| “Thick Lip Stomp” Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra December 13, 1926 (HMV B-5302 mx A 37232) |
| “Harmony Blues” Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra December 13, 1926 (HMV B-5302 mx A 37233) |
From the Edward Mitchell collection, here are two recordings by Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, an influential black jazz band based in Kansas City throughout its existence from 1922 to 1935. The copy here is the British pressing on His Master’s Voice. In the United States, it appeared on Victor 20406.
Moten’s records for Victor sold well. The band’s most famous and best-selling record was its 1928 recording of “South,” which remained in Victor’s catalog for many decades until the end of the 45 rpm era.
Sadly, Bennie Moten died in 1935 at the age of 41 from complications of a tonsillectomy. (Another famous jazz musician, Eddie Lang, died as the result of a tonsillectomy in 1933.)
Moten’s brother Buster briefly and unsuccessfully took over the band, after which its top musicians were recruited to form the core of the newly formed Count Basie Orchestra.
These recordings were the first two made during the band’s first recording session for Victor after switching its recording affiliation from OKeh. The recording session was held on December 13-14, 1926, in the first-floor ballroom of the Webster Hotel in Chicago, which Victor used for many of its Chicago field-recording trips between 1926 and 1931.
If you have ever been impressed by the audio quality of certain early Jelly Roll Morton recordings, it is likely because they were recorded in the same ballroom and benefited from its remarkable acoustics.
After the recording industry converted to electrical recording in 1925, American companies tended to dampen their recording studios with heavy drapery, much more than their European counterparts. These recordings are anything but dampened. The acoustics of the Webster Hotel ballroom provided enough reverberation that recordings fortunate enough to have been made there sound incredibly lifelike.
You can hear another recording made in that same ballroom in 1931 by a very different style of band, Wayne King’s, featuring three selections on a Victor Program Transcription Disc (a commercially unsuccessful attempt to introduce a 33 rpm long-playing record) in this previous blog post.
Happily, the Webster Hotel still stands and is now the Webster House Apartments. If you follow this link and click on the “Photos” section, you can see images of its spectacular, still-intact original lobby. I have not been able to locate any information about whether the ballroom is still intact.