This story started in early 2019 with a toothache and the rumor of a Pasadena dentist obsessed with wax cylinders, the earliest commercial recording format. Martin told me that during Grammy weekend, they usually stayed at the Los Angeles home of a wildly knowledgeable collector of wax cylinder recordings named John Levin. They were made by the Los Angeles Phonograph Co., according to the announcer on the cylinders. I scoured street guides in the L.A. Public Library’s holdings, which led me to an 1893 listing of Los Angeles businesses. There, a single mention of the “Los Angeles Phonograph Co.” on Spring Street offered a revelation: My own obsessive research might have expanded the timeline of the largely unwritten history of early music in Southern California.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 12, 2020 13:03 UTC