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Palais De Danse in Melbourne in 1933.
A high proportion of 78rpm records carry jazz music which is not surprising when you think about it. The development of recorded music and the emergence of jazz went hand-in-hand. As prohibition took hold across America so did the music coming out of New Orleans, and it carried a generous dose of the risqué, making it perfect for the salacious speakeasies serving up moonshine and the scandalous dance styles being executed by their customers.
Thus the 1920s and early '30s is generally regarded as music’s Jazz Age. It led to the big bands of swing and set the stage for the Gershwins, Frank Sinatra, Andre Previn and Elvis. And all this music and dance was taken up with gusto by Australians, fuelled by the bonus of freely available booze.
Frank Coughlan's Band at the Sydney Trocadero in 1938.
Jack’s first foray into digitising all this resulted in a couple of double CDs of music from the 1940s and '50s, and he’s just completed a project he’s called Happy Feet, with 127 minutes of Australian jazz music from the 1930s. He called it Happy Feet because it gets folk dancing.
All the tracks on the double CD were originally mastered for release on 78rpm records, most by Columbia at its studio in Sydney’s Homebush although some tracks were recorded in Melbourne by Featuradio, and others by Rex Shaw’s Prestophone label. A few come from London.
Happy Feet is out now on double CD.
“Thousands of 78s recorded electrically after 1925 still sound great,” Mitchell says. “But some were never issued and I bought taped copies of some of those original acetates from Rex Shaw. The 78s produced by Columbia were renowned by collectors around the world for their smooth, quiet surfaces, rivalled only by the German Brunswick label.”
I’ve listened to an early copy of Happy Feet and it’s totally representative of the age, lots of trumpets, trombones, double basses, saxophones and slick vocals at up-tempo rhythms.
Okay, it’s all completely mono but it is nicely engineered and the sound quality is surprisingly good, with very little of the noise and scratchiness usually experienced with 78s. One track, Dinah, gets a bit muddy and indecisive but Jack explains it was taken from a Cinesound movie short.