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Dan Levinson's ROOF GARDEN JASS BAND
The Roof Garden
Jass Band
CYLINDER RECORDINGS
Several years ago, antique specialist and genius sound engineer Peter Dilg brought his vintage cylinder recording equipment on location to a barn in Shelter Island, NY, and recorded the Roof Garden Jass Band, using 100-year-old wax cylinder blanks from the Edison National Historic Site. Now, though a revolutionary process recently developed in England, these two-minute cylinders are available in limited quantities to the public. More durable than wax, they are virtually indestructible and will last a lifetime with proper care and storage.
The following Roof Garden Jass Band titles are available:
Send $25.00 plus shipping and handling ($2.00 within the U.S., $4.00 to Canada, and $6.00 overseas) to:
Peter Dilg
906 Merrick Rd.
Baldwin, NY 11510
Or you may use Peter's PayPal account, verticalcut@earthlink.net.
Please note that these are CYLINDER recordings and must be played on a CYLINDER PLAYER. They were recorded using the same acoustic recording process that Thomas Edison used to record at his laboratory, many years before digital recording, stereo, hi-fi, and the electric recording process - these are mono and extremely LO-FI !
For more information, or for a listing of Wizard's complete catalogue of cylinder recordings, write Peter Dilg at
verticalcut@earthlink.net.
DAN LEVINSON'S ROOF GARDEN JASS BAND
In 1987, Dan Levinson (then a senior at New York University), organized a five-piece band for a concert celebrating the 70th anniversary of recorded jazz. The phenomenal success of that event inspired a repeat performance, across the continent, in the Roof Garden of Los Angeles' famous Variety Arts Center, from which the band took its name. Since then, the Roof Garden Jass Band has performed for jazz societies throughout the Northeast, as well as at the Tribute to Bix Beiderbecke Festival in Wisconsin, the Orange County Classic Jazz Festival in California, and Dick Hyman's Jazz in July Festival at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The band has also been an annual fixture at the Hot Steamed Jazz Festival in Essex, Connecticut since 1998.
Initially, the Roof Garden Jass Band's repertoire consisted solely of Dan's note-for-note "transcriptions" of records made by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the group that made the first jazz recordings in 1917. Over the years, however, Dan has expanded the band's repertoire to include the music of the Original Memphis Five, the Louisiana Five, the Frisco Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Georgians, and other "rag-a-jazz" bands active before King Oliver made his historic recordings in 1923. The Roof Garden Jass Band is the only band in existence devoted exclusively to this neglected era, a time when jazz—or "jass" as it was often called—still retained many elements of ragtime. In those evolutionary days, jazz bands played for dancers, and the music was almost entirely ensemble rather than a succession of instrumental solos.
The Roof Garden Jass Band's debut CD, Salutes the ODJB and the Beginning of Recorded Jazz, was released in 1998 on the Loup-garous label, followed by Blue Roses of Far and Near (2000) and Echoes in the Wax (2003), both released on the Stomp Off label.
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This page was created by Mike Maginot.