Gilbert Watson & His Orchestra-I Only 'Wanna' Be Known As Susie's Feller

Gilbert Watson was a Canadian dance band leader and pianist. He was born at Glasgow in 1896 and died in Peterborough, Ontario in 1959. He studied piano with Michael Hambourg and Harvey Robb and played at the Allen Theatre in Toronto. He also worked for several local music retailers, among them Mason & Risch (in the Victrola department) and Whaley Royce (as store manager). In the mid-1920s he formed his own dance band, which played at the Prince George Hotel (where it was heard on the Toronto radio station CFRB) and ca 1935-42 at the Old Mill. It also appeared in dance pavilions around Toronto. The seven or eight musicians of the Watson orchestra, including the trumpeter Kurt (or Curtis) Little, recorded in Montreal for Starr in 1925 and Domino in 1926; among the nine issued titles (listed in the Canadian Jazz Discography) are some (eg, Bamboola and St. Louis Blues) that stand among the first jazz recordings by a Canadian band. Watson retired from music in 1942 to operate a summer resort, Gil-Mar Lodge, and dance hall at Sturgeon Lake in the Kawartha region of Ontario. This great record was made in 1926. Unfortunately, this disc was in very poor shape. I did my best to restore sound, and although the result is not entirely satisfactory, I definitely wanted to present this very rarely heard orchestra.