[Dixielandjazz] Wax cylinders

[coastsidegiraffe at comcast.net]

 A trip back into the technological past from the N.Y. Times:

Karen
Pacifica, CA



June 11, 2006
The City Life
Edison, Unplugged

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
In a basement recording studio in the Bronx the other day, unencumbered by 
wires, cables, amplifiers or headsets, a huddle of musicians took their cue and 
eased into a song. It was a four-man band — trumpet, clarinet, banjo and 
battered tuba — and a singer, a young woman with saucer eyes, a blond bob and 
excellent diction.

They played and she sang into the fat ends of two long metal horns, like 
backward megaphones, that funneled the sound to a wooden box, a wind-up lathe on 
which spun a shiny cylinder coated in brittle black wax. As a needle etched a 
groove in the cylinder, a surgically attentive man dusted away the shavings with 
a paintbrush and little puffs of breath.

When the music stopped, he put the cylinder on another machine for playback. He 
turned the crank, placed the needle and a sweet, melancholy song flooded the 
room. It sounded like an unearthed relic of the Roaring Twenties, though the 
recording was barely a minute old.

Down in the poolroom
Some of the gang
were talking of gals they knew
Women are all the same, said Joe
Then one dizzy bird said, Pal, ain't you heard
the story of True Blue Lou.

It was an electric moment, though electricity had nothing to do with it. The 
recording was the product of the collaboration of a radio host, Rich Conaty, who 
plays 20's and 30's jazz and pop on Sundays on WFUV; Peter Dilg, an acoustic 
engineer; and the pickup musicians who leapt at the invitation to make a 
brand-new, old-time Edison cylinder.

Mr. Conaty, Mr. Dilg and the band are first-rank, certifiable enthusiasts. At 
lunch after the session, they plunged obsessively into Thomas Edison lore and 
Tin Pan Alley trivia. They lamented the supremacy of inferior recording 
technologies. They pined for Betamax and cassettes, for Bix Beiderbecke and Cab 
Calloway.

Mr. Conaty, who plans to play the cylinder on his show tonight, has an audience 
that, practically by definition, is too young to remember Sophie Tucker, Ukulele 
Ike or the young and jazzy Bing Crosby. But the people who, like me, plan their 
Sunday nights around the show have discovered pleasures in the music totally 
unrelated to nostalgia. It's a revelation to hear music so fresh and strange, so 
witty and soulful, from people who are dead and gone.

And there is another pleasure, too. It's the warmth of the technology. There are 
surely downloadable versions of "True Blue Lou." But unlike the MP3, whose magic 
is incomprehensible and thus boring, the wax cylinder is viscerally miraculous. 
It's staggering to think that lungs and plucked strings could vibrate the air, 
wiggle a stylus and capture a song for 100 years on a fragile thing that looks 
like a toilet paper roll. Compared with the iPod, it's a lot more human, a lot 
more accessible, a lot easier to love.

Once you've seen and heard it done, there's no going back.


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