Our story begins long before any of us were born, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris…

In 1931, five students at the Lycée Carnot began regularly meeting to listen to American jazz records. Surely they were not the first to listen to 78rpm discs in this way, but they may have been the first to name the endeavor: they formalized their listening session into the Hot Club de France, the leading organization for studying and promoting such phonograph records and the hot music they contained.

When most music was live and records no more than 4 minutes per side, hearing hot music was necessarily a social activity. The Hot Club model proliferated as the ideal listening environment – a way to gather and listen intentionally, to celebrate new releases and to dig the rare out-of-print discs you needed to know someone to hear. Discography developed to help these listeners find, explore, and appreciate this music as thoroughly as possible.

But by the mid-’50s, record industry developments had altered how people listened to music. As new genres dominated the market, the 33rpm Long Playing disc (LP) and thereby the album became the new standard. The 78rpm disc was rendered obsolete. With opportunities to hear old 78s even more scarce, their enthusiasts had to get creative. Teaching/writing jazz history, broadcasting over FM radio, rereleasing 78rpm records on LPs and later CDs… second generation shellac aficionados continued their forebears’ grassroots efforts while utilizing the modern media at their disposal to cultivate a modest niche for pre-Elvis American music among the listening public.