Lakeview Hot Record Club

This group is about listening to jazz and blues music of the 1920s through 1950s, on 78 rpm records. The best way to hear this music is in the original format in which it was recorded, distributed, and experienced—it is more vibrant and alive than later remastered versions in other formats, at least to my ears. If nothing else it is worth a try if you’ve never really heard the original before!

Whether you are already a fan of the blues and jazz, or just want to hear and learn about some of America’s greatest music, we want you to join us whenever you can. All the information you need is right on this website.

We have two formats for this experience (see below for details about both): Zoom listening sessions, and monthly live in-person listening sessions held at the Spirit Room here in Rochester. We’ll post information on upcoming sessions here, so can always check back to see when the next session will be. There is also a Facebook group called ‘Lakeview Hot Record Club’, so please feel free to join that group if you use Facebook, as that is a good way to engage in discussions about the sessions, and this music.

Please tell your friends, and anyone else who may be interested in this music! All the sessions are free—all you have to do is show up!

Thanks…
    —= Gian Carlo Cervone =—

Please email giancarlo@lakeviewhotrecordclub.org to be added to our mailing list.

The Music

There is a wide variety of music you can hear on 78 rpm records—we focus on jazz and blues—the background image on this webpage shows records all of which might be heard at one of these listening sessions. Blues records range from the blueswomen of the 1920s such as Bessie Smith, Rosa Henderson, and many other through the acoustic and electric sounds of Chicago including artists such as Tampa Red, Big Maceo Merriweather, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Jimmy Yancey, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, and others, as well as electic sounds of Walter Brown, Roy Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, Crown Prince Waterford, B. B. King, Helen Humes, and more… On the jazz side, we go from early 1920s recordings of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, to early big bands of Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington, to small and large bands and artists of the swing era such as Chick Webb, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Woody Herman, Bunny Berigan, and there is always something fantastic by Louis Armstrong! We also hear the more modern sounds of the bebop and cool styles of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Art Pepper, Stan Getz, as well as numerous lesser-known greats.

A typical playlist is given below, taken from one of the Zoom listening sessions, but each session varies widely in the material chosen, sometimes following a them such as ’music of Kansas City’, or ‘what to listen for in 1920s jazz’.

78 rpm records

The discs that we listen to are mostly 10" or 12" in diameter—most are made of a shellac compound, and are rather brittle, although some of the later ones are made of a vinyl compound—often called ‘unbreakable’ on the label, they are usually more flexible and less prone to breaking or cracking. The sound quality varies with the company, time of manufacture, and quality of materials. Records made during the war, when shellac was in short supply, are particularly variable. There is a single performance on each side, lasting up to around 3 minutes on a 10" record and 4.5 minutes on a 12" record. The grooves in these records are wider than those on LPs and 45s, and require a different kind of playback stylus. Sometimes records were issued in sets of from 3 to 6 discs, contained in a binder called an ‘album’—this is where the vernacular name later used for LPs has come from, where the entire contents of an album of 78 rpm records could be contained on a single microgroove disc that became known as an ‘album’.