Brunswick Record Corp.'s Manhattan laboratory has lately been a hotbed of Negro jazz—Duke Ellington and Don Redman with their high-spiced bands, Torch-Singers Ethel Waters and Adelaide Hall, Cecil Mack's choir; the four Mills Brothers who learned to sing like tubas and saxophones back in Piqua, Ohio, because they could not afford to buy the instruments; Tapdancer Bill Robinson who went to the laboratory at midnight because his feet twinkle faster when the night is half done.
Brunswick was making records of the music from Blackbirds of 1928. They went on sale last...