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From the Introduction:
The Origins and Development of the Pop Music Album from To Mother to The Voice (1926–1945)
“Ha ha ha. Who’s got the last laugh now?” In 1937, George and Ira Gershwin immortalized, in an irreverently syncopated style, a sequence of celebrated accomplishments of innovation and invention. Chief among them was the widely accepted fact that Thomas Edison was the first man to record sound. For well over a hundred years, it was taken for granted that sound recording was perhaps Edison’s first great achievement, even before the electric light or the motion picture camera.
Yet in recent years, it has become known that sound recordings were actually made (and still exist) at least twenty years before Edison’s tinfoil experiments. As early as 1857, a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had invented a device called the phonautograph, which successfully captured soundwaves and represented them visually. At that time, it was not actually possible to play back the sound in any way, although in 2008, the recorded noises of 150 years earlier were extracted and made available on the Internet. (Where else?) The fidelity is far from wonderful—in fact, it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re listening to—yet they constitute a genuine precedent to Edison.
Which goes to show that you can never say that something is the “first” of anything. Inevitably there’s something else out there, waiting to be discovered.
I offer the above “cautionary tale” as a preamble before attempting to track the history of the popular music album. No one can say what the first pop album actually was, but one point that needs to be made at the outset is that the album—as both a concept and a commercial reality—predates the long-playing record (or LP) by many years. Albums were, in fact, a viable and familiar concept to record producers and buyers deep into the 78 era, well before World War II. It’s often reported that the technology of the long-playing album inspired creative musicians like Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington to craft more ambitious, extended projects for a bigger canvas, but in fact it was the other way around: it was artists who drove the technology. Likewise, albums too were very much a part of the pop music market for at least a decade before the long-playing disc was perfected, thereby enabling record labels to release eight (later twelve) songs on a single disc.
The concept of the album had a long and respectable run. We know of pop albums going back to at least 1926, when the dominant format—virtually the only format—was individual 78 rpm discs. The 10-inch LP medium, introduced in 1948, was the next step forward, succeeded by the 12- inch LP, which became the standard, in America at least, about 1955, and then the compact disc (from 1985 on). The CD would be, so far, the last physical format for which artists would put together programs of creative and interesting music. In the post-physical age of listening to music, the album is more or less passé: kids primarily download individual tracks, and pay attention to entire albums only secondarily. Thus the age of the pop music album is finite, stretching for roughly eighty years, picking up speed slowly from the mid-1920s onward and then losing momentum quickly in the mid-“aughts.”
The purpose of this book is to talk about the great jazz and pop vocal albums, and in this introductory chapter we trace the development of the concept—the events that led up to the development of the pop music “album.” We’ll go from the first pop albums, well before the start of the Depression, up to the successful introduction of the long-playing record after the war. By the time that the LP was good to go, creative artists like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington (not to mention forward-looking producers like Jack Kapp, George Avakian, and Norman Granz) were truly ready for it. Throughout this whole period, for our purposes, there were essentially three types of albums:
* Existing Songs / Existing Recordings: The most basic kind of album (then as now) was a collection of tracks that had already been recorded, and, in most cases, already released. Usually these were collections of songs that had been hits in the singles format; more often than not, they sport titles like The Best of So-and-So or So-and-So’s Greatest Hits.
* New Songs / New Recordings: On the other end, there was the all-original album, which actually began in 1946 with the release of Manhattan Tower, a groundbreaking and genre-defying work which all but singlehandedly invented what later became known as the concept album. In the 1960s, this idea came to dominate in rock-oriented pop music (although there already was a precedent in the jazz world). In most classic rock albums from the Beatles onward, the tracks were all newly recorded and all the songs were completely original as well, written in almost all cases by the performing artist.
* Existing Songs / New Recordings: There was a halfway point between the two above extremes (completely unoriginal and completely original), which was perfected by Frank Sinatra in 1945 with the first pop music “concept” album, The Voice. Nearly all of the great pop and jazz vocal albums would follow this format: the songs themselves were already of a certain vintage, well known and well loved enough to be considered classics. But the recording itself was new, and so was everything else: the interpretations, the arrangements, the sequencing. It became a challenge for the singers, orchestrators, and producers of the era, which reached a peak in the 1950s and ’60s, to be able to take standard songs and use the album concept—i.e., the act of taking individual songs, written for different purposes by different composers, and making them relate to each other, thus forging a new collective statement out of songs that already existed.
It’s the contention of this book that the most creative, interesting, and memorable albums (starting with those of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald) belong to this third category. There was, quite possibly, more creativity and more great results from this particular combination of the old and the new (a new spin on songs the listeners already knew) than in any other use of the album format. The central idea behind this book is to show how this format (old songs in a new context) evolved, and to identify and discuss the classics of the genre. (For the most part, I’m leaving original cast albums out of this categorical discussion, although I will mention a few—they are a distinct genre unto themselves.)
