Early jazz records....58 rpm?

[Guest]

It is clear that there are discrepancies in the replay speeds of reissued early jazz records, (i.e. not likely that so many were recorded i E natural or B natural etc). However, as a clarinet player I can tell quite easily what the correct key is by the fact that the clarinet sound varies markedly between Ab (the highest 'throat' note), and A natural (the lowest note of the middle register). This gives the game away particular if the player is Johnny Dodds who seems to enjoy emphasising this difference. This is usually enough to nail the key which is usually within a semitone of the reproduction. There are similar tonal discrepancies of sound to be heard on saxophones. For this reason I feel the 58rpm theory is a bit shaky.

Trevor Whiting

Cambridge August 2011

[Guest]

Back in the 1920's recordists occasionally used slow speeds to push draggy numbers played by second-rate organizations into Charlston dance tempo. A prime example of the practice would be the 1926 recording of "I've Got the Girl" by Don Clark's Orchestra, which was, incidentally the first appearance on record of a young Bing Crosby ( with Harry Rinker). the band sounds O. K. If perhaps a bit frenetic on this side, but Harry and Bing come across more on the order of a Gene Carrol novelty.

[OrthoSean]

Check out the Dorsey Brothers record of "The Spell Of The Blues" with Bing sometime on oKeh. It plays at about 85 RPM, yes, really. Bing sounds more like Pol Plancon at 78.

Sean

[pno4tay]

A few things to toss into this discussion:

The phenomenon of "absolute" or "perfect pitch" in certain musicians (me among them) - and the particular relevance this might have among jazz musicians.

With the exception of "art songs" transposed for high or low voices and the occasional transposition of an operatic aria at the request of a performer or even a revision by the composer (Strauss transposed Zerbinetta's aria in Ariadne auf Naxos down a whole step in 1916) classical musicians rarely talk "key". If you're gonna play the Haydn Gypsy Rondo trio you're gonna follow the score and play it in G. A pianist would be crazy to play "Clair de lune" in E flat just for the heck of it.

In a small jazz combo, a true professional could play, for example, "Stormy Weather" in any key, to accomodate the vocal range of the performer, whether vocal or instrumental. (Try playing something in the key of B major on a clarinet, for example. Cross fingerings galore. That's why God gave us the A clarinet as well, to make playing in sharp keys easier.)

Jazz musicians know their keys. And I would guess that even though "perfect pitch" is rare even among trained musicians, that the jazz wing would not be left out in this department.

And we have no anecdotal evidence of musicans mentioning odd transpositions only for the purpose of recording, no "We always did "Big Ass Blues" in E flat, but when we recorded it, we did it in B flat."

As for the Gerwhwin Rhapsody recording, evidently George really did play it that fast. The piano roll backs this up, as well as the filler on the Preludes disc of the slow portion of the Rhapsody. Yes, the speed of piano rolls can be manipulated, but the relative tempi from section to section still lead this person, meaning ME, to think that Gershwin "got carried away" with speed as he played. The solo piano discs of his songs are also frightfully fast, but sound to me in score pitch.

Given Gershwin's penchant for dropped notes, it would have been tempting to tune a piano down a whole step and record him at a slow speed. But if Gershwin himself had "perfect pitch" this would have been a near impossibility for him.

It has been accepted that Victor did record things a little "under" so they would sound brighter at 78, but I doubt that any musician who was "serious" at his or her craft would stand for such blatant key and tempo change.

Another story that backs this up would be some of the early acoustic recordings by pianist Alfred Cortot. Cortot, for all his musicianship, was one of the sloppiest-playing "major pianists" of all time. He enjoyed recording, and he learned that certain subtleties of playing - including notey acconpaniment figures - were drowned out in the surface noise. So he left some things out.

[syncopeter]

There is a movie short of Gershwin playing the piano while rehearsing for a dance routine for one of his shows. He really played that fast. And do you think Paul Whiteman would let him solo (and improvise) the world premiere of his Rhapsody in Blue with its near impossible tricks if George's playing wasn't up to scratch?
Modulating a song (i.e. changing the key up or down) to fit it better within the range of a singer or a solo instrument is of all ages. People like Bach and Mozart did it all the time, thanks to the then new 'temperated' tuning as against the 'natural' tuning that was used earlier. But changing the key still audibly influences the harmonics. Just listen to how Bach uses the same choral in his St. Matthews Passion four times and is able to make it from reasonably happy to gut wrenching sad.
No serious musician, be it a classical or popular artist, would ever accept 'fiddling' with his or her performance to make the record more brilliant. After all, they also had to had to perform on the stage and often under far worse conditions.
As I've written many times before, exact recording speeds for anything up to 1950 or thereabouts are arbitrary. With the advent of tape recording things got better, but even then cutting lathes (a lot of them still weight driven) could have speed variances up to 5%. The only ones we've some kind of 'guarantee' on are the Vitaphone discs, because they had to be in synch with the film.
I know that Dutch Decca recorded remarkably true to 78.26 rpm, because they had bought the cutting tables of the Cinetone Studio, an old movie company, complete with stroboscobes on the platter. Jaap van den Hul, father of Aalt Jouk (yes, that one, famous for his styli and cables), was the engineer.
Before the onset of stroboscobes, engineers just put a piece of scrap paper under the wax and counted the number of revolutions per minute, using their pocket watch, hoping they were not too much out. But once the cutting stylus was on the wax, a table could slow down because of the drag, speeding up showly during the process, resulting in a record dropping as much as a half note during playback.
And then there was the added problem of the wax cooling down, creating extra drag, sometimes not equally distributed along the record.
It isn't hard to imagine that engineers were very happy to change over from the old waxes to laquers in the later 1930s, early 1940s.
Still it is incridible to imagine how well, even in those very early days of electrical recording, engineers did capture those artists.
So, winding up, I think that the last thing people were worrying about was the brilliance of the recording that was made.

[Henry]

I think it was George Bernard Shaw (a very perceptive music critic, BTW) who said, "Perfect pitch is the pitch of your mother's piano." Food for thought, anyway.

[bart1927]

And what about those British Columbia's (even the electric recordings) that say "speed 80"? I have several of those that used masters from US Columbia, and those were, if I'm not mistaken, recorded at 78 rpm. But I have a couple of records in both the UK (80 rpm) and US (78 rpm) version, and they play at exactly the same speed! (Around 77 rpm, actually).

[OrthoSean]

That's not uncommon from my experience, Bart. A good number of acoustic Columbias which always suggested 80 RPM play at 78 or even 76 RPM to be in the correct key.

Sean

[Guest]

[quote="Henry"]I think it was George Bernard Shaw (a very perceptive music critic, BTW) who said, "Perfect pitch is the pitch of your mother's piano." Food for thought, anyway.[/quote]

That is true, since "perfect pitch" is pitch memory, and one could memorize the pitches from a faulty source. I never claimed to be born ringing at A-440.

Another percceptive music critic - me - was once quoted as saying that those people who like to make snappy comments about perfect pitch are the people who don't have it.

Rick