Re: Welte Restoration Project
By Rob DeLand
Stacey,
I'm glad you brought up Welte rolls to the AMI list! A few weeks ago I posted re. my enthusiasm on this subject. I'm really awestruck by the number of interesting, early recordings made for Welte, and have started looking for some of these exceptional originals to recut.
I have been recutting rolls under the BluesTone name for 7 or 8 years now, mostly ragtime & blues 88-note rolls. Since last year I've added Ampico, Duo-Art and Welte rolls to my lists. I recently issued my 1995 recut list with 27 excellent Welte popular performances which had previously been made available by Mike Schwimmer. At this time I can only offer recuts in the standard 9-to-the-inch 11-1/4" format, and I don't know of anyone who is reissuing red rolls other than hand-cut: Mike Kitner and Claes Friberg come to mind. (BTW, please pardon the blatent self-promotion!)
A Chicago-area friend has 150 red rolls, of which 45 or so were never issued in licensee format. I selected 11 of these and am having them recut as licensee rolls. I have no idea how well they'll sell, but I'm really just interested in preserving the performances, making them available to myself & others, and not losing my shirt in the process!
I wonder if you or anyone else on the list has red rolls which may be suitable recutting candidates? If you are interested, you could send me a list of roll numbers, and I'd look them up & let you know if they're unique to red rolls. If they were issued on licensee, I'd just as soon look for the material from a licensee roll to recut. You're of course under no obligation to loan any red rolls to me; I'm still curious, even if you don't want to let the rolls out of your sight! Anybody else?...
Of course this topic should not be limited to rolls. We should discuss machines, vintage & current literature availability, and so on. Has anyone here heard of the current status of Hans Schmitz' efforts in Germany? He is supposed to be working on another outstanding book on Welte, and I've found him in the liner notes of several excellent Welte CD's, including one of Mahler that I found while browsing a record store.
That reminds me of another interesting subject - the Mahler CD liner notes showed photos of an original Welte recording machine. I got the story from Wayne Stahnke that this machine may still exist (to make a long story short) in Switzerland.
There, have I dropped enough names & subjects to get this topic moving?!!
;-)
[ for those of you who are new to the net, that
[ thing on the previous line is a wink and a smile!
Cheers,
Rob DeLand
(deland_robert@macmail1.csg.mot.com) |
(Message sent Thu 26 Oct 1995, 20:13:28 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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