Charleston + Waitin' For The Moon (1925) Savoy Orpheans

CHARLESTON [0:00] – announcer: Ramon Newton
WAITIN’ FOR THE MOON [3:04] – vocalist: Ramon Newton
Savoy Orpheans
HMV B2076 (7 July and 26 June 1925 respectively)

A departure: a 1925 image of Ramon Newton with the Savoy Havana Band. Newton took over from Bert Ralton as the SHB director in late 1923; and moved on to directing the Orpheans in 1926. For the past few years I have researched Newton’s life; and the biography is being published in Memory Lane in November 2015. http://www.memorylane.org.uk/file/Home_Page.html . Cyril 'Ramon' Newton had a life of adventure and achievement touched with personal tragedy and some scandal. By permission of his great-niece, the article includes family photos of Newton from young to old not seen in the public domain.

Ramon Newton announces CHARLESTON as a new syncopated rhythm, but James P Johnson’s tune had debuted two years earlier in New York in the 1923 show Running Wild; and he may, in fact, have composed it years earlier.

June and July 1925 were in the early weeks of electrical recording at HMV; and the new technology was not without its problems for the engineers. In WAITIN’ FOR THE MOON there is an ear-splitting high-pitched resonance (presumably on the microphone) which is excited by the high harmonics of the trumpets in particular. To tame it, a notch has been applied to the frequency response from 4.4 kHz to 5.0 kHz.

Check out the Schubert at 4:58 - yet again, 1920s popular music quotes the classics.

An allegedly pristine copy of CHARLESTON auctioned for £300 on eBay (people do get carried away); this copy was 98% cheaper, but surely not 98% worse.

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