“Dancing In The Moonlight”
Jack Bund And His Bravour Dance Band
1933 (Parlophone R1463 mx Be 10176)
Jack Bund And His Bravour Dance Band – Dancing In The Moonlight
“Two Guitars”
Jack Bund And His Bravour Dance Band
1933 (Parlophone R1463 mx Be 10153)
Jack Bund And His Bravour Dance Band – The Two Guitars
So where to begin? I have a huge record collection and I have to pick out just one record as the very first to be featured on my brand new blog. I’ve decided to make “Dancing In The Moonlight” this blog’s debut recording simply because I think it is one of the more lighthearted recordings that I own. I acquired this record about a year ago and regular listeners of Radio Dismuke have probably heard both sides in its playlist.
My copy is a British pressing on Parlophone – the original release is on German Odeon titled “Tanz im Mondschein” by Hans Bund’s Bravour-Tanz Orchester. Perhaps they thought that the name Jack would sell more recordings in England than Hans.
“Tanz im Mondschein”/”Dancing In The Moonlight” is a nice example of novelty piano ragtime – a genre popularized in the United States in the early 1920s by Zez Confrey at the very tail end of the ragtime era. By the early 1930s the genre seemed to have enjoyed much greater popularity in Germany and Britain than it did in the US. The song’s composer, Eric Plessow (1899 – 1977) authored a number of popular German novelty piano compositions. He also composed under the pseudonym of Ewald Walter.
“The Two Guitars”/”Zwei Gitarren” is also a memorable recording with a nice Eastern European sort of sound to it.
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Between updates here, I will also be sending out recommendations and links to 78 rpm era recordings elsewhere on the Internet via my Twitter Account. My most recent tweets will also display in the “Recent Tweets” section on the right hand column of the screen.
I ENJOY ALL YOUR MUSIC’ KEEP IT COMING. REALY MISSED THE SOUND. THANKS MUCH.
Thanks!
Dismuke
Is there anyway, pleeaseeee, you can change the RAM format on the early stuff so it can be played on a CD? Things like Here comes my daddy now, and In a Chinky winky town, the teen stuff mostly.
Unfortunately, there really isn’t a practical way for me to do that. Redoing the audio files on the old site would be a HUGE project – there are well over 1,000 of them that were posted over the years.
I am told that there are software programs that can convert RealAudio files to other formats such as .mp3 or .wav. I don’t know the name of such programs because I have not had need for one – but several people have mentioned to me that they exist. If you can locate one you could save the old files you are interested in and do the conversion.
does real audio mean ram. format? Only the turn onthe century stuff seems to have this file format. I love those songs of vaudville days.
.ram is one of the extensions used on RealAudio files There are also .ra files
Back when I first started the site .ra files were the actual sound files and the .ram files were small text files that pointed to the .ra file containing the music. If you linked to the .ram file, it would cause the .ra file to stream in real time rather than download. That was important back then because people were still using 56 k and even 28 k modems so there was a a couple minute wait for even a low bit rate file to download. With RealAudio and .ram files, you could hear music within moments after you clicked on a selection with no wait.
Later on, RealAudio started making various changes to the format. At some point, whenever someone directly downloaded an .ra file to one’s computer the file extension ended up being automatically changed to .ram during the download process.
I THINK at some point RealAudio did away with .ra files and made everything .ram files. But I am not for sure because, at a certain point, I refused to upgrade the encoder I used to generate my RealAudio files because the new files were not backward compatible with people’s existing players – and thus would force listeners to have to upgrade their players as well. And the new players were rather obnoxious in terms of spamming you with ads and recommendations and trying to take over as the default player for virtually every form of media on people’s computers. So I always generated .ra files and linked to the .ram files which pointed to the .ra files.
Now, the Turn of the Century section you are talking about is the very earliest parts of the site – and the .ra files there are accessed differently than they are on the Hit of the Week pages. Go to my main Dismuke.org page and click on the link to the new location for the Virtual Talking Machine under the archived projects section (when I revamped the main page of the site yesterday, I forgot to include the link to the Virtual Talking Machine’s new location – but that has now been fixed). Under the main Virtual Talking Machine page you will see a section for download information with instructions on how to access the ra files. Of course, as you are probably aware, the audio files in the old Turn of the Century section have not been upgraded at all since they were first posted – long before I had any audio restoration equipment. So the sound quality of those files leaves much to be desired. I still have all the records – it is just a matter of locating them again in my collection which is VERY large and only partially organized. I don’t like to “recycle” content – but as I run across the records from the old Turn of the Century section, I will probably redigitize them and occasionally post them to the blog so people can hear them better with my new equipment. I won’t be upgrading the Virtual Talking Machine itself because, by this point, it is just an archive – so those pages will remain as they are, warts and all.
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