One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place a century ago in New York City. On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham, a musician known as “the Whispering Pianist” for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company’s studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of him, level with his mouth: a microphone.
This was the moment when the record industry went electric. By the end of the year, a writer for the Washington, D.C. newspaper the Evening Star marveled at “the capitulation of the world’s leading musical artists to the power of the microphone.” (Hollywood’s sound revolution with “talkies” wasn’t far behind.) Today, a performer’s microphone technique can help define their sound. Yet no plaque marks the spot where Gillham made history with the first commercially released electrical recording.
Archivists at the oldest label in the world, now owned by Sony Music, cannot confirm the studio’s exact location. The best guess is a site now occupied by the Rose Theater, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue in Midtown Manhattan where Columbia’s offices once stood. The current building, a vast glass complex in Columbus Circle, is also home to the recording studio for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house label, Blue Engine Records.
Todd Whitelock, an award-winning engineer who runs the studio, called the advent of the microphone the most important technological development in recorded music. “It’s got to be the top of the pyramid,” he said in an interview from his home studio in Cranford, N.J.
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and the period until 1925 is known as the acoustical era. A conical recording horn would capture the music being performed; sound waves caused a stylus to cut grooves into a rotating wax disc, marking it with audio information.
Whitelock collects antique 78 rpm records, which he plays on a windup Victrola phonograph. “Acoustical recordings are magnificent, but there’s no dynamic range,” he said. “It all stays at the same volume. Be it pianissimo or mezzo piano or forte, it’s all one dynamic.”
The biggest early singing stars came from classical music. In 1902, Enrico Caruso was the first to make a million-selling record, an aria from the opera “Pagliacci.” His “loud, rich voice covered up the surface noise inherent in the disc,” Fred Gaisberg, the British producer who persuaded the Italian tenor to be recorded, wrote in a 1944 article for Gramophone magazine.
Nonclassical singers also relied on vocal projection. Bessie Smith, feted as “the Empress of the Blues,” called herself a “shouter.” Al Jolson promoted himself as “the Blackface with the Grand Opera Voice.” Although Jolson appeared in the pioneering talkie “The Jazz Singer,” neither he nor Smith adapted well to the arrival of electrical recordings. Both were too set in their ways to adjust to the microphone’s paradoxical qualities of detail and volume. With electrical amplification, the quietest person in the room can be the loudest.
The effects were felt across music. Instruments could be reproduced with greater fidelity. No longer would double bassists suffer the indignity of being supplemented by tuba players. But the biggest beneficiaries were pop singers. Acutely sensitive to tone and nuance, the microphone gave them personality, like Hollywood stars.
“It enabled people who wanted to sing in a different manner to come to the fore,” said the audio restorer Mark Obert-Thorn, who produced a compilation called “1925: Landmarks From the Dawn of Electrical Recording” that celebrates the microphone’s centenary for Pristine Classical, an archival label based in France.
“Landmarks” features what is believed to be the first recording from Gillham’s Columbia sessions, a gossamer-light breakup song called “You May Be Lonesome.” The Whispering Pianist warbles it conversationally over an amiable piano melody, as casual as a telephone call.
Jack Smith, another intimate singer who would put out an album called “The Whispering Baritone,” released his first record in 1925. Like Gillham, he honed his soft vocals on the radio. “Some of the people who were most successful in early electrical recordings got their start on the radio, mastering the new medium of singing into a microphone,” Obert-Thorn said.
Record labels at first distrusted radio, viewing commercial broadcasting, which began at the start of the decade, as though it were the Napster of the 1920s — in effect, giving away songs for free. “They looked at radio and anything to do with radio, like microphones, as the enemy,” Obert-Thorn said.
Declining record sales forced labels to change their tune in 1925. Columbia’s main rival, Victor, installed an identical recording system. The first electrically made recordings went on sale in April. But Columbia and Victor agreed to keep the new method secret to avoid alarming the record-buying public. The beginning of November was set as the date for the big reveal. Victor nicknamed it Victor Day.
“The initial reaction to electrical recording was not always positive,” Obert-Thorn said. “People thought they sounded overly strident and tinny. They had gotten comfortable with the warm sound of the acoustical recordings.”
But the public ear quickly acclimatized. Having faced bankruptcy in 1924, Columbia returned to profit in 1926. Whisper singers evolved into crooners, and microphones migrated into concert halls. Rudy Vallée claimed to be the first singer to perform a live show with electrical amplification, in 1930.
Contemporary artists are well versed in how to use different kinds of microphones and methods to make an impact, whether it’s the close-up intimacy of Billie Eilish, the powerhouse belting of Adele or the imaginative flows and ad-libs of generations of rappers. Many of them work with vocal producers, studio technicians who act as “a mix between a vocal coach and a record producer,” said Simone Torres, who is based in Los Angeles and has worked with Cardi B and Becky G.
When producing a vocalist, Torres chooses which type of microphone to use, then monitors and adjusts the input level while the singer performs. She also monitors the artist: Are they too far from the microphone? Do they need a reminder to smile? (“You can hear when someone is smiling on a recording,” she said.)
Exaggerated mouth movements aid enunciation. Celine Dion is a model for how to belt, slightly turned away from the microphone. “You’re still getting the fullness of her voice, she’s not going too far away,” Torres explained. “It’s all very smart.”
In the 1920s, the first wave of vocalists to make use of this tool were known as “microphone singers.” It framed and lit them in close-up, creating a new range of stars. When Ella Fitzgerald auditioned in Harlem to be the “girl singer” for a jazz big band in 1935, the teenager was overcome by shyness as she performed. “Well, your voice is soft,” the future “First Lady of Song” was told, according to a 1995 biography, but the mic “will bring it out.”
And so it did. The arrival of the microphone changed not only who was heard in recordings, but also how we hear. “It’s the same experience as people tuning in to watch Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon,” Whitelock said, “that moment of, ‘Oh my God, I’m looking into another world.’ Or hearing another world. It was the moonshot of its time.”
