[78-L] ODEON-PARLOPHONE - WAS Ted Wilson Musicraft pressings WAS Casa Loma "White Jazz"

[Iñigo Cubillo]

Tim Huskisson, Lennick and Vein:

Thanks for your responses.

About the fuzziness of the Wilson sides, I also first listened to these
Wilson Musicraft recordings in one of those cheap italian LP issues of Jazz
Pianists (Discophon was the brand?) And the fuzziness was there too...

Lennick: my Musicraft pressings are not  the rough type (which I believe
you refer to with the camel poop simile) but others which seem very soft,
like vinyl-lite sort of shellack? They are shiny... but this sort of thing
grabs the bamboo needle and the surface becomes cloudy and white when
played with bamboo. Steel also works bad (too much black powder on the
needle tip at the end). Now I don't remember if they are Canadian
pressings...could they be? I bought many records from the late dear Jeff
Healey, and this set could be one of them.


About the Odeon (SP) - Parlophone (UK) connection:

Indeed I must say my apologies, for actually not having any direct evidence
of Parlophone issues in the Wilson case. I just run ahead and
extrapolated... I supposed EMI UK issuing imported US matrixes on
Parlophone (funny cheap label for all kinds of music) and then passing them
to EMI Spain, who in turn converted this into Odeon pressings. I've always
supposed these things were done in EMI UK and we simply duplicated issues
of british Parlophones.

I've found other spanish Odeons that come from US King recordings and
others, through british Parlophone... (Sondra & Jon Steele, Irving Fields
Trio...) Those have been found among the UK Parlophones, and the originals
are USA King recordings. I think I found them in Steve Abrams databases or
any other sort of thing.

This is only a reasonable guess, with some evidences to sustain it.

It would be very interesting to prepare (myself) a list of say, post-1936
spanish Odeon issues of imported matrixes that are likely to be drawn from
british Parlophone issues, and launch it, just to be compared by UK
colleagues with Parlophone catalogs to see if indeed our Odeons drew from
UK Parlophones.

There are clear cases of 1947-1956 period, as all the Robert Inglez and the
Savoy Hotel Orchestra Parlophone sides, which were very popular in Spain...
These were recorded in the UK for the Parlophone F (maroon) series and R
(indigo) series, and many issues were repeated in Spain in Odeon 184000
blue / 204000 green series.

Anyone picks the glove? I could send next week an XLS or TXT extracted from
my database for any curious soul that may want to cross check spanish Odeon
issues with UK Parlophone catalogs...

Inigo Cubillo
Temporarily landed in France