On 19/09/2012, Michael Shoshani wrote:
> Likely as not you'll get four different stories from six different
> people, and who knows which one is accurate.
>
> In "The Music Goes Round", Fred Gaisberg maintained that the EMI
> archive had metal parts and at least one pressing for every disc ever
> pressed since 1908 or so, and that earlier matrices that were held by
> Deutsche Grammophon had been repatriated right before the second World
> War.
>
> (DG was the German arm of His Master's Voice, but was nationalized
> during WW I and HMV lost possession of whatever masters were still
> held by their original pressing plant in Hannover.)
>
> However, I made a telephone call to EMI in Manchester Square back
> around 1993 or so, when an overseas call was still a Big Deal. The
> gentleman in the archives with whom I spoke told me that EMI had, in
> fact, never gotten back its early masters and at that point was in a
> program with BMG to have new metal parts grown from whatever BMG still
> held from the acoustic era that had originated with HMV, to help fill
> out the missing pieces. EMI was likewise growing and sending copy
> parts from their holdings to fill gaps in BMG's vaults.
>
> I'd called to find out what might be available on CD by Jack Hylton.
> Not much, I was told, because "we don't actually have much from that
> era". When I expressed surprise, that's when he clarified that he
> meant they didn't have much from that era in digital form, but they
> had all the metal parts. Then he volunteered the above information
> concerning their holding of mothers, matrices, and other shells.
>
There might be an opportunity here for somebody to license the material
and produce some high quality CDs from original parts.
Just about all the available CDs of Jack Hylton, Ambrose, etc derive
from commercial pressings.
Regards
--
Don Cox
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