"ORIGINS OF JAll"

As announced last month, the Decca organisation has revived its Vocalion label for the periodic issue of records especially for oldtime jazz enthusiasts, and the following titles are already available.

They are described as "Origins of Jazz." This is rather misleading. Jazz had its origins chiefly in the chants and percussion rhythms of the Africans and West Indians, and the folk music of France and Spain, all of which were taken to America by slaves and emigrants long before the gramophone came into existence; and well before the earliest of these Vocalions came to be recorded the origins had become more or less obliterated in the very music they had helped to create.

However, not only are all the records of some form or other of the early jazz that is known as "traditional" ; some of them also intentionally reveal much more noticeably than do most recordings of the music of the period some of the influences that went to create jazz.

This is likely to he the main attraction of some of them. For while those I have given three and four star ratings are good from any standpoint, those given lower rating have little but their historical interest—and some may think 75. 6d. rather much to pay for just that.