Carl Kress

1936

March 29, 1936

Carl Kress and Dick McDonough

Carl Kress-guitar, Dick McDonough-guitar.

HEAT WAVE - Swingtime At NBC program, NBC Studios, NYC.

SOURCE: The Savory Collection 1935-1940, Mosaic Records 266, 2018.

Bill Savory certainly ranks as one of the more fascinating unknown figures of the golden age of the recording industry. Born in 1916, he studied piano from a young age and developed an interest in sound engineering.

In 1940, Columbia Broadcasting System hired Savory to help operate and maintain its new recording facility in Chicago. Savory joined the United States Navy and left Columbia in 1942 for active duty during World War II, including work at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the centimeter wave research division.

After a year in Washington, Savory returned to New York and Columbia Records, this time as a member of the team led by Columbia Records engineer William Bachman that succeeded in bringing the first 33 1/3 LP record albums to market in 1948. Savory made some of the first transfers from disk to tape to LP master.

Among these were the on-site recordings of the historic Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, and a Tchaikovsky violin concerto which won Savory a dollar when he bet the violinist, Isaac Stern, that he could make an undetectable splice during a long trill. “I bet him a dollar he’d never find where the splice was made, and he didn’t,” Savory recalled. “So he paid me a dollar.”

He recorded via phone lines the historic May 29, 1938, jazz marathon at Randall’s Island Stadium, an all-day swing concert for the benefit of Local 802’s Hospital Fund. Savory also made many air-checks and phone-line recordings of Benny Goodman, some of which he played for Mr. Goodman during a recording session in 1950. Goodman was so pleased with what he heard that he asked for more, and the result was Columbia’s 1952 release of the “air checks” album, “1937-38 Jazz Concert No. 2” later re-released on CD as “On the Air (1937-1938)” (Columbia Legacy, 1993).

He left Columbia in 1953 to become Chief Engineer of Angel Records/EMI, and represented EMI on the first engineering staff of the newly formed R.I.A.A. to establish a standard recording curve. After retiring in 1989 he devoted much of his time to the digital conversion of the many air-check recordings he had made during the 1930s and ‘40s from hotel broadcasts, concerts, and sponsored radio programs.

CARL KRESS & DICK MCDONOUGH-HEAT WAVE

At the same time that Bill Savory was documenting these momentous moments by giants of the era, he also went out of his way to record broadcasts by musicians’s musicians who may never have been household names or even known to many of young swing fans (known in the parlance of the times as “alligators”) of the era.

In the years before Charlie Christian joined Benny Goodman’s band in 1939 and started the proliferation of electric guitars in jazz, there had been a solid decade of acoustic guitar stylings that had their own individualistic idiom. This aircheck of HEAT WAVE took place a year before the studio recording (April 7, 1937). Kress does most of the chord work while McDonough mostly plays single notes, but he does add his chords to Kress’s during the performance making it difficult to deduce one from the other. This performance is livelier and not as polished as the studio recording. Obviously, by the time they committed this to wax they had performed it numerous times, which explains why this radio performance sounds a little fresher. Over time, with the ascendency of the electric guitar combined with changing jazz styles, charming, composed, acoustic guitar duets like HEAT WAVE have been all but forgotten.

Notes by Vincent Pelote, The Savory Collection 1935-1940, Mosaic Records 266, 2018. ww.mosaicrecords.com

Note: See April 7, 1937 (below), for the Brunswick Records studio recording of HEAT WAVE.