A Sergeant Pepper’s before there was one

The technology for stereo sound was invented in the 1930s. No one used it much. It was partly that the equipment, both to record and play back stereo, was expensive. But mostly, no one saw much point in stereo music. The first stereo LPs came out in the mid-1950s, and they were all of sound effects. Trains, were popular. You could hear them steam in from the left, pass with a loud whoosh, and then fade out to the right. Novelty stuff.

2020-sleeve Then this LP appeared. It was the idea of Enoch Light, a veteran American band leader. A skilled an imaginative musician, he decided to make music crafted specifically for the medium of stereo. Persuasive Percussion was built around the work of jazz drummer and vibraphonist Terry Snyder, who had played with Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and other swing legends.

Greg Milner tells the story in his fabulous history of recorded sound Perfecting Sound Forever:

Most of the songs on the album were well known standards … But the album was recorded and mastered with such care and the stereo effect was so dramatic , that is was unlike anything most people had ever heard … Even the album’s packaging made it seem like special …an abstract pattern of black dots designed by the painter Josef Albers … Persuasive Percussion was like a concept album, with the “concept” being your hi-fi … a Sergeant Pepper’s (before there was one).

Persuasive Percussion was a huge hit. It millions of copies, and paved the way for stereo to become the dominant format for recorded music. This was not always such a good thing: mono sound works perfectly well for most music and there was some naff use of stereo effects over the years. A lot of excellent mono recordings were also “split” for stereo editions. Like the mass shift of the vinyl back catalogue to CD in the 1990s, the reformatting was often hasty and carelessly done, actually diminishing sound quality.

The thing about Persuasive Percussion is that Enoch Light had a concept and patience and care, and Snyder and the other musicians on the album got the concept, and had the skill to execute. The result is a delight.

This is my favorite track on the album, a reworking of the Cole Porter tune “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. Worth putting on a pair of headphones and turning up the volume for this one.