African American Players and West Coast Jazz Labels

[Larry Kart]

Also a Contemporary label offshoot, with Vernon Duke playing an advisory role: The Society for Forgotten Music:

1000 mono /2000 stereo 12 inch series:

SFM 1001mono, 7006 stereo – Mendelssohn: Quartet In E flat and Glinka:Quartet in F - Westwood Quartet [5/58] Released in stereo on Stereo Records 7006.

SFM 1002 mono – Jan Ladislaw Dussek: Piano Music – Hermanns & Stoneridge [6/58] No stereo release.

SFM 1003 mono, 7014 stereo - Works of Chausson: Quartet in A Op. 30 (piano) - Andre Previn and the Roth Quartet [1958] Released in stereo on Stereo Records 7014.

SFM 1004 mono, 7023 stereo - Works of Guillaume Lekeu: Trio in C – Ryshna, Baker And Kaparoff [1958] Release in stereo on Stereo Records 7023.

SFM 1005 mono, 2005 stereo – Michael Haydn Quintets in C & G for Strings – Roth Quartet, Halleux [1959]

SFM 1006 mono, 2006 stereo – Viotti: Quartets in B flat and G for Strings – Baker Quartet [1959]

SFM 1007 mono, 2007 stereo – Mily Balakirev Sonata: Berceuse Nocturne; Valse – Ryshna

SFM 1008 mono, 2008 stereo – Lekeu Piano Quartet; Cello Sonata, Trois Poemes Van den Burg, Duke, McCraken– Ryshna, Baker Quartet

SFM 1009 mono, 2009 stereo – Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Polonaises (12) Sonatas;Suite; Fugue; March – Hermanns (Piano)

SFM 1010 mono, 2010 stereo – Mozart: Andantino in B flat for Cello and Piano Sonata in E for Cello and Piano, Bonifazio Sonata in C for Cello and Piano – Kaufman, Neikrup

 

I have the Viotti; it's a gem; excellent performances by an Israel Baker-led quartet. Wish I had more SFM albums. I believe that the Chausson and Lekeu works have latter-day recordings. There's a fair amount of Dussek on CD now as well. 

[Chuck Nessa]

If we are speaking of obscure Contemporary classical discs, I have S 8501 stereo.

Image is way too dark but..

[Guy Berger]

SoCal’s 1950s-1960s avant-garde Jazz scene was really something... Eric Dolphy, Ornette, Don Cherry, Bobby Hutcherson, Charles Lloyd... then a little later, Horace Tapscott, Arthur Blythe, James Newton, John Carter, Bobby Bradford.  I am sure I am forgetting plenty of great talents.

[Larry Kart]

6 hours ago, Chuck Nessa said:

If we are speaking of obscure Contemporary classical discs, I have S 8501 stereo.

Image is way too dark but..

Now that would be a prize.

[Big Beat Steve]

7 hours ago, JSngry said:

Who would the LA Ike Quebec have been? And who would have valued him?

Maxwell Davis?

Maybe it would be appropriate not to forget that a good deal of the post-war African-American west coast jazz(ish) scene was taken up first by the Central Avenue scene (which was not "West Coast" at all in the sense it became known, although cross-fertilization seems to have taken place, according to some accounts) and then the R&B scene (e.g. Aladdin, John Dolphin and many, many others). This covered a lot of ground of "black music" (and artists like Red Callender and Plas Johnson straddled the fence).

[John L]

19 hours ago, JSngry said:

Wasn't it Shelley Manne who brought Ornette to Contemporary, as a composer?

As I recall, Red Mitchell recommended Ornette to Lester Koenig, but only as a composer.   When Ornette played out some of his compositions for Koenig on alto, Koenig decided that he liked Ornette's own sound and set up the recording date for Something Else!!!

[JSngry]

Might have been Red Mitchell, yeah. and to that end, Red used James Clay on a record. and James Clay was playing with both Ornette and Don cherry.

But that's how it works, you only have access to the business if you know somebody who already has it. What Archie Shepp did to Bob Theile was the exception that proves the rule, and even then, if Trane hadn't intervened...

Another thing that plays into that is the issue of, shall we say, personal habits. The East Coast labels were dealing with that. Bob Weinstock built an empire off of it.  But Lion...look at the early 50s BN records pre Messengers...and Richard Bock and Lester Koenig, they were dealing with a LOT of L.A cats who were either totally clean or "controlled clean"...Chet Baker knew Bock, but could you imagine Dexter during those days trying to connect (no pun intended) with either Bock or Koenig? Who would be running interference on that deal (again, no pun intended)?

Dootsie Williams to the rescue, only...that's a sad record.

We ask if it was racism, and yes, LA in those days was a fiercely segregated city, with a racist power structure, top to bottom. But as it pertains to jazz recordings, the relative isolation of a coordinated, engaged  infrastructure of African-American Jazz recording was probably as much a trailing indicator of a segregated culture impacting workflow az it was anything intentional or conscious.

Sonny Criss, Teddy Edwards, maybe these guys were dealing with some changes in those days, but they could still have benefited from a sympathetic producer like Koenig. But here the issue remains - was he looking for them at all during that time? Why would he be? He's selling plenty of records with that Lighthouse crew, right? And were they looking for him? If they were and he shut them out, shame on him. Edwards certainly worked it out (and please recall that he was one of the early Lighthousers, his recounting of "what happened" should not be taken lightly) , however that came about, great. But, you know...at some point, in some cases, people get the feeling that they're not wanted, so why bother. Maybe they're right, maybe they're not, but that type of cynicism...fact of life.

Just saying, sometimes a desperate impact is the result of intentional and/or systemic racism, sometimes it's just an indicator that things simply are not connected, period.

As it pertains to Fantasy...that seemed to pretty much always be a San-Francisco thing, not LA at all.

 

[John L]

Good points, Jim, although Koenig did make several recordings with Teddy Edwards - Teddy's Ready!, Back Again, Good Gravy, Heart & Soul.

It is true that Sonny Criss went very under-recorded after his time with Imperial and before he signed with Prestige.  I don't know what the story is there. 

  

[Peter Friedman]

Don't recall seeing one of my very favorite jazz pianists mentioned - Carl Perkins. He did a trio session for the DooTone label, was a sideman on that label with Dexter Gordon, as well as his sideman role with The Curtis Counce group on Contemporary

[JSngry]

What are the dates on those Teddy Contemporary sides? First one was in 1960, correct? 1960!

Not looking to throw shade on Koenig, just pointing out that these labels were like any other business - when you have a winning product, you usually don't go looking for something different from somebody you don't really know.

And on from the other side -  if you don't know somebody who has a winning product (or somebody who knows somebody), your incentivization to reach out to them cold is going to be directly proportional to your perception of how that's going to go, considering everything else you see around you.

We like to think that The Family Of Jazz just All Comes Together and None Of This Matters, but that's an attitude that is only possible when looking backwards at the compressions of historical record. Day to day, real-time life as you're living it, that shit's a bitch.

 

[ghost of miles]

21 hours ago, T.D. said:

Definitely. But kinda strange to me, hearing it only after a lot of much later Taylor.

I dimly recall a quote in a profile of revered (by me) engineer Roy DuNann about how he found some of the hyper-modern jazz he recorded for Contemporary very strange*. I always assumed that referred just to Ornette, not knowing of the Taylor album. So I checked the credits and indeed, Looking Ahead! was recorded in Nola Studios, NYC, engineers Tommy Nola and Lewis Merritt.

*it's in Stereophile, https://www.stereophile.com/interviews/402roy/index.html

 "What was it like, in 1958, to come in and set up a session for some new musician you didn't know, and hear Ornette Coleman play like that? Jazz was changed forever from that moment. It must have been incredible. You were there, Roy. What did you think?"

In his inflectionless voice, Roy said immediately, "I would have sent him home."

"You would have sent him home."

"Yeah. I got so I could listen to a lot of the jazz stuff and know where one chorus was going to end and the next one begin. It was important for knowing where to make a splice. But with Ornette, you couldn't tell where you were. It just started out and it ended. It wasn't music at all for me."

From Richard S. Ginell's notes to the Contemporary box-set, which reference the same Stereophile interview:

Oddly enough, (Roy) DuNann was not a modern jazz fan; he liked the country-western tunes that he had been recording over at Capitol, and his favorite act in Koenig's stable was, of all things, the Banjo Kings on Good Time Jazz.  One doesn't have to imagine his reaction to the Ornette Coleman sessions ("I would have sent him home," he told Stereophile Magazine in 2002).  John Koenig remembers that DuNann used to scrawl sarcastic comments in pencil on the tape boxes (he labeled one of the selections from Coleman's first album "Butchered Blues").  Even so, DuNann and his former Capitol colleague Howard Holzer quietly engineered a legacy of recordings that have terrific presence and balance, and still sound better than many of the latest digital wonders.

[sgcim]

23 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Another step, a sad one. The eminently talented Don Christlieb was IIRC in the forefront of those Hollywod film studio musicians  who named names and pretty much ended the careers of a good many of his colleagues. Probably because many of them were European Jewish emigres and had direct experience of Nazism, the older generation of film studio musicians was a fairly Left-Wing group.

There have been a bunch of documentaries on McCarthy and Roy Cohn lately. "Tailgunner Joe" (his air force service was a lot of BS) apparently just used the Red Scare to advance his political career, and couldn't understand it when people held his legal actions against him. After ruining hundreds of lives, he'd put his arm around the shoulder of the opposing attorney and say, "let;s go out and get a drink, buddy", as if it all was just business as usual. He drank his way to an early death.

We have Roy Cohn to thank for training his young protege to attack people if they get in your way.

[Larry Kart]

21 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

You missed where I mentioned the King Cole Trio.  I was thinking of Moore.  I also mentioned Plas and posted a link to one of his two greatest albums.  (I'll let you guess the other one.)

I s

 

22 hours ago, JSngry said:

Think also of Plas Johnson, Oscar Moore, Gerald Wiggins, Teddy Edwards, Red Callender, Sonny Criss, Lawrence Marable, Sonny Clark (sic!)..James Clay, Clora Bryant, who recorded them, and how often? They were there!

But again, look at who was running the labels then, what was selling already, and then where those musicians were, and who was going to call then for a date, and are they going to cold-call, say Richard Bock?

Who would the LA Ike Quebec have been? And who would have valued him?

I see a fair number of Plas Johnson CDs on Amazon and have several myself.

Wasn't Plas Johnson something of a special case? Unless I'm mistaken he was making money hand over fist in the studios for a good many years doing that special Plas thing, and aside from making some good records now and then under his own name for reasons of self-expression and perhaps to some degree ego, he may have had little or no interest into making a career for himself a jazz "soloist." Sonny Criss, for example, would seem to have had no other alternative.

[JSngry]

13 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

I see a fair number of Plas Johnson CDs on Amazon and have several myself.

When were the vast majority of them recorded? During the heyday of "West Coast Jazz"? Probably not?

Plas didn't need the money, the dude was on SO many R&B (and other) records it's not even countable. But he's always been quite a fine jazz player, to the extent that one wants to view those as different musics. But he could have been marketed as a LA Gene Ammons, if you know what I mean, and who was going to do that?

Again, not blaming anybody, not sure that there is anything to blame anybody for, but let's be real about the where's and whats were of the LA-based jazz labels of the early-middle 1950. It wasn't on getting this onto the jukeboxes, ok?

 

 

[Larry Kart]

For Plas to be marketed as an LA-based Gene Ammons he would have to have been willing to take the time and trouble to be so marketed. Given the texture of the rest of his life, economically and professionally,  I would be surprised if he would have been.

I belIeve that most of not all of of Plas' estimable jazz albums were post-"Pink Panther" affairs.

[JSngry]

Gene Ammons had to be marketed?

Other than just being who and what he was, how much marketing was there other than jsut getting somebody to make the records and make sure there were gigs?  It's not like he needed much help past that.

As it pertains to the topic, though, the whole point of the marketing of "West Coast Jazz" and the audience for it in its time was pretty much to NOT be anything like Gene Ammons.

Is this your favorite Lighthouse All Stars record?

Is this your favorite Porky Pig cartoon? I think it's mine.

 

Just saying, if there was any interest among those labels in ANYBODY making Gene Ammons type jazz records, it's not like they couldn't have been made by somebody. But that was not where those labels were at, musically or socially. Again, I wouldn't really call that "racism", at least not as I have known the word (but I'm fully aware that what the word means to me may or may not be in-sync with what it means today...). But it was a musical/sociological reality that played out in record making.

 

[Larry Kart]

No. not my favorite Lighthouse All Stars record.

About Ammons needing to be marketed, I think you misunderstand the social/commercial context to some degree. By the time Ammons albums came to be made, he had essentially and already been marketing himself with and to his audience for some time -- as a vaunted big band soloist with Hines snd Woody Herman, in best-selling recorded tenor battles with Stitt et al., as the maker of numerous juke box 78s, etc. -- I have a multiple CD set full of those. By the time Gene Ammons albums came to be made, he was, so to speak, pre-marketed and pre-sold to his audience.

 

Another factor with the standard West Coast Jazz labels and Ammons-like players. The product those labels were putting out appealed to audiences of a different socio-economic demographic than Ammons-like records would have. Salesmen would sell Pacific Jazz and Contemporary type records to one kind of store and Ammons-type records to another kind of store that might well have been located in a rather different neighborhood. Are the same salesmen going to service both sorts of stores? Perhaps or even probably not. The label owners, I woiuld guess, were aware of this and proceeded accordingly in their a&r choices. But didn't Bock make Les McCann into Les McCann and the Jazz Crusaders likewise?

[JSngry]

8 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

 But didn't Bock make Les McCann into Les McCann and the Jazz Crusaders likewise?

Sure, once the "fad" had faded and a new one begun.

[Teasing the Korean]

12 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

I see a fair number of Plas Johnson CDs on Amazon and have several myself.

Wasn't Plas Johnson something of a special case? Unless I'm mistaken he was making money hand over fist in the studios for a good many years doing that special Plas thing, and aside from making some good records now and then under his own name for reasons of self-expression and perhaps to some degree ego, he may have had little or no interest into making a career for himself a jazz "soloist." Sonny Criss, for example, would seem to have had no other alternative.

Plas is the featured soloist on Les Baxter's "Jungle Jazz" and "African Jazz."  Unfortunately, the current CDs of these albums are sourced from vinyl. 

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Sure, once the "fad" had faded and a new one begun.

I thought your point was, or almost was, that the likes of Bock probably wouldn't  have had had much to do with with two such black-audience-oriented fads, if fads they were, or even would have noticed them in the first place because they weren't in the Pacific Jazz label's stylistic wheelhouse. What was the difference in these cases? 

(P.S. -- I wouldn't call the Crusaders a fad. They had genuine musical value, plus a fair amount of longevity. McCann I never paid much attention to beyond that one groovy BN album he made with S. Turrentine.)  My guess is that, as quirky as Bock probably was, there was more nuance at work here than we might think. In particular, I'll bet that someone Bock knew and trusted pulled his coat to McCann and the Crusaders, and/or they were tearing it up at a venue (the Lighthouse?) where Bock hung out.

BTW, it was the quirky Bock who at about  this time brought out all those Ravi Shankar albums that would adorn so many college dorm rooms.  That would be your "next fad" perhaps? But then I wouldn't be surprised if Bock genuinely loved Shankar's music and placed a bet on it with little or no calculation that it would pay off as it did. But then there was the fad that Bock bet big on and lost -- "Sophie Tucker Sings Yiddish Folk Songs."

[JSngry]

2 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

I thought your point was, or almost was, that the likes of Bock probably wouldn't  have had had much to do with with two such black-audience-oriented fads, if fads they were, or even would have noticed them in the first place because they weren't in the Pacific Jazz label's stylistic wheelhouse. What was the difference in these cases? 

(P.S. -- I wouldn't call the Crusaders a fad. They had genuine musical value, plus a fair amount of longevity. McCann I never paid much attention to beyond that one groovy BN album he made with S. Turrentine.)  My guess is that, as quirky as Bock probably was, there was more nuance at work here than we might think. In particular, I'll bet that someone Bock knew and trusted pulled his coat to McCann and the Crusaders, and/or they were tearing it up at a venue (the Lighthouse?) where Bock hung out.

BTW, it was the quirky Bock who at about  this time brought out all those Ravi Shankar albums that would adorn so many college dorm rooms.  That would be your "next fad" perhaps? But then I wouldn't be surprised if Bock genuinely loved Shankar's music and placed a bet on it with little or no calculation that it would pay off as it did. But then there was the fad that Bock bet big on and lost -- "Sophie Tucker Sings Yiddish Folk Songs."

My point was - and has been from the beginning - that the relative lack of exposure of African-American LA Jazz on labels like PJ & Contemporary was a simple matter of those labels having sprung up to document a certain scene, and then they were fed from within that same scene, because that's how shit works. Go with what you know and who you know unless and until something else comes along. Basic business, really, I mean, did Specialty rush out to record Lighthouse offshoots? Of course not, why would they?

Also part of the ongoing point is that labels like Contemporary & PJ didn't really begin to actively engage in African-American talent until after the Hard Bop Breakthrough of SilverBlakeyCo, once it was established that, ok, THIS is what people are going to buy now. Note that this did not manifest itself in a curtailing of recordings of existing talent, just as an expanding set of faces/names/expression.

It's really not complicated either - instead of looking at the labels' cumulative output, trace it chronologically. The shift in tastes - and catalog - is right there in plain view.

 

 

Oh, by the time it was over, Richard Bock made ALL kinds of records, that guy was eventually eclectic like a mo. But it took him the better part of a decade to start moving. Dude must've dropped some acid one day or something.

see for yourself: https://www.jazzdisco.org/pacific-jazz-records/

same thing for Contemporary: https://www.jazzdisco.org/contemporary-records/

[Big Beat Steve]

20 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Basic business, really, I mean, did Specialty rush out to record Lighthouse offshoots? Of course not, why would they?

 

And when they did - it remained in the can: Frank Rosolino!

Apart from that, your post above sums up the core of it all perfectly IMHO.

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

My point was - and has been from the beginning - that the relative lack of exposure of African-American LA Jazz on labels like PJ & Contemporary was a simple matter of those labels having sprung up to document a certain scene, and then they were fed from within that same scene, because that's how shit works. Go with what you know and who you know unless and until something else comes along. Basic business, really, I mean, did Specialty rush out to record Lighthouse offshoots? Of course not, why would they?

Also part of the ongoing point is that labels like Contemporary & PJ didn't really begin to actively engage in African-American talent until after the Hard Bop Breakthrough of SilverBlakeyCo, once it was established that, ok, THIS is what people are going to buy now. Note that this did not manifest itself in a curtailing of recordings of existing talent, just as an expanding set of faces/names/expression.

It's really not complicated either - instead of looking at the labels' cumulative output, trace it chronologically. The shift in tastes - and catalog - is right there in plain view.

 

 

Oh, by the time it was over, Richard Bock made ALL kinds of records, that guy was eventually eclectic like a mo. But it took him the better part of a decade to start moving. Dude must've dropped some acid one day or something.

see for yourself: https://www.jazzdisco.org/pacific-jazz-records/

same thing for Contemporary: https://www.jazzdisco.org/contemporary-records/

I agree.

[JSngry]

Frank Morgan...without knowing the day-to-day particulars, could Gene Norman have kept him active enough to matter? Or was that guy going to end up like Art Pepper anyway, only without the extended grace period(s) no matter what?

For that matter, how the hell did Frank Morgan hook up (no pun intended with Gene Norman to begin with?

It does seem, from a casual look, that the oppressive environment by/of the LA Police made the whole narcotics thing more harrowing than it did farther east? Not to say that it was easy there, shit, look at Gene Ammons, look at the whole cabaret card thing, but you can see enough stray records in the 1950s on eastern labels that you just don't see from LA labels.

And then there's the cultural aftershock of Stan Kenton...let's not talk about that other than to acknowledge that it happened...

[Peter Friedman]

Both Gene Norman and Pacific Jazz recorded Clifford Brown in 1954. That was while the "West Coast Jazz" phase was in full bloom. Though the session on Pacific Jazz did feature , along with Clifford, a number of  "regular" west coast musicians such as Jack Montrose.