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Imperial
Marimba Band
The Blue and White Marimba Band, latest Columbia Artists,
have been the elect musical sensation of New York's
social season. Besides appearing all winter in the Hippodrome,
these musicians have played in the private homes of
practically the Blue List of New York's "400".
Their musical gifts are now offered [to] the public
through their first Columbia recordings.
Columbia
Records catalog (1916). Gerhardt Collection
The
performance of the Blue and White Marimba Band of Guatemala
at New York City’s Hippodrome in 1916 was the spark
that ignited America’s new interest in the music
of Guatemalan Marimba Bands. That concert quickly led
to recordings by the group for both Columbia and Victor.
Performances by the Cardenas Marimba Band and the Royal
Marimba Band appeared on the Columbia label. The latter
group featured another great mallet player, Celso Hurtado,
who also recorded for Victor with the Hurtado Brothers
Royal Marimba Band. Soon excellent ensembles from Guatemalan
and Mexican were touring America, performing at expositions
and in vaudeville theatres. By 1919, the popularity
of these groups and their recordings had begun to wane.
In 1917, the Edison Company issued their first four-minute
Blue Amberol cylinder marimba recording, A Garden
Dance (#3557), performed by an ensemble calling
itself Imperial Marimba Band. They quickly released
an Edison disc recording of Blue Danube Waltz and
The Messenger Boy March (#50413). The marimbas
on these recordings have the buzzing sound that is typical
of Guatemalan marimbas, although later performances
of the “Imperial Marimba Band” on the Edison
label were apparently recorded by a different ensemble
containing a piano, saxophone, xylophone, and a marimba
without the buzzing membranes.
While the personnel of the Imperial Marimba Band is
uncertain, the earliest recordings were probably made
by musicians from Mexico or Guatemala. William Cahn
thinks it is likely that later recordings by the ensemble
calling itself the Imperial Marimba Band probably included
George Hamilton Green, Joseph Green, and possibly William
Dorn and Harry A. Yerkes.
The Gerhardt Collection includes eight Edison Blue Amberol
cylinder recordings by the Imperial Marimba Band, including
recordings from 1917 of Blue Danube Waltz (#3136)
and The Messenger Boy March (#3104) that had
also been sold in disc format. William Cahn reminds
us that, when the Edison Company began to produce discs
in 1912, the same recording sessions were frequently
used to simultaneously make both the Edison Diamond
Discs and the Edison Blue Amberol cylinders.
Marimba
Centro-Americana
This
information is taken from William Cahn, The Xylophone
in Acoustic Recordings (1877 to 1929). Bloomfield,
NY: Cahn Publishing, 1996.
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