Biography
In an age of American popular music when ensemble directors routinely generated abundant recordings—issuing them variously under their own identities, borrowed names of actual colleagues, or entirely invented personas—Nathan Glantz directed the Nathan Glantz Orchestra. During the Roaring Twenties his ensemble ranked among New York City’s leading groups, which produced an extensive array of pseudonymous pressings that filled the earliest private libraries of jazz and dance discs. The Hollywood Dance Orchestra frequently consisted of Glantz’s musicians, while the Roy Collins Dance Orchestra, responsible for multiple successes, served as a shared alias for both Glantz and the Joseph Samuels Orchestra. The previous year the same two leaders had jointly assumed the identity of the Continental Dance Orchestra, before either recognized the marketing advantage of inventing a figure named Roy Collins.
Such customs appear alien beside contemporary industry norms, in which listeners would likely reject the notion of Kid Rock as a nonexistent front for recordings alternately credited to John Maher and Snoop Doggy Dogg. The underlying mechanism was nevertheless routine and rooted in label operations: a company would engage a “leader” solely to assemble personnel for a date and distribute payment. Successive sessions followed one another without pause; a trumpeter retained after a Glantz date might himself be contracted as leader for the next, only to engage Glantz on C-melody saxophone as a sideman. The resulting overlaps render documentation of many 1910s and 1920s ensembles nearly unattainable, a circumstance some admirers of less celebrity-driven later styles might ruefully imagine with envy.
Among the best-known releases issued directly under the Nathan Glantz Orchestra are the brooding “Ask Her When Shadows Fall” on Ajax, the charming “Dearie” on Champ, and the period Edison “Diamond Disk” “Sitting in a Corner.” Across every pseudonym, Glantz contributed saxophone parts to more than one hundred sessions from 1916 through 1927.
Such customs appear alien beside contemporary industry norms, in which listeners would likely reject the notion of Kid Rock as a nonexistent front for recordings alternately credited to John Maher and Snoop Doggy Dogg. The underlying mechanism was nevertheless routine and rooted in label operations: a company would engage a “leader” solely to assemble personnel for a date and distribute payment. Successive sessions followed one another without pause; a trumpeter retained after a Glantz date might himself be contracted as leader for the next, only to engage Glantz on C-melody saxophone as a sideman. The resulting overlaps render documentation of many 1910s and 1920s ensembles nearly unattainable, a circumstance some admirers of less celebrity-driven later styles might ruefully imagine with envy.
Among the best-known releases issued directly under the Nathan Glantz Orchestra are the brooding “Ask Her When Shadows Fall” on Ajax, the charming “Dearie” on Champ, and the period Edison “Diamond Disk” “Sitting in a Corner.” Across every pseudonym, Glantz contributed saxophone parts to more than one hundred sessions from 1916 through 1927.