Background information about the recordings can be found below the audio selections.
“Stolen Kisses”
Casino Dance Orchestra
(Pathe 020579-B) circa May 1921
“Julienne”
Bennie Krueger And His Orchestra
(Pathe 020579) June 8, 1921
Here are two rather charming recordings from a 1921 Pathe Actuelle disc.
“Stolen Kisses” is a Ted Snyder composition. Snyder was a highly successful songwriter and music publisher, best remembered today for songs such as “The Sheik of Araby” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” which remain well-known.
The identity of the band on this recording is not known, as Pathe’s recording logs have long been lost. The Casino Dance Orchestra was a pseudonym that Pathe assigned to recordings made by several bands for the label. Discographer Brian Rust speculates that the band on this might have been either the Nathan Glantz Orchestra or Joseph Knecht’s Waldorf-Astoria Dance Orchestra. Whoever the band might have been, its saxophone player provides some nice Rudy Wiedoeft-style passages.
“Julienne” is a Roy Turk – J. Russell Robinson composition, billed on the record’s label as a “Franco-American Foxtrot.” While both Turk and Robinson were well-known composers, this particular song seems to have been rather obscure as I was not able to find much information or even very many references to it during my online research.
Prominent on this recording is the Bennie Krueger Orchestra’s banjo player Bill Arenburg. The banjo was an essential part of the rhythm section of the early jazz and dance bands in the era before the advent of electrical amplification. Banjos are loud and could cut through and be heard over the ensemble of the various brass instruments. They also reproduced well under the constraints of the limited frequency response of pre-microphone era acoustic recording technology.
Pathe records during this period were made through an unusual and utterly unique process. I previously wrote about it in some detail in this May 4, 2024 posting.