$2.75 DESIGNATED AREAS HIGHER © 2020 DD latimes.comSATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2020
BUSINESS INSIDE: SpaceX launch could usher in more commercial activity in orbit. A9
Business is booming for
Maria Mir. Under normal cir-
cumstances, she takes little
time off in November and
December; the holidays are
her busy season. But this is
2020. Nothing is normal. And
everyone seems to need her
at once.
Mir is a licensed marriage
and family therapist. She’s
used to patients feeling
lonely and depressed as
Thanksgiving and Christ-
mas near. But “this particu-
lar time is different,” she
says. “Even people who
haven’t felt lonely in the past
are now feeling that isola-
tion.”
Pandemic Holiday Sea-
son 1.0 is taking its toll on
psyches and pocketbooks.
We’ve been cooped up for the
better part of eight months,
but instead of drawing up
lists of guests and gifts,
we’re cataloging the things
we cannot do as tempera-
tures drop and coronavirus
cases soar across the coun-
try.
Like visit far-flung family
and friends. On Friday, the
governors of the three West
Coast states issued “travel
advisories” recommending
against nonessential travel
and urging people entering
California, Oregon and
Washington to self-quaran-
As virusrages,distressfills theseason
No holiday meals,guests, gifts: Pandemictaking toll on psyches and pocketbooks.
By Maria L. La Ganga,
Sonja Sharp and
Julia Barajas
[See Season, A6]
The voice seeps in
as if from anoth-
er dimension,
hissy and dis-
tant, like an AM
radio broadcaster transmit-
ting through late-night
static.
“ ‘The Ambassador
March’ by Brown’s Orche-
streee for the Los Angeles
Phonograph Company of
Los Angeles, California,” a
man announces with a
gentlemanly accent. After a
moment’s scratchy pause, a
violinist opens with a melo-
dy, and a small orchestra
jumps in. Led by a Long
Beach-based bandleader
named E.R. Brown, the song
dances along for two min-
utes. The fidelity is primitive
by today’s high-definition
audio standards, a quaint
toss-away. But “The Am-
bassador March” and the
Coke-can-sized wax cylin-
der upon which it was
etched into permanence in
the late 1800s open a portal
to another era.
That wax cylinder and
others like it — rescued from
rural estate sales and dusty
attics — have survived
earthquakes, heat waves,
mold and indifference. They
feature Mexican folk songs;
military band marches;
minstrelsy songs of the kind
that preceded American
blues, folk and country
music; and the voices of
former Lincoln cabinet
members, Southern sena-
tors, popes, preachers and
comedians. Their survival is
emblematic of a revolution
that allowed sound to be
freed from its origins. Once
untethered, the world would
be forever changed. Many of
the recordings have been
JOHN LEVIN has amassed a significant archive of early sound recordings and even created his own cylinderplayer, the CPS-1. His early music collection includes a 1900 phonograph used in traveling shows of the time.
Francine Orr Los Angeles Times
DENTIST Michael Khanchalian has salvaged hun-dreds of fragile wax cylinders like this 1905 recording.
Francine Orr Los Angeles Times
CYLINDER records collected by David Seubert, whoruns UC Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Audio Archive.
Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Keepersof ourmusicalhistory
A small band ofcollectors dedicatesitself to preservingthe vessels containingthe earliest recordings.
By Randall Roberts
[See Recordings, A12]
SEOUL — President
Trump’s cool-headed nucle-
ar envoy told the North Ko-
reans it was “a window of op-
portunity.”
Here was a U.S. president
willing to venture far outside
traditional diplomacy, par-
ticularly with regard to a pa-
riah nation. As quick as he
was to fire off insults on
Twitter and threaten “fire
and fury,” Trump stunned
many by agreeing to meet
with leader Kim Jong Un —
even stepping onto North
Korean soil when he crossed
the demilitarized zone be-
tween the two Koreas.
“You know how to reach
us,” said Stephen Biegun,
now the deputy secretary of
State, in late 2019. But at the
end of all the photo ops and
summitry, North Korea
wasn’t buying the deal
Trump was selling.
As Trump’s whipsaw di-
plomacy with North Korea
draws to a close, the country
is no closer to relinquishing
its nuclear arsenal. It has in-
stead blown up a liaison of-
fice with South Korea, shot
and killed a South Korean
man in its waters, and last
month showcased a new,
larger intercontinental bal-
listic missile in a triumphant
military parade.
Enter President-elect Joe
JOE BIDEN, center, at the demilitarized zone in 2013 as vice president, has saidhe would meet with Kim Jong Un if North Korea cut back its nuclear capacity.
Lee Jin-man Associated Press
North Korea’s next actAfter Trump’s whipsaw approach and summitswith Kim, Biden promises ‘principled diplomacy’
By Victoria Kim
[See North Korea, A4]
Trump emergesto discuss vaccineSpeaking publicly forthe first time since hisdefeat, the presidentignores the virus’ highdeath toll. NATION, A5
Saugus Highreflects on lossA remembrance videowill be released Sat-urday, one year after adeadly shooting on cam-pus. CALIFORNIA, B1
WeatherTurning sunny.L.A. Basin: 69/54. B10
A HISTORIC HIRE
Jon Soohoo WireImage
Kim Ng, with Tommy Lasorda in 2005, was hiredby the Miami Marlins and is the first female gen-eral manager in a major sports league. SPORTS, B8
SACRAMENTO —
Buoyed by another blue
wave, Democrats are await-
ing election results in two
races that, if won, could
mean historic gains in the
state Senate and further
pad their supermajority in
the California Legislature.
Democrats learned
Thursday that they picked
up two seats in the Senate
that had been held by Re-
publicans. If they prevail in
one additional race, the
party will have 32 of the 40
seats in the upper house.
That would be the most
Democrats in the state Sen-
ate since 1883, said Alex Vas-
sar, communications man-
ager at the California State
Library. Democrats have ne-
ver held more than 32 seats,
Vassar said.
“Who knew California
could be more blue?” said
Robin Swanson, a veteran
Democratic communica-
tions consultant.
Democrats in both
houses entered the election
with a supermajority and
will retain that two-thirds
voting threshold, which al-
lows them to pass most leg-
islation without Republican
help. But with more blue
comes more challenges,
Swanson added.
Adding Democrats
California Legislature set toturn a darker shade of blueBy Melody Gutierrez
[See Legislature, A7]
State underscorestravel advisoryResidents urged to keepguard up ahead of holi-days and to quarantineas needed. CALIFORNIA, B1
■■■ ELECTION 2020 ■■■
WASHINGTON — As President-
elect Joe Biden labors to rescue the
nation’s ragged coronavirus re-
sponse, no challenge looms larger
than rallying Republicans and
Democrats behind a unified effort to
wear masks and take other basic
steps to control the pandemic.
Months of political disputes over
face coverings, social distancing and
other public health interventions
have turned even the simplest pre-
cautions into partisan mine fields.
And relentless attacks by Presi-
dent Trump and his allies have
sapped trust in public health leaders
and institutions such as the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
and the Food and Drug Administra-
tion, even as the COVID-19 pandemic
rages out of control across the coun-
try.
“We need to tone down the politi-
cal rhetoric … but we are digging out
of a huge hole,” said Dr. Richard
Besser, who heads the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation and previously
led the CDC. “Once you’ve lost trust,
it’s very hard to get it back.”
Biden, who made unity a central
message of his successful campaign,
issued an urgent plea this week to
Americans to put aside partisan
fighting over the virus.
“We could save tens of thousands
of lives if everyone would just wear a
mask for the next few months. Not
Democratic or Republican lives —
A cure for COVID politics?Biden’s challenge is to unite Americans enough to mask up
By Noam N. Levey
[See COVID-19, A6]
A12 SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2020 LATIMES.COM
restored, digitized and added tosound libraries that are easilyaccessed for free, and they may bethe answer to “what do I listen tonow?” as we continue to shelter athome or navigate the world cau-tiously.
These first recordings pavedthe way for the music industry aswe know it today. Columbia Re-cords, which in the late 1890s wasknown as the Columbia Phono-graph Co. and released cylindersof music performed by variousminstrel shows, often white men inblackface, remains a music power-house whose roster includes Bey-oncé, Lil Nas X, Daft Punk, Adeleand Tyler, the Creator. The as-tounding success of Italian tenorEnrico Caruso was enabled byVictor Talking Machine Co., whichcame to be under the umbrella ofRCA Records, now home to artistssuch as Miley Cyrus, ChildishGambino and Alicia Keys. BothColumbia and RCA records arenow owned by Sony Music Enter-tainment.
Preserving early recordings —and the lumbering machines thatplay them — has been an obses-sion for a small group of SouthernCalifornia collectors, who havebeen stealthily wrangling from thewild the essential sounds of theearly American acoustic recordingera.
Decoding the sound on the waxtubes is a powerful experience —as close to time travel as can befound.
But the clock is ticking.
b
Not long ago, Dr. MichaelKhanchalian sat down in his Mon-rovia home office to repair anEdison brown wax cylinder, strap-ping on his nerd glasses — hisdescription — and picking up aprobe.
A dentist with his own Pasa-dena practice, the collector’svision zoomed in to explore micro-scopic waves and valleys im-printed onto the delicate tube.Because of their fragility, manybrown wax cylinders are consid-ered one-of-a-kind rarities at thispoint, and he has salvaged hun-dreds of them using decades-oldsteel dental instruments. Khan-chalian held the probe above aflame until smoke wafted, then hedipped it into a shallow canister ofwax and tapped the sharpenedpoker onto a crack in the cylinder.Wax rolled like lava through a gullyand dried in a few seconds.
“You need it to flow realsmoothly into the nooks and cran-nies,” he said in a whispered tonethat suggested Bob Ross paintingautumn foliage. The dentistrubbed off excess flecks and pol-ished the surface with a silk cloth.
Many of Khanchalian’s “fixes”have ended up in climate-con-trolled safety 90 miles north ofhere at UC Santa Barbara’s re-nowned cylinder archive. Othersare in the British Library and theLibrary of Congress. On any givenevening he might be working torepair a recording of director CecilB. DeMille’s actor-grandfather,piecing together a broken cylinderof Welsh evangelist Evan Robertssinging hymns, or fixing cracks ina recording by early Black banjoplayer Charles Asbury.
The home he shares with hiswife Janene and two sons is a Dr.Seussian wonderland of earlysound machines. Record playersor music-making devices linenearly every spot along walls in theliving room, their ornate, mega-phone-shaped horns jutting outevery which way. (Khanchalian,who sports a bushy, Super Mario-esque mustache, parks his ModelT in his dad’s garage.)
The dentist has been resurrect-ing spectral voices on cylinders fordecades, a mission he shares withtwo longtime friends, expert col-lector John Levin and Oscar-winning sound engineer MarkUlano. In the 1980s, the trio ofobsessives formed what Ulanocalled “a triangle of engagement”to identify and understand NorthAmerica’s earliest pop records.Levin, whose Silver Lake homecontains about 3,000 brown waxcylinders, compares their enthusi-asm to “people who collect rarebooks. Cylinders are from thisperiod before there was an indus-try, and because we can hear it,and see it, and feel it, it’s a wonder-ful conduit into this early time.”
Among those he and Khan-chalian have identified are a previ-ously unknown recording of anearly 1890s New Orleans brassband and a tube etched with thesound of composer John PhilipSousa’s New Marine Band. Levinworked with Ulano, Khanchalianand Dan Reed of the AntiquePhonograph Society for years torestore and digitize the South-west’s most important collectionof wax cylinders, the recordings oflibrarian, writer and onetime LosAngeles Times reporter CharlesLummis.
A socially-connected renais-sance man, Lummis bought anEdison recorder in 1902 and overthe next three years recordedmore than 450 cylinders, capturinga host of regional musicians, intel-lectuals and personalities in and
around his Mount Washingtonhome. He preserved Mexican folksongs and original compositionsplayed by musicians includingDoña Adalaida Kamp, José de laRosa, the Villa Family and Manu-ela Garcia.
“We joke with each other aboutbeing brown-wax brothers,” Khan-chalian says of Levin. “We’velearned so much together, and weboth hope we can get some of thisinformation down before it’s toolate.”
Levin has mined collections theworld over, amassing a singularlysignificant archive of early soundrecordings, most of which pre-datethe Lummis cylinders.
Among his holdings are a vol-ume of crucial operatic recordingsmade by Gianni Bettini, an audio-phile-inventor based in New York;more than 400 releases by theUnited States Phonograph Co., anearly label based in New Jerseythat issued cylinders by many“first generation” recording art-ists; and a wide range of cylindersfrom America’s oldest-knownregional record labels — Lambert,the Kansas City Talking MachineCo., Potter and Earle Electricians,Siegel-Myers, and the UnitedStates Phonograph Co. amongthem.
A semi-retired creative directorof a digital marketing agency, inrecent years Levin has invested histime and energy into designingand commissioning one of themost technically advanced cylin-der players ever built. Called theCPS-1, it digitizes the sound wavesvia a specially designed cartridgeand stylus that can read parts thatprimitive needles could neveramplify, adding more nuance tothe static-y and crackly record-ings. Since the cylinder player anddigitizer went on the market a fewyears ago, Levin has sold nine ofthem — at about $20,000 a pop.“There’s a really interesting con-fluence right now of a lot of knowl-edge about analog technology,some rich digital tools that weren’tthere 10 years ago and a robustinternet that wasn’t there 15 yearsago,” Levin says. “This is a veryimportant period.”
b
Ulano, the son of legendary jazzdrummer and educator Sam “Mr.Rhythm” Ulano, has served asQuentin Tarantino’s productionsound mixer on every movie since
1997’s “Jackie Brown.” Last year, hewas nominated for a sound mixingOscar for his work on Tarantino’s“Once Upon a Time … in Holly-wood.” (He was also nominated inthe same category for his work onJames Gray’s “Ad Astra.”) In 1998,Ulano won an Oscar for his soundwork on “Titanic.”
A scholar on the history of filmand audio recording, he describesLevin and Khanchalian’s efforts ascrucial to understanding “theearly stages of mass media andcommercializing of music andspoken word as a commodity.”
“There’s a magic to the vitalityof hearing humans speak and singand communicate” on such an-cient recordings, Ulano said.“Even the private home record-ings, to me, are among the mostfascinating because they’ve cap-tured the living dynamic of peoplein the flow and in play in a veryorganic way.”
Levin is drawn to the record-ings for their mystery.
Not long ago, for example,Levin bought two unmarkedbrown wax cylinders from a pickerhe knew in the Midwest. Evidencesuggested that whoever ownedthem at one point lived in down-town Los Angeles. When Levinplayed the cylinders, he wasshocked to hear the announceridentify the recordings as beingfrom “the Los Angeles Phono-graph Co.” No such business wasknown to exist. Levin and Khan-chalian believe the two cylinders tobe the first known commercialrecordings to be made and mar-keted in Los Angeles — and issuedby the city’s first record label.
b
Khanchalian’s interest in earlyrecordings and devices started inchildhood. He had an aunt whowas obsessed with antiques, andon her sprees she’d buy him curi-ous objects, hand them to him andtell him to figure out what theywere. One time she presented hima cylinder and he was hooked.
When he was a teenager, hisyounger sister accidentally broke acouple of his favorite recordings.They were irreplaceable, so hedecided to try to fix them. Hissolution, he said with a chuckle,was “to learn all the ways it can’tbe done.” Decades later, he’s thego-to guy in the country on all theways it can.
He paused for a moment when
asked who his peers were in thecylinder repair business, beforecoming up blank. “No one.”
Although Khanchalian’s den-tistry-informed methods, un-orthodox as they are, have earnedhim work for respected institu-tions, the techniques would likelynot pass muster with most li-braries, which typically requireadvanced degrees in the field.Recorded sound has long beentreated as an afterthought byarchivists, most of whom special-ize in books, transcripts, paint-ings, photographs or film footage.As a result, cylinder restorationtechniques have never been stand-ardized, says David Seubert,curator for the Performing ArtsCollection at UC Santa BarbaraLibrary. He heads the university’sCylinder Audio Archive.
“We rely on people like Mike,”Seubert said, “who have devel-oped, basically, folk knowledgeabout how to fix this kind of stuff.”
Located in a wing of the uni-versity library, the archive’s collec-tion of arcane music and mach-ines, stored in a climate-con-trolled, purpose-built facility tohold wax cylinders and 78 rpmrecords, is the most extensive onthe West Coast.
Lined in rows of draweredcabinets and towering, movableshelving units, the archive’s quan-tity of cylinders and discs over-whelms the imagination. Say whatyou want about the millions ofdigital songs stored in the cloudand awaiting your Spotify spin; thesensation of standing in a roomteeming with some of the world’searliest sounds feels somehoweven more remarkable than anycelestial jukebox.
Collectors like Levin and Khan-chalian make it possible for Seu-bert to present to the public re-cordings that would otherwiseremain unheard to all but a chosenfew.
Though hardly as sophis-ticated as Apple Music or Spotify,the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archiveportal features a searchable data-base that accesses more than10,000 cylinders stored in the facili-ty’s basement. The portal is di-vided into dozens of categoriesincluding hymns, corridos, comicsongs, ethnic humor, speeches,sermons, waltzes and yodelingsongs, which combine to offer aperspective-shifting listen into thespirit, expressions and dialectsthat typified the era.
Pockets of the archive also lay
bare in brutal detail the racismthat permeated American culturein the late 19th and early 20thcenturies. An hour of browsingthrough the minstrel music willshine a direct beam on sinistertropes and casual references tonooses and lynching that typifiedthe so-called blackface music ofthe period.
Another part of the collectiongathers more than 650 home waxrecordings made in private resi-dences as audio letters, to docu-ment birthdays or simply to passthe time.
That public-facing charterdrew Levin to hook up with Seu-bert and the university. Duringtheir initial meetings in the early’00s, Levin told him that donatingitems from his collection would becontingent on making the record-ings accessible to the public. Seu-bert was headed in the same direc-tion. Levin then confesses to whathe calls “a little bit of a hiddenagenda, which is to make it asdifficult as possible for the uni-versity to ever dismantle what[Seubert’s] created up there.” Italso affords him access to a li-brary’s worth of archaic record-ings.
b
Cylinder collectors come in afew different varieties, Ulano says.“Some collect out of compulsion.Some of them are out of academicpassion for documenting. Someare in it for the fun of it, and you’llsee permutations of all that.”Levin is the kind who, when decid-ing to ride out the pandemic withhis wife Pat at their Connecticuthome, packed his bulky CPS-1machine and 100 cylinders intotheir car for the cross-countryroad trip so that he could work onhis various projects during theshutdown.
Khanchalian describes a cyclethat many such hobbyists willunderstand: “When no one elsecan answer the questions and youstart doing the primary research,the fascination keeps growing.Suddenly people start coming toyou for information, and then youbecome the go-to guy.” But none ofthese guys — yes, cylinder collec-tors are mostly men — is gettingany younger. The whole endeav-or’s incredibly impractical, andthat’s a problem. Curious kids whoin previous generations would getlost in collecting and documentingthe past are more likely spendingoff-hours building virtual spaces in“Minecraft” than tinkering withanachronistic tech or wonderinghow songs such as R.I. Jose’s “PoorBlind Boy” or Dan Quinn’s “StillHis Whiskers Grew” came to be.
Unlike the online realm, therearen’t any backups of the brownwax cylinders dotting flea mar-kets, antique malls and old storagesheds across America. Each is itsown would-be Rembrandt.
“I just try to sweep the stuff up,”Levin says.
He has cylinders that he’s neverheard because they’re too fragilefor playback. “They need a kind oftreatment that hasn’t been devel-oped yet,” he said. “But it’s aston-ishing how much this early tech-nology captured that we can stillgo in there and get.”
The problem now is one ofattention, adds Levin, “and that iswhat we are in danger of losing asall of these old analog guys timeout.” As the phonograph collect-ing community dwindles andinterest wanes, who continues thesearch?
What good’s a rescued cylinder,after all, if no one can conjure themagic within it?
The dedicated keepers of musical history
DAVID SEUBERT, curator for the Performing Arts Collection at the UC Santa Barbara Library and head of the university’s Cylinder Audio Archive, has his own early music collection at home. Cylinder recordings are the earliest commercial “records.”
Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times
MICHAEL KHANCHALIAN repairs wax cylinders using old dental instruments. The dentist’sfixes have gone on to such institutions as UCSB, the British Library and the Library of Congress.
Francine Orr Los Angeles Times
[Recordings, from A1]
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