Percival Mackey's Band: I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight, 1925

I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight (Kahn-Donaldson) Fox-Trot – Percival Mackey’s Band with Vocal Chorus, Columbia 1925 (UK)

NOTE: Percival MACKEY (b. 1894 in London, UK – d. 1950) British pianist, composer and dance band leader. Born to a family of music publisher, he learned to play piano early in his childhood and when he was 14 he toured as a pianist with a travelling comedy show. At the age of 18, Mackey joined a travelling film show in Ireland, where he played as part of a musical trio with a trumpeter and a fiddler. After the First World War, Mackey moved to Brighton to play with Jack Hylton's orchestra. In the early 1920s, he formed his own band, which was initially billed as the Broadway Five. Soon, the band became popular working with many well known British musicians, such as Al Bowlly (1929) or Jack Jackson (1930–31). Besides bandleading, Percival Mackey was also busy as the musical director for several West End stage productions, including No, No, Nanette in 1925, and Follow Thru in 1929. From the beginning of the 1930s, he began to be involved in film work, as a composer and a musical director. In 1935 Mackey gained an influential position in British music market as the director of dance music at EMI, the parent company of the His Master's Voice. His orchestra’s earlier recordings from the mid-1920s are very much sought for by the collectors as the purest examples of the British hot dance style of the Roaring Twenties.