Born: March 28, 1880, Constantinople
Died: September, 1966, New York
Active years (retailing / publishing): 1920s - 1950s
Label Association: Armenaphone, Popular Haygagan Yerkabenag, Popular, Perfectaphone, Kurdiphone

Since commercial recording began, each generation faced the challenge of keeping historical recordings accessible. By the time of the Depression in America, major record labels had largely abandoned their ethnic catalogs due to the limited market, leaving many recordings of Armenian music out of print. Like Armen Vahe, who we featured in our second Sound Archive article, Hrand Markar Tashjian was a record distributor and shop owner who took matters into his own hands, reissuing out-of print recordings from major labels on a series of his own imprints, each geared to serve specific diaspora communities.

Born April 11, 1880 in Constantinople, Hrand emigrated to Manhattan in 1920, along with his wife Dirouhi. Being active in the record trade back home, Hrand brought his work to the States and by 1925 had established his store “HM Tashjians” near 3rd Avenue. In addition to selling a wide range of electronics, typewriters, phonographs and piano rolls, the store was an official dealer of Odeon records and ran regular ads in the Armenian papers. In the early years the store stocked discs published by labels such as Odeon, Beka and Favorite, all subsidiaries of the German Carl Lindström Company, as well as American companies like Columbia and Victor with substantial Armenian catalogs. Tashjian did well and later moved to a location at 353 3rd Avenue which ran into the 1960s. 

By the late 1940s Tashjian was running ads publicizing a line of labels including Armenaphone, Popular and Perfectaphone, each of which was geared at specific diaspora communities. Among them was “Popular Haygagan Yerkabenag,” which reissued three of the recordings shared in this feature. Many of the artist and title details on these labels were vague, perhaps to avoid any potential copyright issues with the original publishers. In the case of Popular Haygagan records, the artist performing Siroun Groung and Yaylouges Gorav is listed as G. Andonian, a name we have not been able to trace. The original recording was made in Constantinople in 1910 and issued by Favorite under the name B. Haig. Also included here is a rendition of Amen Hair Sourp published on Popular Haygagan and credited to “MVU.” This recording is paired with a performance of Vart, recorded for Columbia by the same performer, Vahe Utudjian. Interestingly Utudjian was also once a record dealer with a shop in Constantinople. By the late 1940s Favorite had dissolved and Parlorphone who had acquired their catalog— showed little interest in keeping these titles in print. It was through Tashjian's persistent and creative endeavors that this music remained in print.

As a major distributor and official Odeon dealer in the early days, Tashjian would have had access to material that was both important to his community and less accessible by the late 1940s. While a natural choice for Tashjian to republish the material, he was ahead of his time as an early reissue publisher. Labels like Folkways, Arhoolie and the present-day Dust-To-Digital have gone on to provide people access to the vast history of recorded sounds. Operations like Tashjian’s are critical to audio preservation, not only as entertainment but for their unique lens on history.

A special thanks to the SJS Charitable Trust for their generous support of our work to digitize and share our collection of 78 rpm records.