Transferring Early Bebop 78 rpm Records

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">Charlie Parker performs at the Three Deuces jazz club in New York City, 1947.</div>

In the mid-'40s, a new generation of musicians heralded the arrival of bebop. Here’s why some of the most exciting jazz performances ever recorded still don’t sound good, and how we might be able to fix it.

In the long and vast history of jazz, Charlie Parker stands as one of its giants. The saxophonist, known as “Bird,” along with trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie helped invent bebop in the middle '40s, forever altering the musical language of jazz.

A music characterized by fast and complex playing by small groups (in many ways unlike the big band swing era that preceded it), bebop’s recorded legacy was truncated by the American Federation of Musicians ban, waged by its infamous president, James C. Petrillo. Petrillo wanted the record companies to pay royalties, and when they didn’t comply he enforced a ban on recording for all union musicians, starting July 31, 1942. For this, Petrillo was lambasted from every conceivable corner of the entertainment business. The halt on recording dragged on – in September 1943, Decca and Capitol Records agreed to pay royalties. Over two years after it began, in November 1944, the Victor and Columbia labels likewise capitulated. Looking at the record sales evidence today, it shows that the labels themselves weren’t very affected by the ban. In fact, due to the need for product to push, they scoured their vaults and ended up inventing the compilation album in the process. But a certain musical damage entailed – the earliest bebop music was simply never recorded.

While this new music was developing and flourishing at Minton’s Playhouse, its beginnings forever evaded the recording studio. When recording did resume, Parker and Gillespie, along with the genre’s other great movers and shakers – luminaries such as Dexter Gordon, Erroll Garner, and Max Roach – started cutting sessions at Savoy Records. Herman Lubinsky, a middle-aged no-nonsense radio repairman, founded Savoy in 1942. Lubinsky managed to get a few records released before the ban, and once it was enacted he recorded musicians under pseudonyms in attempts to sidestep it. One of his A&R men, Teddy Reig, was a regular at many New York City jazz clubs. Hired in early 1945, right after the ban was lifted, Reig befriended up-and-coming artists and brought them into various studios to record for Savoy.

As exhilarating as early bebop performances are, the modern ear is quick to notice sonic shortcomings. Savoy didn’t feature the best recording fidelity at the time. This isn’t to say they’re bad recordings – only that the engineering know-how and older analog equipment in use at a smaller label couldn’t compare to the majors. It’s regrettable that Charlie Parker never received the fidelity on records that his virtuosity deserved. But in the modern era, another problem compounds the early Savoy sides’ sonics – what labels now use as the source material. Music historian Frank Kofsky claimed that Lubinsky, a famous cheapskate, had “a scarcely disguised disdain for black art” ( see 1. below ) and an unwillingness to understand much of the music his own record label recorded. Like many record companies’ masters, unfortunately Savoy’s no longer exist. It’s not known what happened to the metal parts, only that: One, they were once transferred to tape, and: Two, their owner was a hard line businessman who was shortsighted, indifferent, or perhaps even animus to the revolutionary music that surrounded him.

Because of those factors, today, the sound of these recordings exist in limbo. When the master source is missing, the true fidelity – however good or bad in the first place – is forever obscured, to some degree. The Savoy catalog was purchased by Concord Music Group in 2019. The Savoy disc masters were transferred to tape in the early '50s for the production of five 10-inch compilation LPs covering the label’s early history – and CMG’s Craft Recordings have recently reissued that very set of LPs. A re-release in the truest sense, Craft maintained their original title ( The Birth of Bop ) and they even feature jackets with the exact same cover art. As the disc masters can’t be located, those disc-to-tape transfers, performed over 70 years ago, have been the sources used for almost every reissue, boxset, or repackaging of Savoy recordings since, including this release. It appears Mosaic Records’ Classic Savoy Be-Bop Sessions 1945-49 compilation was sourced from commercial pressings, although per industry standard licensing agreements (and their intention of being limited editions) this mastering unfortunately isn’t accessible digitally – such as on streaming services – and is out of print on CD.

Disc transfer and the instrument that made it feasible, the modern phono cartridge, were in their infancy in the early '50s. Early in this decade, magnetic tape – with some hesitancy at first – replaced disc recording as the primary format in professional recording studios. In the Victor Recording Manual from 1940, the most comprehensive surviving technical document from the 78 rpm era (credit to the late Ray Rayburn for saving it), Victor’s engineers term disc transfer “Re-recording From Records,” depicting it as “[an] operation [that] represents such a diversity of problems and a wide variance of operating conditions…” a statement that painfully rings true a staggering eight decades later. Groove size, disc speed, playback emphasis curves, off-centeredness, and pressing material vary widely between the discs known as “78s,” the dominant format for recorded music from the 1890s to the 1950s.

In order to make a great disc transfer, the engineer must keep track of all of these variables and have the tools, both on the analog side (different styli shapes and sizes, various record cleaning fluids) and digital too (repair-oriented DAWs) to deal with those “diversity of problems'.' The later convergence of tape recording, improved lathe motors, the RIAA curve, and the scale production of vinyl alleviated most of these differences.

The Savoy recordings present a strange dichotomy: What sounds better? A 70-year old tape transfer of a master disc source, or a modern transfer of the original commercial pressing. Another caveat lurks: because the Second World War cut off access to India (where high-quality shellac could be imported) records made especially during and sometimes after the war suffer from poor, gritty, and noisy surfaces. Unfortunately, Savoy’s commercial pressings were pressed from that era’s poor stock. For the curious, this is the same problem that exists with the Paramount blues recordings: Missing metal parts, poor record surfaces, and a recording fidelity that is decent but unfortunately not as great as it could’ve been.

The question still remains: Can reference grade transfer and restoration of a grainy shellac 78 really surpass the transparency of the master source when that transfer is decades old and has another analog step?

To find out, I found a pressing of one of the headlining tunes of the whole box set – Tiny Grimes’ “Romance Without Finance,” featuring Charlie Parker on sax – and got to work. As this track was left off the Mosaic release, no modern mastering from a disc source exists. After a scrub with distilled Disc Doctor fluid, vacuum cleaning, and the same process with distilled water for rinsing, I placed the disc on the rubber mat, elevated above the spindle of my turntable; a Technics direct drive. For this transfer, I first centered the disc by knocking the edge until no lateral motion was observed when the tonearm was lowered onto the record surface. I used a 2.8 mil elliptical stylus, which sounded best, and transferred with a flat frequency response.

As I had a stereo transfer, and needed to get to mono, I created a sum-and-difference mix that canceled out some of the noise and damage. For those who make mid/side recordings, this is the inverse function and is much better than a simple summing of the two channels. To do this, the engineer must use a DAW to split the interleaved file into two mono channels (which in this case are the left and right groove walls), mute the stereo, and pan the two mono tracks center. Name them to avoid confusion. Duplicate the worst sounding channel and mute it. Invert the polarity of the original of the duplicated track and change the level until the least amount of music is audible. At this point, we are canceling out the most vertical modulation and are listening to what disc transfer engineers call the “null signal.” When the duplicated channel is unmuted, the signal we just heard will cancel out, leaving not only less noise and damage, but also a theoretical 3 dB signal-to-noise ratio improvement. This simple process can virtually eliminate damage present on only one groove wall by replacing it with information on the other.

The sum and difference mix helped this disc out a lot. I then applied a 500 Hz Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) bass emphasis curve (which sounded appropriate) by using a Nyquist prompt with enterable biquadratic equations required to closely replicate analog, which for bass relates to the restoring spring of the cutterhead. Thanks to my friend Dustin Wittmann for collecting a document of these equations (see 2. below for link), which can easily be copied and pasted.

The disc had quite a grainy surface, so I knew I had to use CEDAR for initial declicking. In my opinion, CEDAR is the best restoration software available, although most software can work well as long as the engineer is careful and doesn’t overuse it. I own some CEDAR declicking, but I don’t own their top of the line version, so I called in a friend for some assistance. Seth Winner – whose studios bearing his name have done exceptional work (especially for recordings by the great maestro Arturo Toscanini) – was able to help me process this recording. To summarize: Seth used a declick module in CEDAR’s Sadie system to get the disc sounding a lot cleaner. To my ears, it seemed to put the air back in the studio that was obscured by the disc’s poor surface. I then manually removed around 50 more clicks using iZotope RX’s Interpolate tool. Seth used a light pass of CEDAR’s NR-5 noise reduction to cut back on noise. I then applied a high end curve, took out some rumble using RX's Spectral De-noise module, and then did a bit of EQ'ing at the low frequencies.

The result is, of course, noisier than the tape transfer from metal parts. It’s also complete, which strangely can’t be said for the tape, where somehow the ending was cut off. In my opinion, Seth and I were able to achieve something that’s more musically transparent, closer to, and does more justice to the original performance than any previous release. Most importantly, what do you think?

To be clear, this isn’t a drag on Savoy, CMG/Craft, or the many great engineers who were occasionally tasked to return to the tape sources as digital restoration improved. Some of them I’ve gotten acquainted with, and I admire their perseverance in dealing with such difficulties. What I’m writing is plainly a cautionary tale: When a master source is missing, it should be imperative to correctly identify the best source possible and begin working from it only. All these years later – with powerful tools such as CEDAR and iZotope RX at the engineer’s side – don’t count anything out.

1. Frank Kofsky, Black Music, White Business

2.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PtUPwUjSnOGTgrhcB-NJH5and5KLBht_HbmThYnr7rM/edit#gid=0

Dylan Utz is a disc transfer and restoration engineer based in Maryland. youtube.com/@dylan78rpm