Before The Wrecking Crew & Funk Brothers Were 'The Victor Co. Players'

If you're a music fan, you've likely read the stories of 'The Wrecking Crew' and/or their Motown Records counterpart 'The Funk Brothers'. These incredible collectives of musicians put their mark on the music industry from the 1950s to the 1970s - outputting a large portion of hit records of the era from bands like The Monkees, Sonny & Cher, The Beach Boys, The Temptations, The Jackson 5 and countless others. There is, however, one great story of the record industry that has yet to be told - and that is the story of The Victor Co. Players.

Formation:

The Victor Co. Players were formed (like The Funk Brothers and The Wrecking Crew) as a collective of musicians based in the Camden, NJ/Philadelphia/New York Area whose services were employed for thousands of Victor Studio recordings between 1901 and the modern day. Created by the Victor Talking Machine Co. for the legendary Victor record label (among others) - their formation shows the degree that Victor understood (very early) that the key to selling their disk records and record players was ‘content’ (in this case, music) …they needed a steady stream of new records and music to make sure the public kept interested in the reasonably new home entertainment industry - and the Victor Co Players would be integral to what we now call ‘artist development’ - or ‘project development’. Internally, ‘The Victor Co. Players’ was a name given to the growing pool of studio session musicians on not just ‘Victor’ developed projects - but often times on larger recording stars that utilized union musicians for live shows - and thus didn’t have their own ‘band’ per se for recording. A very early example of this would be ‘The Great Caruso’, whom often DID have a pianist but had to be supplemented by The Victor Co. Players when making some records that required a ‘fuller’ sound from the early recording superstar.

The individual musicians were (often) not publicly recognized in their era (like The Wrecking Crew, and The Funk Brothers), and the collective were often credited with names like ‘The Victor Recording Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Symphony Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Band’, ‘The Victor Saloon Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Dance Band’, and various other iterations…dependent on the ‘players’ hired for whatever the particular project may be. These musicians and recordings are viewed with a high level of reverence by music industry insiders - and today, The Victor Co. Players are considered one of the most successful and prolific session recording units in music history.

Their story has never been told…till now.

Earliest Sessions:

The first true recording session for the Victor Talking Machine Co’s collective studio band was at Victor Studio in Philadelphia in 1901. This studio (the world’s first dedicated commercial disc recording studio) had been the site of Victor’s predecessor ‘The Gramophone Co.’ - founded by Emile Berliner in 1895. By 1900, a combination of Emile Berliner’s inventions (the microphone, disc record, and record player) and Eldridge R Johnson’s manufacturing businesses created The Victor Talking Machine Co. - and subsequently Victor Records (and Victor Studio). The firm was hell bent on establishing the new invention as a home entertainment device and so they went to work on building out ‘content’ for the the record player - which they called ‘The Gramophone’ (record player…and later utilized the brand name ‘Victrola®’) Making records was very much part of an industrial process back at the spark of the recording industry and it required a know how of a vast number of concepts that would be foreign to many recording engineers of the modern age. Sound travelled to a large 4” thick special blend wax diamond polished disk in the recording studio via a large ‘acoustic horn’ (acoustic microphone) and a complex diaphragm (the forerunner of modern condenser microphones) while a series of carefully and expertly weighted pulleys brought the turntable up to a consistent speed fast enough for ETCHING the sound to disk in REAL TIME. This system would exist from the late 1800s until much of the 1950s when tape recording fully took over the market (tape recording was not, as popularly believed, introduced in the late 1940s. Tape recording began as early as 1927 in commercial recording studios - but it still wasn’t as efficient as direct to disk recording for several decades).

This began many decades of studio recording for The Victor Co. Players whom would move with Victor Talking Machine Co. across the river to Camden, NJ when Victor closed the then obsolete Philadelphia recording studio down in 1907. The local musicians would work between Victor Buildings #15, #2, and #22 (expanding to 4 recording studios total in the Victor Camden Plant by 1925) and the Victor Studios established in New York City - often traveling to and from multiple sessions in the same day at different Victor Studios to keep up with the hectic schedule of recording. Soon, The Victor Talking Machine Co. would expand its Camden Plant to include facilities for employees (and The Victor Co. Player's use); A hospital, daycare, The Victor LunchClub, Victor Family Store, Johnson Park, and a slew of beautiful rehearsal rooms were all at the disposal of The Victor Co. Players during recording sessions, making the experience as seamless as possible in order to facilitate a never ending stream of recording sessions during the first 40 years of the recording industry in Camden & New York.

The Recording Process:

Victor Studio in Camden NJ; Nat Shilkret (A Victor Musical Director) sits center prior to a session in Bldg. 15 (demolished 1973)

Ahead of a recording session, Victor's musical directors were in charge of organizing The Victor Co. Players and they were often tasked with arranging and selecting music for any/all incoming guest or primary artist(s) (many times in collaboration with the artist). This meant that what was then called a 'Musical Director' - a term the early music industry adopted from theatre - was (at that point) some part 'Record Producer' and some part 'A&R man'…eventually The Victor Company began to form ‘A&R Committees’ to approve of the selections that PRODUCERS would make for artists coming into the studio. Many of Victor's earliest record producers (musical directors) had backgrounds in theatre, opera, or classical music of the era and thus carefully selected musicians that had been working in the musical accompaniment of these establishments throughout the Philadelphia/Camden area. It was uncommon for musicians to come from above the Princeton, New Jersey area even for New York recording sessions (at least until the late 1930s); The Victor Co. Players had a very select group of musicians that had to be excellent executors of the often very complex arrangements that early record producers created to accompany early recording stars like Caruso, John Phillip Sousa, Henry Burr, George Cohan, Al Jolson, Melba, John McCormick and more. To pad out the record catalog, Victor Records would often record entire projects utilizing Victor Co. Players - billing them under various 'Victor' names. This is some of the earliest record label artist and product development - these weren't projects that would exist without The Victor Co. creating them for their catalog...a model that Motown would later embrace in creating groups and albums from scratch utilizing their in-house writers, producers, and studio musicians; 'The Funk Brothers'.

The Victor Co. Players make up the hard majority of the musicians on George Gershwin’s famous ‘An American In Paris’ and ‘Rhapsody In Blue’, but you can bet they didn’t receive royalties like this from either record.

It is important to keep in mind that The Victor Co. Players had very little rehearsal (often just a few takes prior to the final recording session - more complex pieces for more famous victor artists might receive some level of rehearsal in the days prior in Building 15s rehearsal complex). Each musician had to be top-notch and excellent at sight reading mostly hand notated music scores OR musical enough that their playing was accepted alongside the rest of the musicians, the primary artist, and/or the Musical Director (record producer). Needless to say, this was a high stress gig for these musicians - but it paid well enough; from 1901, The Victor Co. Players would receive an average of $40-$60 (in modern adjusted 2020 money value) per side (not per day) - meanwhile a primary 'non star' Victor Co. vocalist/performer could receive what amounts to around $100-120 per side (often making around 5-25 sides (single songs) in 1-5 days at the discretion of the A&R department's needs. This meant if you were a Victor Co. Player in 1907, you could have made on average an additional $9,000-$20,000+ in revenue per year on top of your theatre and touring gigs. Not a bad addition to a working musicians life at that time - an era which had only seen the concept of recording enter the sphere of income streams just 10 years earlier. By the 1940s, musicians unions rose to keep the session fee amounts (which had risen in parallel to the natural inflation that occurred in the 40 years prior) linked to the spending value of the dollar. Many primary artists and 'stars' of Victor Records were given a royalty per record sold - the first time this practice occurred in the music industry. None the less, like studio collectives of The Wrecking Crew, and The Funk Brothers - Victor did not extend this courtesy to its session musicians - owing to the idea that session musicians conduct the execution of a predetermined musical work (the work of producers and musical directors). This practice continues to the modern age for session musicians -and often extends to other creative industry businesses like animators, copywriters, and extra work for films. The life of a session musician was never one of overt glory but it was, and often remains, one of greater consistency.

Masters Of Pop

The Victor Co. often assigned touring bands to artists that needed them….billing them as ‘_________and The Victor Recording Orchestra’

Over the years, the musicians would cut thousands and thousands of records which would be released under such musical amalgamations like the Victor Concert Orchestra, Victor Light Opera Company, Victor Orchestra, Victor Mixed Chorus, The Victor Military Band, The Victor Recording Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Symphony Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Band’, ‘The Victor Saloon Orchestra’, ‘The Victor Dance Band’ and more. Harry MacDonough, a Victor executive, a gifted singer and early Victor Co. Player was drafted to record in many of these groups. MacDonough would later recall “For many years, I sang solos, duets, trios, quartets and ensemble records such as the Victor Male Chorus, The Victor Trinity Choir, The Victor Mixed Chorus, and The Victor Light Opera Company. In fact, I was mixed up with almost every combination in the Victor Records catalog, besides picking artists and selections for them to do.”. All in all, he recorded just over 1500 recordings in Camden as a member of The Victor Co. players. Almost all of these musicians were locals to the Philadelphia and Camden areas, but many of their names were not credited on the Victor label unless the musicians were soloists, much like their later Motown and Wrecking Crew counterparts.

Throughout the years, the Victor Co. Players would evolve from a pool of around 25 musicians in 1901 to over 150 by the late 1920s. This would come in part due to the genre blending that occurred between these eras. In the early days of the Victor Co. Players - orchestral, popular, and opera were popular sellers for Victor Records and so the musicians recruited had backgrounds in such styles. As the Blues, Country, and Jazz entered the world, The Victor Co. Players kept up by recruiting now legendary musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Tommy Dorsey, Earl Hines, Eddie Lang (The Father Of Jazz Guitar), Pee Wee Russell, Joe Venuti, Paul Whiteman, Steve Brown to the band - Through the years, The Victor Co's players would act often as a jumping point for musicians into their own recording contracts with Victor Records (or other record labels of the time).

The Victor Co. Players would go on to be the studio band on an incredible body of work that includes such diverse music as George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody In Blue’, the first recorded blues music, “Memphis Blues”, “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary”, Enrico Caruso’s “Vesti La Giubba”, and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind”, Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White’, ‘Fantasia’….and THOUSANDS more (really, its…almost too many to type…but we’ll eventually do a full overview).

Through the 1940s and 50s, as recording companies began recording more and more artists with their own studio bands, The Victor Co. Players (which was then being credited as The RCA-Victor Band, The Victor Orchestra, The Victor Symphony, The RCA-Victor Symphony) were being employed less and less for pop sessions - while classical sessions became a focus of what became RCA-Victor Records. By the 1960s, The Victor Co. Players went gradually dormant as the music industry changed - and as then owners of Victor, The RCA Corporation, was less and less focused on the music industry.

The Victor Co. Players are still utilized for recording projects, shows, and as the house musical collective at Victor Bldg. 19/The Victor Vault - a performing arts center/visitors center for The Victor Co. opened in 2015. Musician/Producer and Victor CEO Graham Alexander tours as Graham Alexander & Co. - utilizing The Victor Co. Players as his live band.

For years, re-issues of classic recordings by The Victor Co. Players (under all sorts of names) were re-issued and featured in media (we even have UNRELEASED) material in the Victor Vault…to this day (if that gives you any idea of how MUCH the collective recorded). In many ways, The Victor Co. players are the band everyones heard but nobody knows they’re hearing; and THAT is really the point. The years went by and in 2011 as The Victor Talking Machine Co. changed hands and the new directors of the company decided they needed a production crew to back touring artists, complete recording work, and develop new solo artists/projects in the modern era. The Victor Co. Players® were then officially revived and returned to duty after a many year absence. Today, the crew remains about 25+ cast members strong including several directors of the company itself (who are all musicians, unlike most of their historic counterparts)…Since 2015, The Victor Co. Players® are the ‘house band’ at Victor’s venue ‘Victor Bldg 19./The Victor Vault’ and have performed 300+ shows, and countless recording sessions at Victor’s Studios since reforming in 2011. The Victor Co. players are also the chosen backing group for (CEO of Victor) Graham Alexander (billed as Graham Alexander & Co.). Guitarist/Vocalist and a Musical Director of The Victor Co. Players, Zach Harski, is the only member of The Victor Co. Players to have had blood relation to a historic member of the collective; Giuseppe Creatore (Harski’s cousin) recorded for The Victor Co. Players - and later toured as a member of John Phillip Sousa’s band. Since 2014, in addition to acting as the studio and performance collective for artists like Monty Python member Neil Innes, Simon Kirke (Bad Co.), Garth Hudson (The Band), and many more - the collective has been doing soundtrack work for companies like Disney, Marvel, and P32 Productions. In 2021, The Victor Co. Players are set to tour in a theatre production created by Victor Entertainment Division known as ‘PAST MASTERS®’ while continuing their work for the Victor Music Group label projects that the company has planned for the next several years.

Listed below are some names and number of documented recordings of local musicians who helped build the young music industry by contributing their time, crafts and expertise:

This is a VERY Incomplete List Of The Victor Co. Players and more musicians will be added to this list; we believe we are missing upwards of 900 more between 1901 and the modern age. If YOU have a family member that was a member of the group - or have any information to add; please email us: info@victorrecords.com

Billy Murray - tenor vocalist: 1135 recordings

Arthur Collins - baritone vocalist: 374 recordings

Fred Van Eps - banjo - 73 recordings

Francis J. Lapitino - harp, xylophone, percussion: 753 recordings

Clement Barone - flute: 280 recordings

Alexander Schmidt - violin: 333 recordings

William H. Reitz - xylophone, anvil, bells, chimes, drums, marimba, steel bells, traps, vibraphone: 104 recordings

Arthur Pryor - trombone, bandleader: 1255 recordings

Rosario Bourdon - piano, cello, violin, musical director - 4530 recordings

Josef Pasternack - piano, musical director - 2783 recordings

Sante Martorano - Cornet

Adolph Hirschberg - Tuba

Walter B. Rogers

Charles D’Almaine - Violin - 234 recordings

Theodore Levy - Violin - 498 recordings

Emil Keneke - C ornet - 218 recordings

Walter Pryor - Cornet

S.O. Pryor - Tympani and Drums

Orlando Edward Wardwell - Trombone

Louis H. Christie - Clarinet

Frank E. Reschke - Viola and Saxophone

Darius Lyons - Flute - 110 recordings

Arthur Trepte - Oboe

Christopher H.H. Booth - Organist and Accompanist - 84 recordings

Herman Conrad - Bass

Ade Levy - Clarinet

Bix Beiderbecke

Hoagy Carmichael

Tommy Dorsey

Earl Hines

Eddie Lang (The Father Of Jazz Guitar)

Pee Wee Russell

Joe Venuti

Paul Whiteman

Steve Brown

Louis Raderman - Viola & Violin

Steve Porter (Baritone Vocalist/Animal Imitator)

Elliot Shaw (Baritone Vocalist)

Howard Rattay - Marimba, Viola, Violin

Carson Robison - Guitar, Harmonica, Tenor Vocalist

Leroy Shield - Musical Director, Celeste, Organ, Piano

Jack Shilkret- Piano, Celeste, Clarinet, Orchestra Leader, Musical Director

Ed Smalle- Recording Assistant, Sound Effects, Piano, Tenor Vocalist

Reinald Werrenrath - Sound Effects, Tenor Vocalist

Frank Ferera

Glenn Wilfred Bass Vocalist

Charles Hart Tenor vocalist

Charles W. Harrison Tenor Vocalist

Albert Campbell Tenor Vocalist

Frank Croxton Bass Vocalist

Willam Adams English Horn/Oboe

Cecil J. Sharp - Session Supervisor

Ted Levy (Clarinet)

Clement Barone (Flute)

Edward T. King (Musical Director)

Samuel Chotzinoff (Piano)

Francis Lapitno (Harp)

Alan Parado (Piano)

Col. Jasper E. Brady (Session Supervisor)