s partan life
Spartan Magazine
Sounds of Yesteryear with Colin Hancock Huddled around a phonograph on a Sunday afternoon, six musicians pointed their horns, tenor banjo and bass saxophone into a 1906 Edison Standard B Phonograph and blared a hot jazz tune fiery enough to transport you to old New Orleans. It takes a special music producer to pull off a recording of this kind, one who knows the ins and outs of yesteryear’s sounds and one who has mastered the inner workings of a phonograph. Not just any phonograph, but one that plays and records wax cylinder records. These toilet paper tube-looking records predate the disc-shaped records most people know. Standing beside the phonograph, making sure the recording sounded precise, was 17-year-old music producer Colin Hancock. The teenager, who launched Semper Phonograph Company, has produced wax cylinder recordings for several of Austin’s old-timey bands. Hancock enjoys re-creating the music of eras gone by, music that he’s passionate about preserving, for a generation of music listeners who walk around with extensive music catalogs in their pockets. Hancock is methodical about his process and strives hard to make the recording sound as perfect as possible. He's a multi-instrumentalist but says he’s known as a trumpet kid at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, where he’s a junior. When Hancock was about 7 years old, he picked up one of his dad’s Bix Beiderbecke CDs and grew fascinated by the music of the 1920s influential jazz soloist. At 8, he had his first trumpet. By 10, he had discovered wax cylinder records from his dad’s jazz book. Hancock may be a teenager, but he leads the recording session with confidence, which is good, because when you’re working sans
electricity, you’ve got to get creative. Band mates stood close to the recording machine so it could capture the best sound quality possible, and they constantly adjusted — one step forward, another step back. The four-hour session required multiple takes; there’s no editing. Recording tunes such as “Kansas City Man Blues” or “Snake Rag” without electricity required sound waves to travel down the horn and funnel of the phonograph into a diaphragm where sound waves vibrated into a little needle, which cut grooves into the wax cylinder. When it comes to recording over a used wax cylinder, you have to put in a little elbow grease. Hancock shaves the wax cylinders to wipe away the recording grooves using a 1918 Dictaphone shaving machine. But 21st-century technology wasn’t ignored. When the band needed a stopwatch, Hancock turned to his trusty smartphone. He also used a device called an archivette to connect the phonograph to his laptop. Once songs downloaded, he listened with headphones and identified trouble spots. Hancock hopes to re-create and record music on 78s soon. He’d like to continue researching sound restoration as a hobby, but plans to study architecture in college. Jazz, for him, feels personal and has the power to soothe. “When I want to sit down and read a book or relax, I listen to the teens, ’20s or ’30s music,” Hancock said. “That’s the kind of music I want to listen to when I want to feel good. Even the blues makes me feel better. It just speaks to me.” — nancy flores, austin american-statesman reprinted with permission of the author, revised
photo Scan the QR Code in the photo on your smart phone to watch Hancock’s cylinder recording of St. Stephen’s Jazz Combo!
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