoyment. They, too, keep up the search for rare records, but solely in the hope of finding something satisfying to the ear, as well as something they consider to be of historical significance.”
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Here, Smith identified a mix of reasons behind the movement: aesthetic appreciation, historical preservation, and the fetish of possession all drove him and his fellows to collect.

Although some collectors did insist on having the original disc, the small-scale copying of records in the 1930s suggests that others would accept a copy.
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“There are those who will have nothing but the original label,” Smith observed, “and who will turn down a clean copy of a record in preference to [the original] in bad condition because the latter has what is known to be an earlier label.” However, fans who cherished a record not only for its historical character but also for the sound it contained would settle for unofficial copies of rare works. “One often had acetates made from discs owned by a fellow collector,” according to Charles Edward Smith. “These were called ‘dubs’ and were brought out on display apologetically, like fish bought in the market instead of caught properly with rod and reel.”
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The word “dub” originated in the late 1920s, meaning to “double” an object. The term connotes a practice of making individual copies, doubling an item one copy at a time, rather than mass producing it in large batches.
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The verb was fittingly used by those pragmatic collectors who made copies of rare records for each other. Speaking of the music of Sidney Bechet, George Hoefer wrote, “The original record is so rare that it is almost impossible to even find a copy from which to dub an acetate.”
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The collector, critic, and producer John Hammond once had to seek out the Chicago musician Meade Lux Lewis in person because he could not find a Lewis record of good enough quality to copy.
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Although the phonograph disc surpassed the recordable wax cylinder in popularity by the 1910s, it was technically possible, albeit difficult, for consumers to make their own disc recordings.
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Record-copying technologies appeared on the consumer market as a response to the economic woes of the Depression.
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RCA confronted the calamitous drop in music sales during the early 1930s by marketing record players that could connect to a separate disc recorder. Presumably, consumers would make their own recordings if they could no longer afford to buy records. “The new recorder utilized a small, pre-grooved, 6-inch disc made from a piece of cardboard with celluloid plastic laminated to each side,” writes historian David Morton. “Later, solid plastic blanks were sold in 10-and 12-inch sizes. The recording attachment used an electromagnetically driven stylus to emboss the recording into the pre-grooved disc.”
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After World War II, the cumbersome and delicate operation of a disc recorder, available to those with the money and inclination to record and copy music, would give way to the more flexible, user-friendly medium of magnetic tape, particularly with the rise of the high-fidelity home-recording market in the 1950s. “Disc home recording requires a great deal more skill than magnetic home recording, and if a mistake is made in the process of recording, the record is lost,” the engineer Semi J. Begun argued in the 1940s.
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Manufacturers improved disc-recording sets and lowered prices slightly throughout the 1930s, but in an era of economic distress consumers were unlikely to exchange their old record players for newer models with fancy new accessories. Indeed, people were hardly buying records, opting instead to listen to the radio for free. Remco’s Babytone recorder, introduced in 1936, cost $125, and Universal Microphone offered models ranging from $92 to $375 soon after.
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Begun noted that a few companies offered radios with built-in disc recorders in 1940, but to little avail. A few well-heeled music aficionados like Hammond, a Vanderbilt heir turned activist and jazz impresario, could afford a disc-cutting machine to reproduce records and share them with friends, but home-recording technology failed to take off in a big way until after World War II, with the emergence of reel-to-reel magnetic recording and the high-fidelity market.

Figure 2.1
The music from an African American musician’s horn becomes a disc and is passed from the record company to consumers, collectors, and bootleggers in this visual representation of bootlegging from
Record Changer
’s January 1952 issue.
Source
: Courtesy of the Brad McCuen Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University. Reprinted by permission of Richard Hadlock.

While dubs were a necessary evil for collectors, groups of jazz enthusiasts began launching their own programs to distribute copies of classic recordings soon after collecting emerged as a hobby. England’s Brunswick label copied some “classic swing” records in the early 1930s, and Panassiéled the reissue charge in France with his magazine
Jazz Hot
. Milt Gabler had pioneered the concept in the United States through his Commodore Music Shop on New York City’s 42nd Street. Beginning in 1934, Gabler sought licenses from record labels to produce small batches of jazz records that were no longer in print. The Commodore Music Shop became a hot spot for jazz enthusiasts in New York, and soon some of the “hipoise” who hung around the store, which moved to a bigger space on 52nd Street in 1938, launched the Hot Record Society (HRS).
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“The reissue adherents made like Don Quixote on a hot kick,” Charles Edward Smith recalled. They took on the task of reintroducing recordings that the major labels had let lapse into obscurity years before, a job they considered noble and, perhaps, quixotic. When Panassié visited the United States for the first time in 1938, he joined with Steve Smith, Russell, and others to start the Hot Record Society, which distributed copies of old tunes to its members and
irregularly issued its own journal, the
H.R.S. Society Rag
.
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The New York–based HRS got permission from record companies to copy their old records, he explained, because “(1) no one had discovered any loopholes in the copyright situation, and (2) pressings often had to be done through record companies, subsidiaries or firms in some way associated with them.”
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Permission did not mean cooperation, though. The labels condoned the activities of HRS with indifference; the only evidence of their tacit support is the fact that the Society never suffered any legal retaliation, unlike later bootleggers who also made copies of out-of-print recordings available to the public. HRS had to seek out the best copies of records, since firms such as Decca and Columbia would not let them use their masters. Society members tracked down the original musicians and urged them to share their knowledge about the recording sessions, suggesting that the buzz around a rediscovered classic might raise their profile in the music world. That said, “a hot chorus blown through a bust-up horn in 1924, whatever its merit, didn’t bring home the bacon a decade later,” Smith admitted, but many old hands were willing to contribute anyway. In 1941 Columbia told HRS it could reproduce the
Red Onion Jazz Babies
record by Clarence Williams. HRS made new masters of the record, and Williams joined in to provide the historical context for the recording. However, Columbia withdrew its consent shortly before the record’s release date. In fact, the whole program ended soon after, as the three major labels decided to try producing their own reissues in the early 1940s, and then the outbreak of a new world war put everything on hold.
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