“The Flapper Wife”
Harry Reser’s Syncopators
(Columbia 393-D mx 140622) May 25, 1925
“Craving”
Harry Reser’s Syncopators
(Columbia 393-D mx 140612) May 26, 1925
Here’s a record from the Edward Mitchell collection that impressed me. In my opinion, it ranks among the best of the “hot dance” records from the mid-1920s Charleston craze.
On this blog’s January 17 update, I featured an excellent recording of “The Flapper Wife” by Harry Raderman’s Jazz Orchestra that I had been looking for ever since I first heard it on a YouTube video. That recording of the song was made the same month as the Harry Reser version of it here. But Reser’s version was made the month after Columbia started using the new electric recording technology that utilized microphones rather than acoustic recording horns.
The arrangement for the first 55 seconds of the Reser recording is similar to Raderman’s. The biggest difference is the vastly improved fidelity of the new technology. But that is followed by the first of two very nice extended Harry Reser banjo solos of the same “sparkling” style that he brought to his radio band, the Clicquot Club Eskimos.
“Craving” starts out up-tempo but laid-back. The primary term I would use to describe the first portion of this recording is “charming.” But, a little over halfway through, the arrangement abruptly changes direction and becomes quite “hot.” If one ever needs to find a musical passage that exemplifies the “Roaring ’20s,” the latter portion of this recording would certainly fit the bill.
“Craving” was composed by bandleader Ben Bernie and Kenneth Casey. Ben Bernie’s band made a recording of the song in January 1925, which was issued on Vocalion 14965. I was able to find a copy of it on YouTube. (Note: the person who uploaded the record to YouTube mismatched the audio and video on both sides; thus the audio for “Craving” was uploaded under “Keep Smiling At Trouble” while the audio for the latter song was uploaded under the information for “Craving.”)
The Ben Bernie version of the song is not as “hot” as Reser’s, and, of course, in January 1925, Vocalion was not yet recording electrically. But it is still quite nice. If I can find a copy of it in Eddie’s collection, I will definitely add it to Radio Dismuke as well.
We are so fortunate that both of these Reser recordings were made just in time to be captured electrically. If you compare Reser’s “The Flapper Wife” with the Harry Raderman version I posted in January and linked to above, you can immediately hear the radical improvement over the old technology. But, while Victor and Columbia began recording and releasing records with the new technology in the spring of 1925, neither company made public announcements about it until much later in the year so that they could have time to build up a new catalog and provide dealers a chance to sell off their existing inventory of records that would soon be perceived as obsolete.