Music Minus One

Music Minus One (commonly abbreviated as MMO) is a music production and recording company in Westchester, New York. Their recordings are meant to be accompanied by the listener on whichever instrument (or voice type) is excluded from the recording, as an aid to practice, or as an accompaniment to home performance. The technique is the same as the later development of karaoke for the voice.

Background

Music Minus One was begun in 1950, by Irv Kratka, a 24-year-old college student. The company's first recording was devoted to Schubert’s Trout Quintet, with all five instruments omitted in five different MMO’s. This release received a full page review in The New York Times. As a result, articles appeared in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, and hundreds of papers across the USA and Europe.

In the following years, the company continued to release chamber music and jazz rhythm recordings utilizing the best of New York’s players at the time, many of whom are legends in music. Such names as Stan Getz, Hank Jones, Max Roach, Sam Baron, Julius Baker, Murray Panitz, Doriot Dwyer, Elaine Douvas, Donald Peck, Armando Ghitalla, Stanley Drucker, and countless other first chair players in the five major American orchestras were prevailed upon to add their skills to MMO recordings.