Clicquot Club Eskimos

CLICQUOT CLUB ESKIMOS: Andy Bosen tp, Matthew Collen tb, Joe Davis cl as Clarence Doench cl ts, Paul Rickenbach p, Harry Reser banj dir arranger, Paul Redmond b, Maurice Black tu, Tom Stacks dm vo

- Clicquot- 142263

Recorded New York City, 28 May 1926 for Columbia
Click on the title to hear the tune

This record, recorded 80 years ago, always has fasinated me as it was one of my first original 78rpm I bought on a record fair. The music was played in a straight way arranged with a little swing and the presence of the banjo was outstanding.

It must have been one of the first electric recordings as around 1926 most record companies had exchaned their accoustical record equipment for an electric system. I remember that I was fascinated by the sound of the barking dogs and the jingle bells of the eskimos sleigh.

The Clicquot Club Eskimos was the name of the orchestra that performed during the weekly W.E.A.F. radio program to provide the music of the day that included bright peppy numbers to go with the advertiser's sparkling Clcquot Ginger Ale. Clicquot was the name of the eskimo boy that was on the label of the bottles. During that radio program the popular Reser's band played live and the radio program was transmitted nation wide. When you see their picture, all dressed like eskimos, the listener could imagine how they must have been dressed in the radio studio.
Reser was association for ten years with his Clicquot Club Eskimos for this ginger ale.

Harry Reser made hundreds of records, always arranged around his instrument, the banjo. Later he played guitar too, but in the 1920s the banjo was his main instrument as it was more powerfull and clear in a period when recordings and performances were not electric amplified. Later the guitar pushed the banjo away having a more sophisticated sound.

Harry Reser's banjo work has been reissued on LP and so are his Clicquot Club Eskimos, even. like in the picture above, with more then one banjos.

( Listen to: Flapperette - 4991 (ca. 1930))

Listen to Tom Stacks singing in I'm Wild About Horn On Automobiles ( Harry Reser's Syncopators - 7 March 1929 )

Thank you Ric G. and Bud B. for sharing your MP3 file - it completes my blog.