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this is a thread on Chuck Nessa


AllenLowe

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When I saw the title of this it reminded me of the theme song from "It's Gary Shandling's Show" Something like 'This is Gary's theme song. He asked me to write the song..............and now we'll watch It's Gary Shandling's show.

Sorry for the momentary hijack, Chuck. :winky::crazy: I'm glad there's a thread about you.

As you were, board........

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Koester was sort of trapped between the sandbar and the edge of the shore at Duck Lake State Park. The water will get waist high, chest high, about three feet from shore. But if you walk another yard or two it's back to around your ankles. After that incident he'd introduce me to anyone who would listen, "He's the guy that saved me from drowning in Lake Michigan." I can't remember clearly if I even did -- I think it was Ann Nessa! Who knows. Its become a myth.

When Koester would come up to Michigan he'd sometimes bring his jazz films and show them on the warehouse wall where Chuck was working at the time. Great parties. Live band playing early jazz -- I think there was a bass sax involved -- then a cookout and after the sun went down "The Sound of Jazz," "Jammin' The Blues" and all kinds of other jazz films projected on the wall. Again, this was a couple of decades before You-Tube and you just didn't see that stuff much. Koester showed those often at the Record Mart in that period, but it was a real special treat to have them in the vicinity of Lost Valley in Montague, Michigan.

Edited by Lazaro Vega
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I have decided that the Nessa catalogue is one of the most important collections of music ever recorded. I am making it a priority to buy all of it in the coming year.

In the 1970s I bought some of the Nessa albums on vinyl, and absolutely loved them all. Now that I have the opportunity to get more, I need to take advantage of it.

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He's also got the best site on the web: http://www.nessarecords.com/

Sorry Chuck, some joshing was needed...;) We're all looking forward to reading it once you, you know... get round to it...

Great photo of a bolt of lightening on it though--which was what hit me the first time I ever played Les Stances a Sophie.

A very similar bolt of lightening hit me when I first heard "Snurdy McGurdy"! :tup:)

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From the Book of Chuck:

I fear for America - the last century was ours (the American Century), and that may be it. After it's over, I'd rather be Sweden, rather than Rome - if you get my foggy drift.

I gotta keep my mouth shut.........Oh, shit here it goes. He has a great personal tone and 2 solos. One is fast and one is slow. The musicians around him camoflage this.

Money may be our least significant expense.

Rather than artists, single tracks do it for me. A good example for me is Sheena Easton's "Morning Train" aka "9 to 5". This record does it for me every time.

Knowledge is good, if it does not interfere with feeling. All art is about expressing feelings. Technique and "tools" are the way the artist expresses feelings, but the "audience" is already lost if they look for the "tools" to justify the emotion. If you search for the tools before "experiencing" the work, you are lost.

Webern and Albert Ayler are primarily about MELODY. They have different ways of arriving there, and they deliver different melodies. That is the magic.

It is really that simple. Forget what you learned. It may be of use later.

I'll stick with the wine and cantaloupe crowd. Nice to have options.

Mechanical engineers are not the best drivers of Porsches. The limits are discovered by other souls.

Please call me Chuck. You seem to be a bright guy - keep posting

Understand, I'm not a Democrat, just an anti-Republican.

Probably my favorite show only aired for one season - Tim Reid's "Frank's Place".

How 'bout the entire Amos 'n' Andy series.

So I guess if that beautiful red hair is ever "crushed" on my chest, I'm a pervert, right.

This reminds me, when Michael Cuscuna was preparing a series of Coltrane issues for Impulse in the late '70s', he made a presentation to the marketing crew, and a young exec stood up and said something like "If Coltrane is so important, why don't we do a 'direct to disc' date with him and back it up with a tour?"

This board is my internet home, BUT for me it is too locked into music from '55-65'. This is fine music, but only one decade. I really don't understand the "taste limits".

Music be happnin' for thousands of years, and maybe into the future. Why only one decade. Branch out folks.

I would be delighted to find threads on Webern, Tommy Johnson, Billy Banks, Machaut, Berwald, Borodin, Red Allen, Tommy McClennan, Haydn, Horenstein, Furtwangler, Joseph Jarman, Elliot Carter, etc. I glaze over when discussions of early recordings center on transfers. Music first, technology after that.

Dickie Wells, Sam Nanton, JC Higginbotham, Bill Harris, Lawrance Brown - in that order.

So......I just turned 59! Now to figure out how to spend the rest of my 50s.

I have to go with 1942 since that's the year my spectacular wife was conceived. If not for her, I would not exist.

Everyone I ever met from East St. Louis had bad teeth - black or white.

Yup.

Anytime I see "Zero" I think of Coleman Hawkins' girlfriend.

Kim Novak.

I thought I had a snappy response, but........

I'm always in front of the computer. What else do you need?

Thanks to all.

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  • 2 weeks later...

From the Book of Chuck:

Probably my favorite show only aired for one season - Tim Reid's "Frank's Place".

I missed this before. I'm glad to see that someone else is a Frank's Place fan. No matter how video technology changes, I'll have to keep my VCR, because I taped the whole season when it was rerun on BET a couple of years later.

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I don't mean any disrespect or anything, but weren't People in Sorrow and Les Stances recorded in Paris and issued on Pathe as well as Nessa? So Chuck didn't produce them? or am I wrong?

Correct. I was not in Paris when they were recorded, but the guys made sure I had "rights" in North America. Not many artists would do that.

Edited by Chuck Nessa
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  • 3 months later...

From Jazz Magazine, Summer 1978

By Jerry DeMuth

Nessa Records Comes of Age

A duke Ellington record brought home by his father, a job at Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart, an encounter with saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and a job loss that ended a ten-year career managing record stores. Those are, perhaps the key events that have gone into the making of Nessa Records, a small, Chicago-based all-jazz independent label.

Begun eleven years ago by Charles (Chuck) Nessa, the label – whose releases range from the AACM avant garde to Ben Webster – in now a full-time operation, with an increasing number of releases (album number twelve is set for release this fall) and wider distribution. It’s a far different situation than existed in early 1975, when the entire Nessa catalog consisted of four releases, the most recent, a 1970 recording and the earliest an August 1967 recording, Lester Bowie’s “Numbers 1 & 2”. With the trumpeter plus saxophonists Mitchell and Joseph Jarman and bassist Malachi Favors, this was the first recording made by the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

A year earlier, Nessa had recorded these and other AACM musicians for Delmark, albums that were the first vinyl representation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians – Mitchell’s “Sound” (DS-408) and Jarman’s “Song For” (SD-410).

“Those early Roscoe Mitchell albums are something I still try to measure up to with all my releases”, Nessa said.

Nessa was in high school in and Iowa farm community, collecting Fats Domino and Little Richard records, when he received that Ellington record.

“He gave me that records and said “I want you to hear this record once a week””, Nessa remembers. “I liked it and, within six months, I had 50 jazz records”.

Nessa also traved to Des Moines, 40 miles to the south, to hear his fist live jazz – George Shearing. Then while in college at the University of Iowa, he often traveled west to Grinnell and east to Chicago to hear jazz, in addition to whatever he was able to catch on his own campus in Iowa City. Nessa moved to Chicago in 1966 and, with an interest in producing records, got in touch with Koester, who owns Delmark as well as the Jazz Record Mart.

“I told Bob I would work running the record store if I could produce records,” Nessa said. “He agreed. I then went looking around for someone to record and I discovered the AACM.”

“I didn’t quite understand their music,” he admitted, “but I could tell they knew what they were doing. I met Roscoe at the first concert I went to and within three weeks I worked out a contract for him to do an album for Delmark”.

Mitchell referred Nessa to Jarman, who he also recorded for Delmark, and Nessa also signed Muhal Richard Abrams to the label, but left before the pianist did any recordings.

“I had a personality conflict with Bob and I left but I had no intention of starting my own label”, Nessa explained.

“A few months later, Roscoe said it was time to do another record. I said ‘I don’t do recording any more for Bob.’ He said “Then do it for yourself.”

Thus Nessa Records was born, and Nessa did the Bowie album (Mitchell actually was the leader but he was under contract to Delmark so the trumpeter’s name was used), followed by “Congliptious” by the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble (Mitchell, Bowie, Favors and drummer Robert Crowder.)

“Then I moved out of town,” said Nessa, who was then working for the Discoutn Records chain, for whom he was to manage stores in Bloomington, Ind. And then Madison, Wis, before being sent to Boston as regional manager for a dozen stores in New England and New York City. During that six-year period he released two Art Ensemble LPs (“People in Sorrow” and “Les Stances a Sohpie” with Fontella Bass), both from tapes made by the group.

“All this time, I was getting deeper and deeper involved in my job with Discount Records and then on the day before Thanksgiving in 1974 I got fired,” he said. The Nessas returned to Iowa for two months and then in May they returned to Chicago. “I decided to try to make a go of the label,” Nessa said.

Using what money was left from his severance check, he bought tapes for “Old Quartet” (N-5) with Mitchell, Bowie, Favors and drummer Phillip Wilson and the label was reborn and soon began expanding its musical base.

Nessa and Terry Martin were spending Monday nights at the Enterprise Lounge on the South Side, listening to tenorist Von Freeman, father of AACM tenor saxist Chico Freeman and brother of guitarist George Freemen and drummer Bruz Freeman.

“After five or six nights there I decided I wanted to make a record with Von and Terry introduced me to him,” Nessa said.

Freeman’s “Have No Fear” (N-6) featured two Freeman group regulars – pianist John Young and bassist David Shipp – plus Wilbur Campbell, Nessa’s suggestion for taking over the drum chair that had been in a state of flux, Campbell was a good choice, reflecting Nessa’s keen ear as a producer, for the drummer drove Freeman to make his most inspired appearance on LP.

That was followed by Warne Marsh’s “All Music” with Lou Levy on piano, Fred Atwood, bass, and Jake Hanna, drums, all members of Supersax, when the LP was recorded in February 1976.

With these two albums, Nessa went back one generation from the AACM and with his nest release went back to still an earlier generation.

Nessa was working for a classical distributing and recording firm at this time, HNH in suburban Evanston whose releases included classical reissues from a Spanish company, Discos Ensayo. A box of records they sent to HNH included a Ben Webster recording.

“I took it home to listen to it and it was terrific,” Nessa said. “Ben plays so well – a combination of his romanticism with tight, concise modernism. I told the people at HNH and they said, “Why don’t you release it?”

He did, as “Did You Call?” and a Lucky Thompson LP from the same source – “Lucky’s best album since the ‘fifties” will follow in the fall.

In the meantime, Nessa also did a two-record Mitchell set, “Noonah”, the reed player’s strongest recorded work to date, cuts from concerts in Berkeley and Switzerland plus three Chicago studio dates with Abrahms, Jarman, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis and others, and also the first domestic album by Air (Henry Threadgill, reeds; Fred Hopkins, bass; Steve McCall, drums), a group Nessa had been trying to record for several years.

Like Nessa’s other AACM productions, it’s a fine release. He has been able to bring out the strengths of these musicians and keep to a minimum their weak points – primarily a certain rambling, unstructured raggedness.

“I’ll do my homework well before a record date,” he explained. “By the time we go in the studio, it will amount to filling in the outline already worked out. We’ll have a week of intense rehearsal before going into the studio. I want to leave as little to chance as possible.”

Note from BeBop

Sorry for typos and transcription errors; I’m a terrible typist and a worse proofreader. If use of this 31+ year old story from a long-defunct magazine runs afoul of any legal or ethical issues, please delete.

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Jazz Magazine seemed to have a Nessa News update every issue (among the six or so that I've pulled out so far): what's being recorded and issued and various interactions with Bob Koester and others. I think the usual writer was named Jerry DeMuth, though I don't have a copy of the magazine at-hand.

Every time I come across one of these updates, I think "He was there...and he's still around".

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I went to high school and college in Iowa City (graduated from UofI in '75). Used to pop into Discount Records there now and then too. Did you work in that store Chuck? There was a guy who worked there named Bob Beals. A real character that one. Knew every classical record ever issued.

Was Hancher Auditorium after your time? I heard Ella, Duke, and Dizzy there in concert. Ella was great, Duke was fine, Dizzy was obviously bored to tears.

greg mo

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I remember that there was a Discount Records store on the first block of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in the 60s. A young Tracy Nelson supported her music career by working as a salesperson there.

I remember that place too. (Gads, was it that long ago?!) And Rather Ripped Records, though I recall that came along later.

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Never worked in that store. I knew Beals from "back in the day" hanging around record stores. Last saw him about 10 years ago. He seemed the same.

Hancher was after my time there.

Yeah, he and Bob Bush used to honcho a shop called "Campus Records" I think, just a few doors down from where Discount opened. I hung out there *a lot*. Bought a lot of RCA Vintage and (God help me) Stereo re-processed Decca Jazz Heritage LPs in those stores! Small world!

greg mo

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Never worked in that store. I knew Beals from "back in the day" hanging around record stores. Last saw him about 10 years ago. He seemed the same.

Hancher was after my time there.

Yeah, he and Bob Bush used to honcho a shop called "Campus Records" I think, just a few doors down from where Discount opened. I hung out there *a lot*. Bought a lot of RCA Vintage and (God help me) Stereo re-processed Decca Jazz Heritage LPs in those stores! Small world!

greg mo

Bob Bush was a great friend in the early '60s when I was there. Campus Records used to be around the corner, west of the Hamburg Inn. All my extra money (and some of my dad's) went into that shop.

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Never worked in that store. I knew Beals from "back in the day" hanging around record stores. Last saw him about 10 years ago. He seemed the same.

Hancher was after my time there.

Yeah, he and Bob Bush used to honcho a shop called "Campus Records" I think, just a few doors down from where Discount opened. I hung out there *a lot*. Bought a lot of RCA Vintage and (God help me) Stereo re-processed Decca Jazz Heritage LPs in those stores! Small world!

greg mo

Bob Bush was a great friend in the early '60s when I was there. Campus Records used to be around the corner, west of the Hamburg Inn. All my extra money (and some of my dad's) went into that shop.

I imagine others are getting tired of reading our little stroll down memory lane, but I too remember Bush as a lovely, gentle man. He was very nice to me in the late 60s when I hung out there and helped guide me toward some better music than I was listening to then.

To generalize this a bit (!), the loss of smaller, often independently owned record stores is a real shame. One can still occasionally find independently owned stores, mostly with used stuff, but they are largely a vanished breed. I guess they gave way to the big chain stores like Peach's and Tower, and then those folded to the internet. Of course, it's possible now to find material we couldn't dream of finding then (when we searched laboriously through Schwann catalogues, ordering and hoping maybe the record would get there in our lifetimes!), but the ambience and occasional educational value of such stores is sorely missed--at least by me!

greg mo

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