Album: V/A / 'I Found a Rose in the Devil's Garden' - Jazz Cylinders 1917-1922

Artist: V/A

Title: 'I Found a Rose in the Devil's Garden' - Jazz Cylinders 1917-1922

A cool curiosity offered up by the internet, this is a compilation of early hot music sides, sometimes referred to as the 'jass'.¹ These recordings are from Edison's wax cylinders, old enough that they even predate 78 rpm records.

I'm not enough of a historian to fully appreciate the intricacies of precisely where these recordings fall in the grand story of the form, but it's telling that several of these sides ("The 'jass' one-step" [1917], "Jazbo jazz" [1918], "Jazz de luxe" [1918], and "Jazzin' around" [1918], to name a few) are early enough in the game that the genre name served as a sort of novelty title.² Musically, these are closest to dixieland (although some, such as Earl Fuller, in non-African-American New York interpretations), filled with ensemble playing and syncopation, but not much in the way of the soloing that would mark the next stage of jazz' development.

But I'm almost certainly in way over my head with all that. Just appreciated musically, there is some pretty fun stuff here. Some of it comes across as a little staid, but a good portion of it cooks nicely, such as the aforementioned "Jazz de luxe". A couple cuts by the Louisiana Five are also pretty tasty. Running to 33 cuts over two-and-a-quarter hours, this can get a bit much to take in large doses, but I find that applied to almost any set of old sides, when every song was as packed as possible to engage you for three or four minutes. The sonic quality varies a bit, of course — there's surface noise in all of these recordings, and a few have some warp and wobble to them, but considering how "lo-fi" the recordings are, these are very good.

This set was compiled losslessly by an enterprising Dime user from the archives of the cylinder digitization project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which has made them available online with this sort of free sharing in mind.³ Praise is due to those involved for making an effort to put music like this in circulation.

Track picks: 6 - "Clarinet squawk" (Louisiana Five), 17 - "Jazz de luxe" (Earl Fuller's Famous Jazz Band)

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¹ Or 'jazz', to use the modern vernacular.

² A noble tradition later carried on by such songs as "Rock Around the Clock", "Rapper's Delight", etc., etc.

³ A browse around through the archives is well worth the time — there's some fascinating stuff there, and all available to sample as MP3's.