[Dixielandjazz] Correct Record Speed - Part 2

[Stephen G Barbone]

here is part 2 from Neville about record speed.



Sixty years ago I had a wind-up gramophone and used to play a trumpet

along with th recordings of Louis Armstrong. The only way I managed,  
was to turn the speed control to very slow, that is about 58 RPM,  
making the key lower by about two and a half musical tones. Nowadays I  
re-record CDs on to cassette on a karaoke machine, which has variable  
speeds, and have now studied much of the popular recorded jazz of the  
twenties, and this discrepancy persists. From the Original Dixieland  
Jazz Band in 1921, to the West End Blues of Louis Armstrong in 1929,  
the recordings were deliberately made to sound fast and jazzy, it was  
good for business as the records sold well. The musicians liked it,  
because improvised playing at a relaxed slow speed was much easier,  
and led to fewer mistakes and expensive re-takes.

If this really was the case, the questions to be addressed are: Why  
has this not come to light before? Why was it such a well kept secret?

In 1925, it was not a secret. Gramophones had a governor control to  
set the speed where you liked. This new music had to sound jazzy and  
people played it at the speed they needed to dance the Charleston.  
Perhaps the first band to be recorded in this way was the Original  
Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) and everyone liked it. The records sold  
well and although the label said 78 RPM no one complained, so from  
then on jazz was recorded at 58 RPM which was fine for about 10 years.  
After that, the governor control mechanisms became obsolete, but jazz  
lovers had become used to the music sounding this way; jazzy and fast.

Today if we see '78 RPM' on an old shellac, it is played at 78; no  
questions are asked. In fact, any suggestion that jazz recordings of  
the 1920s are all too fast is generally met with surprise and  
disbelief. But I have re-recorded a selection of tracks at 58 RPM with  
each one followed by a few bars at 78, and most listeners are amazed  
and convinced at the time, although they might not be so sure later,  
while some older jazz lovers cannot change their years of  
indoctrination and are hard to convince. Clearly there is something  
amiss with the speed of 1920s jazz. By 1929 it seems that the  
recording speed started to be altered: Bix Beiderbecke's recordings in  
New York, April 1928, were slightly faster, but it was only after 1930  
that the Armstrong recordings were approaching 78 RPM. Even today the  
speed of some popular music is incorrect.