[78-L] BACKGROUND ARTIFACTS (WAS Hal Kemp record question)

Taylor Bowie bowiebks at isomedia.com
Fri Apr 17 14:09:22 PDT 2009


Many thanks to Jack Daney for alerting us to this Harry James record...it's 
now a "must have" for my collection.

The end of the Ben Selvin 5-minute Columbia of the Hot-Cha Medley has 
somebody mumbling something about two beats after the music stops...I'm sure 
it's not so colorful as the remark heard on the James record,  but it's 
interesting!

Taylor



> As Dave Lennick pointed out it's not likely you're  "hearing things". 
> Around
> 1944 I had Miller's Bluebird 78 of the "Anvil Chorus." On side two behind
> the softer passages I could  hear an animated conversation going on. It 
> was
> plainly audible but too much in the background to make out any details or
> discern whether there were one or two persons. The reissues I have are 
> minus
> the artifact.  I've come to suspect that it was probably a one-sided
> dialogue of someone in the vicinity of the recording lathe talking on the
> phone and as the result of some leakage somewhere it wound up on the disc.
> In a recording studio, almost anything was possible and Murphy's law was
> always at the ready.
>
> Better than that is Harry James' 1941 recording of "The Devil Sat Down &
> Cried." On the instrumental interlude between vocals one can (almost)
> plainly hear someone way off mike shout, "Aw, go F...yourself!"  I'd never
> noticed it until it was brought to my attention by the local small record
> shop proprietor in the mid forties. Once having heard it it was impossible
> to miss. I asked Helen Forrest (who is on the record) about it when I 
> worked
> with her in 1956. She was unaware but said that with that band in those
> days, anything could happen. It's on all the reissues I've heard, btw. 
> Next
> case....
> JD
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