John Wolff's Web Museum "Broadway" Pianola Roll Catalogue

Introduction.

The table following presents a partial catalogue of 88-note Pianola rolls manufactured in Melbourne, Australia by The Anglo-American Player Roll Company. Anglo-American was founded in 1921 by pianist and orchestra-leader Mr. Len Luscombe (b.1893). Following his death in 1957, the business was acquired by the Mastertouch piano roll company in Sydney. In its 36 years of operation Luscombe's company produced about 2500 titles on the Broadway label, and a smaller number of Regal, Monarch, and Dahlmont rolls. (Dahlmont was a house brand of The Myer Emporium, a major Melbourne department store). The illustration above shows the standard label designs for each type of roll.

Anglo-American was a fairly small operation. Most of the musical arrangements were prepared and played by Luscombe himself, with his assistant Charles Urquhart operating the perforating machinery and producing the physical rolls. Luscombe used many pseudonyms for artists on the roll labels - Dan Rawlings, Art Kaplan, Earl Lester, and Leonard Earl are all Len Luscombe. A number of rolls were also produced from American masters provided through an arrangement with the machinery suppliers, and during the 1930s these included performances by top American artists such as Max Kortlander and J. Lawrence Cook. Luscombe adapted well to the changing musical tastes of the times, from the "Roaring 20s", through the Great Depression and the war years, to the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. His performances are still highly regarded today.

Unfortunately when the Broadway master library was transferred to Mastertouch in 1957 there were many gaps and inconsistencies in the catalogue. In 1988 Mr. Bill Denham completed an extensive review of the Broadway library and produced a "Reference Catalogue" containing the numbers and titles (only) of all known rolls. Despite his considerable efforts, there are still about 200 of the consecutive numbers for which no rolls or titles have ever been located.

The table following aims to complement Bill Denham's work by presenting the full details (rather than just number and title) from the labels of existing Broadway rolls, and to make this data generally available on-line. The table was commenced in about 1987 with contents transcribed by hand from the Broadway rolls in my own collection. It has since been expanded with data from other rolls that I have acquired or encountered elsewhere, and from photographs contributed by visitors to this site. There are currently about 1300 titles listed, or just over half of the total Broadway production.

YOU can help to complete this table!

If you own Broadway, Regal, Monarch, or Dahlmont rolls, or come across them elsewhere, could you please stack them together (no more than 6 at a time) and take a phone photo of the box labels? Please make sure that the photo is clear enough to read the fine print on the labels (see example), then email it to me via the Enquiry and Feedback Form. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Explanation of table columns.

Rolls are listed in numerical order. Broadway allocated groups of numbers to different categories of music, and numbered the issues sequentially within each group.

1000, 2000	Popular "Word Rolls" with red-bordered labels. These numbers were all used by about 1950, so the series continued at 6000. Numbers in the 2000 series were also used for occasional issues of green-label "Music Rolls" of mostly classical pieces. These are listed separately at the end of the main 2000 series.
3000	Ballads and hymns - about 60 titles.
4000	Long-play show selections - only 8 known.
5000	Medleys - about 20.
6000	Continued from 2000 series, 1950-1957 - about 220 titles.
7000	Marches - "Music Rolls", green labels, without words - about 40.
8000	Other "Music Rolls", green labels, without words - about 150.
Other	Miscellaneous rolls with irregular numbers.

A blank field in the table indicates that no information is provided on the label.
Question marks indicate that information may be present, but is hidden, damaged, or illegible.

The columns are presented exactly as on the labels, except for Series, Size, Pub(lished), Arr(anged), and Notes.

Some brief statistics.

Performers. As of April 2020 there were about 850 titles listed in the table below, or about one third of the total Broadway production. About 100 titles (mostly from the mid-1940s) have no performer listed on the label. 455 performances are credited to Len Luscombe alone, and a further 80 to names that were pseudonyms for Luscombe. Another 55 are credited to Luscombe in combination with other artists, some of whom were pseudonyms for Luscombe himself. There are 33 performances by Americans J. Lawrence Cook and his pseudonym Walter Redding, and 14 by Max Kortlander (a real person). About 30 other performers are represented in fairly small numbers. Luscombe himself played over 70% of all the rolls listed.

Musical styles. Almost 500 of the 850 rolls are listed as Foxtrots, 156 as Waltzes, 30 as Ballads, and 25 as Marches. Other more "modern" styles include Tango, Rhumba, Jive, Mambo, Jazz Waltz, and many others.

Composers. There are about 660 individual names listed in the Composers column, in about 600 different "words and music" combinations. Many composers appear with many different lyricists, and vice versa. 430 (or two-thirds) of the names appear only once. Only 18 names appear 10 or more times. The most frequent individual entries are 22 for Lew Brown, 20 for Irving Berlin, and 20 for Joe Burke. The most frequent "words and music" credits are 20 for Irving Berlin, 10 for the American team Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, and 8 for the popular Australian singer and composer Jack O'Hagan (a contemporary of Luscombe, also from the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy).

Resources for further information.

• A short biography of Len Luscombe, written by Barclay Wright of Mastertouch, can be found on-line in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
  
  
• Steve Rattle has produced a hard-copy catalogue of known Broadway rolls, with additional biographical notes and photographs of the Anglo-American operation. Please use the Enquiry and Feedback Form for further details.