Issler's Orchestra

Issler's Orchestra was an early recording ensemble, and perhaps the first popular band.

Personnel and instrumentation varied in the first year, but most sessions included Edward Issler on piano, George Schweinfest on flute and D.B.

Clarinetist William Tuson and xylophonist Charles P. Lowe would also become core members in the early 1890s.

All of Issler's records were recorded on fragile hollow cylinders made of a waxy blend of materials that usually became brown-colored during the making of the blank cylinders, so they are called "brown wax cylinders" because of their shape and usual color.

Not many cylinder records made in the 1890s have survived and the survivors are almost never in great condition, so the sound recorded on them is now less clear than what people heard when they were new and there is much more surface noise mixed in with it.