[78-L] Jaudas' Society Orch's banjo

[Philip Carli]

This really should be clarified; in the DD period, selections to be recorded at Edison's main studio in Manhattan were picked by New York Recording Dept. staff (W.H. A. Cronkhite, Eugene Jaudas, and Cesare Sodero generally) ard artists, and then vetted by a committee at West Orange (whose principal member, in name and often but not always in practice, was TAE).  The one major exception to this, at least from 1916 on, was concert band/orchestra material, which was left entirely to the discretion of conductor Cesare Sodero.  Edison himself did not pick what was to be recorded from the get-go.  As to hiring musicians, for ensemble recordings it was usually left up to the conductor to contract players for sessions, and several players did multiple duty in various types of groups (cornetist Louis Katzman and clarinettist Anthony Giammatteo; the latter also did some contracting as well).  It seems that the club rooms of the New York Liederkranz were kind of a "corral" for picking up session musicians; Louis von der Mehden did his hiring from there for U-S Phonograph in 1912-13, and the personnel lists for his groups include many musicians who were active throughout the studios, including Edison. And session musicians often worked in the studios by day and in theatres or other entertainment venues at night, so $30-50/week was only part of their income -- a pretty good part, though.

It must be said that all Edison entertainment divisions tended to be conservatively biased because of the company's overriding corporate mentality and its habit of micromanagement.  For instance, the Edison motion picture division was the last major US film company to go into regular feature film production (mid-1915; it continued to make one-reel films as a staple almost to the end in 1918) and it tended to film very economically with a small stock company under the management of studio heads selected from other Edison divisions with little feel for film (the first studio head was Edison chief exec William Gilmore's brother-in-law William Markgraf, another was ex-carpet salesman Horace Plimpton, and, ironically, the last one was L. W. McChesney, formerly the advertising head from the phonograph division).  This approach was echoed in the recording division, I think; a small group of reliable artists with reliable reperoire recorded as efficiently as possible.  Their best efforts were made despite executive management.  PC


________________________________________
From: 78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com [78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com] On Behalf Of Mark Bardenwerper [citrogsa at charter.net]
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2011 1:04 AM
To: 78-L Mail List
Subject: Re: [78-L] Jaudas' Society Orch's banjo

On 4/19/2011 9:11, Mark Bardenwerper wrote:

Just finished cataloging and sorting my Edison DD collection. Looking at
the several databases I used, I see the large number of foreign names. I
think many of these musicians were nearly "just off the boat" and worked
for peanuts, much to T. E.'s delight. Though he had a few high payed
names, the bulk of them were just session musicians. I remember Dalhart
saying in an interview that many of them lived in New York and spent
nearly the entire week in the studios jumping from seat to seat earning
perhaps $50 a week on good weeks. The lesser ones got less than that I
am sure.

http://www.banjoorchestra.org/history.html


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