Posts tagged with "dance band"

“They’re Wearing ’em Higher In Hawaii” – by the Corner House Ragtime Band (1918)

Posted on by Sarah Wickham

Charles Hippisley-Cox writes

Here’s another recent addition to the British Dance Band collection here in the Heritage Quay.   It represents exactly what was happening in popular music at the end of the Ragtime era before the arrival of jazz.    The band was based at Lyons’ Corner House, Coventry Street, London with an instrumentation based on a lead violin, two banjos, piano and drums.   Recorded in March 1918 and issued on the Winner record label that had adopted a rather dull colour during the austerity of WW1.  Jazz “proper” arrived exactly 100 years ago by boat with the visit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.   Next month we will be celebrating this by sharing their first London recording which was in April 1919″

A “world record”

Posted on by Sarah Wickham

Charles Hippisley-Cox writes

Here’s one of the latest additions to the British Dance Band Collection held here at Heritage Quay.   It is an exceptionally rare example of a World Record from the early 1920s.   Unlike most of the collection wherethe records revolve at 78 r.p.m, World Records experimented with a system where the record starts slowly and gradually accelerates towards the record label. 

Record label
Record label for World Record

The theory was to reduce the deterioration of sound quality towards the centre of disc recordings where each rotation is shorter.  For various reasons the “World” project was doomed with the eccentric polymath aviator, publisher, Member of Parliament and entrepreneur-inventor Noel Pemberton Billing (1881–1948) swiftly moving on to other things .

However the system of “constant linear speed” was revisited much later with the introduction of CDs that revolve at a much faster speed when the laser gets close to the centre.The new acquisition will be difficult to transfer to an accessible MP3 as the team are still working out a way of using computer software for editing the sound files which will be recorded at a constant speed and then adjusted accordingly.