Oct 19 2008
Gennett Records:The Little Studio that Made History
I know, I know, I rave about radio station WDCB all the time in my blog. What can I say? I love to rant and rave about what I love. WDCB is the only station in Chicago that still plays classic jazz music. The run their studio out of DuPage county, just west of Chicago from the campus of College of DuPage. Despite being on a college campus, the people on the air are paid professionals (mostly). This makes for an interesting, professional-sounding, publicly-funded radio station at the far left of the dial.
They have a very cool page right now dedicated to a fairly local legendary record label that you should know about. The title of the audiocast (you can listen to it on their site) and the article is “Gennett Records: The Little Studio that Could.”
Located not far from Chicago in Richmond Indiana, the studio itself was little more than a shack in a field behind a house. However, it was a place where history was made. That’s because musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Bix Beiderbicke, and Hoagy Carmichael got together here and played interracially mixed music.
The studio itself was nothing to write home about. Inside the shed was a cramped affair where the performers had to sit in stool or stack crates to reach the microphone. For sound-dampening there were rugs hanging from hooks and the walls were lined with hay and straw. Not far away was a railroad track where rumbling freight trains would do their best to ruin precious tracks and takes when doing recordings over again was not an option.
They were recording with mixed-raced groups in a time when there was such a thing as “race records” and music, in addition to the rest of the country, was segregate. Jelly Roll Morton, an African American, broke that mold by making the first racially mixed album in those shabby studios in Indiana.
The rest of the story is available at the WDCB site. Check out the podcast and read the article. It’sa very cool piece of jazz history and it’s not too far from the hustle and bustle of modern day Chicago.
