Jazz on the Record

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

February 26, 1917. At the Victor Talking Machine Company’s studio in Manhattan, five white men gathered to record the first jazz record in history. The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s release was a hit, introducing many listeners across America to this genre for the first time. These musicians even claimed that they invented jazz, but that was far from the truth. Why was jazz, an artform pioneered by black musicians, introduced to the world by an all-white band? And who were the true pioneers who could have made the first jazz record?

Special thanks to Damon J. Phillips, Columbia Business School professor and author of Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form, and Kevin Whitehead, jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and author of Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.0	History this week, February 26th, 1917.
0:09.0	I'm Sally Helm.
0:12.0	The Cornettist is so loud that he has to stand back 20 feet.
0:20.0	If he gets too close to the tin recording horn, the final song will be All Cornett.
0:27.0	It's still early days for the whole business of recorded music.
0:31.0	And so in this 12th floor studio in Midtown Manhattan, the members of the original Dixie Land Jazz Band are trying to get information.
0:40.0	They're an all-white band coming out of New Orleans.
0:43.0	There are five of them.
0:45.0	The drummers in the back, then comes the Cornett, then Trombone, Clarenette, and finally the piano.
0:53.0	Up front where it can be heard.
0:58.0	That huge tin recording horn funnels the sound down to a needle, and the needle scratches lines onto a wax disc.
1:07.0	They keep the room hot, so the wax will be soft enough that the needle can leave an impression.
1:14.0	After a lot of false starts, the engineers are finally satisfied with the recording quality,
1:20.0	and the members of the original Dixie Land Jazz Band pack up to go.
1:24.0	By the way, that's jazz with two S's instead of Z's.
1:29.0	The genre is so young that there's not yet a consistent way to spell it.
1:33.0	But jazz has actually been played for about 20 years now, mostly by black musicians in New Orleans.
1:40.0	Still, most of the country has never heard of jazz before, and they've certainly never heard it played.
1:48.0	But that is about to change.
2:00.0	Today, the original Dixie Land Jazz Band records the first jazz record ever published.
2:07.0	Why was jazz an art form pioneered by black musicians introduced to the world by an all-white band?
	...

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