Joseph C. Smith’s Orchestra – Karavan, Fox Trot (R. Wiedoeft), HMV 1920 (Originally recorded for Victor USA; UK re-pressing)
NOTE: Joseph C. Smith's Orchestra was the Victor Talking Machine Company's most successful band for popular dance records in the late 1910s. Featuring violin & piano and making attempts to introduce into his arrangements the elements of jazz, , the band's sound was, at the time, fresh and modern compared with the military bands the record companies previously used to present dance music. After several years of popularity, the rise of larger bands playing jazzy tunes such as the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, Harry Raderman or Paul Whiteman, made Smith's recordings sound old fashioned. He made his last recordings for Victor in 1922 and after that he started recording for Brunswick, but his records did not sell well. For some time Joseph C. Smith’s band played for the Plaza Hotel in NY and subsequently for Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal, Canada, where in 1925 he made his last recordings at the Canadian HMV under the name of Joseph C. Smith and His Mount Royal Orchestra. In second half of the 1920s his name disappears from the sources. According to Tim Gracyk’s POPULAR AMERICAN RECORDING PIONEERS: 1895-1925 it is believed, that in the late 1920s Joseph C. Smith owned a record store in LaPorte, Indiana, but having lost his savings during the Great Depression, he moved out to Florida where he spend last years of his life.
It is noteworthy, that “Karavan” is a fox trot composed by one of the most important jazz pioneers in USA Rudy Wiedoeft – the Californian saxophone-virtuose and composer who run in early 1920s his own dance band and who is now almost completely forgotten. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=507B4-WrE0A This oriental tune belongs to the whole array of similar oriental foxtrots composed in turn of 1910/20s on the rising tide of interest in the culture of the Middle East, especially Egypt, connected with development of intercontinental tourism especially to southern Europe and the countries of the Levant of the British high society. The excavations in the Valley of the Kings which enjoyed the highest publicity throughout the world and which culminated in the discovery of the intact tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen by Howard Carter in Nov 1922 r., added to it creating the whole big cultural phenomenon of the 1920s called the Egyptomania.
