Recording ban
The recording ban (in German something like: recording ban ) was a boycott measure of US musicians union against the music industry , which is about one in its impact strike equaled. The union announced the recording ban on August 1, 1942; it was partially in force until November 1944. The action was also called Petrillo ban after the chairman of the musicians' union .
prehistory
Since the 1930s at the latest, one can speak of a fully developed music industry in the USA ; It is this new industrial production of popular music that Theodor W. Adorno polemicizes against in his 1936 essay On Jazz .
Although the sale of records was already making huge sums of money for the industry in the late 1930s, the working conditions of the instrumentalists who made the music were largely still extremely precarious. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), commonly referred to as the Musicians' Union , endeavored to remedy this condition.
The entertainment industry has been in a difficult position since the United States entered World War II in late 1941. On the one hand, rationing - for example, shellac as a raw material for records - and special levies endangered the smoothly functioning processes, on the other hand, the Roosevelt government expected peace on the "home front". In addition, as in the warring states of Europe, it demanded a certain propaganda contribution from the entertainment industry to support its own political action.
Goal setting
The president of the AFM, James Caesar Petrillo (1892-1984), who had been chairman of the musicians' union since June 1940, saw the opportunity in the summer of 1942 to put the four major record labels in the United States under pressure. So far, the “Big Four” ( Columbia , Decca , Capitol and Victor ) have always been able to use their dominant position to their own advantage.
In addition to the factors already mentioned, a decisive point was that, due to conscription for military service, the almost immeasurable number of competent instrumentalists in peacetime had suddenly melted down drastically. Petrillo was suddenly able to act as the top lobbyist of a small group of highly specialized professionals.
_(LOC)_(5104556613).jpg)
The union chairman had enough political instinct to make a very easy to communicate and integrative demand the goal of his activities: he demanded a guaranteed minimum wage from the major labels for the instrumental musicians involved in a recording. When the company management unanimously rejected this, Petrillo forbade the members of his union from participating in admissions meetings with effect from August 1, 1942.
Exceptions and "Strikebreakers"
The recording ban was not fully enforced. This was partly due to another political move by Petrillo, and partly to the fate of the record industry, which took advantage of a loophole in the union's system. The record companies soon found alternatives to the professional musicians' strike, e.g. B. old recordings again brought out as singles, such as the inclusion All or Nothing at All by Frank Sinatra with the Harry James Orchestra in 1939, which sold within two months of one million copies.
Singer
In contrast to instrumental musicians, vocalists were not dependent on membership in the AFM in order to be able to accept professional engagements. The record labels made use of this fact: since American music already has a rich tradition of a cappella styles, such as the well-known barbershop , the music industry began on a large scale, pure vocal ensembles - for example in the style of the Andrews Sisters - under contract to take. The boycott did not affect the success of vocal soloists like Frank Sinatra : the instrumental accompaniment of record productions was replaced by a (mostly small) choir . Since popular music almost always puts ( song ) singing in the foreground anyway , the general public enthusiastically embraced these productions as a new trend. Most of the listeners did not find the lack of instrumental accompaniment a loss at first.
The V-Discs
Petrillo's move was related to the importance the music industry had on the propaganda apparatus of the warring nations. After more than a year of consistently maintaining the recording ban , Petrillo complied with the request of George Robert Vincent , a pioneer of sound recording and a lieutenant in the American army at the time . On October 27, 1943, the union allowed its members to attend recording sessions for the newly formed V-Disc label . The "V" stands for victory and already indicates that the records from this company were only allowed to be given to members of the military. The free sale of V-Discs in the United States was expressly prohibited.
End of the boycott
While the beginning of the recording ban can be dated very precisely, there are different views of its end. While the smaller, independent record companies had initially come to an agreement with the AFM, Capitol and Decca, under the impression of Petrillo's consistent approach, followed the AFM's demands bit by bit over the course of the summer of 1943. The other two labels, RCA-Victor and Columbia , maintained the confrontation much longer, but by November 1944 they too had reached an agreement, in some cases tacitly, with union representatives.
consequences
The recording ban is generally considered to be the end point of the swing era. The loss of income from record sales, however, was only one of several factors that led to the death of the organizationally and financially rather expensive big bands (the typical line-up for this genre).
The small bands that developed the new bebop jazz style were not considered to be dancing or entertainment bands and neither were they in their self-image, which is why the club owners were not charged with the war-related special fees when they were young musicians like Dizzy Gillespie , Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk with their jazz combos .
The recording ban , which in a certain sense only created the space for this new musical language, has had a very negative effect on musicology to this day, in that bebop - in contrast to all other jazz styles - practically at all in its development phase is not documented on phonograms. V-Disc was not interested in this pronounced non-commercial style, so a few private and technically very inadequate live recordings from “Minton's Playhouse” and “Monroe's Uptown House” are considered significant points of reference in terms of music history.
The temporary weakening of the position of the big labels caused by the recording ban enabled an intermittent boom of small, independent record companies in the mid to late 1940s. This resulted in countless productions of “specialized”, less widespread music, including not only modern jazz, but also klezmer and bluegrass .
James C. Petrillo initiated another admission boycott in 1948 in the struggle for appropriate fees, which had already been indicated in the summer of 1947. Ten years later he resigned from his position as union chairman and was involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s for the abolition of racial segregation in the music business.
Remarks
- ↑ for a summary see Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, Immanuel Ness (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History. ME Sharpe, New York City, NY 2009, pp. 679f.
- ↑ see short biography in William H. Young, Nancy K. Young: Music of the World War II Era. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 2008, p. 95.
- ↑ Christopher N. Sterling, John Michael Kittross: Stay Tuned. A History of American Broadcasting. 3. Edition. Taylor & Francis E-Library, 2009, p. 257.
- ↑ Diskers Will Bide Time. Petrillo's Ban on Disc for Coin Phonos is Seen as Trial Balloon for Better Disc Take. In: Billboard. Edition of June 20, 1942, p. 62.
- ↑ Compare on this Tim J. Anderson: Making Easy Listening. Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota 2006, p. 196.
- ^ The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book. 5th Annual Edition . Edited by The Billboard , 1943, p. 81.
- ^ William H. Young, Kathy K. Young: World War II And the Postwar Years in America. A Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara / California 2010, pp. 39-41.
- ↑ Jack Behrens: Big Band And Great Ballrooms. America is Dancing Again. Author House, Bloomington / Indiana 2006, pp. 69-71.
- ^ DeVeaux, Scott Knowles: The Birth of BeBop. A Social and Musical History. University of California Press, Berkeley, California 1997, pp. 295-297.
- ↑ Whither Disc Biz, Petrillo? In: Billboard. Edition of July 26, 1947, p. 17.
literature
- Frank Alkyer, John McDonough: Down Beat. Sixty Years Of Jazz . Hal Leonard, Milwaukee 1996, ISBN 0-7935-3491-7 . (including some contemporary magazine articles on the topic that do not necessarily strive for objectivity)
- Ira Gitler: Jazz Masters of the Forties . Macmillan, New York 1966.
- Ekkehard Jost: Social history of jazz . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-86150-472-3 .
- Gunther Schuller: The Swing Era. The development of jazz 1930-1945 . Oxford University Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-19-507140-9 .
- Scott DeVeaux: Bebop and the Recording Industry: The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered. In: Journal of the American Musicological Society. Volume 41, 1988, pp. 126-165.
