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African American Players and West Coast Jazz Labels


Teasing the Korean

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Because that's how records get made....

The Brown/Roach band began in LA, iirc? With Teddy Edwards a.o. Then there was some sort of shakeup where Harold Land came in before the band went out on the road. And then, history.

Didn't Roach take the Lighthouse gig when somebody  took a break? And then once out there, called for Clifford to make a band, etc.?

Trying to remember all this and maybe getting it wrong.

No matter, that was the beginning of the shift, one of them anyway. Bird's drummer came out there, had his act together, and hey, how do you deny THAT? And then, Clifford Brown, again, clean and together in every wayhow do you deny THAT?!?!?!?!?!?!

Brown/Roach, Blakey/Silver, all of a sudden(ish) popular jazz tastes were ready to add something "different", and Max with the Lighthouse Allstars wasn't it. 1954-1956, definitely a shift, not all at once, but a trend that kept trending to the point where I remember reading a lot of contemporaneous press about the Hard Bop "fad", "craze" whatever.

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1 hour ago, Peter Friedman said:

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.

That PJ record puts me in mind of how when foreign royalty comes to town, the social protocols are to have them meet with the various dignitaries of the community,

and of course, what community you are in determines who you think your dignitaries are.

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4 hours ago, JSngry said:

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...

According to Jimmy Heath's autobiography, the Philadelphia police narcotics squad was hell on wheels. As for Frank Morgan, aside from the obvious, his problem was that he was a dyed in the wool con artist .Indeed IIRC that How Frank got busted in addition to drugs, for cheating elderly women out of their savings.I witnessed some behavior from him of that general sort at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago after Frank made his comeback. Willie Picken, who was a member of the rhythm section for that gig and who grew up in Milwaukee with Frank said to me as we shook our heads over what Famk had just tried to pull, "Frank was always that way."

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1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:

According to Jimmy Heath's autobiography, the Philadelphia police narcotics squad was hell on wheels. As for Frank Morgan, aside from the obvious, his problem was that he was a dyed in the wool con artist .Indeed IIRC that How Frank got busted in addition to drugs, for cheating elderly women out of their savings.I witnessed some behavior from him of that general sort at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago after Frank made his comeback. Willie Picken, who was a member of the rhythm section for that gig and who grew up in Milwaukee with Frank said to me as we shook our heads over what Famk had just tried to pull, "Frank was always that way."

Frank Morgan is long since dead, but he seemed pretty well liked when he was in Taos. Maybe he was "conning" the ladies then too. I don't know.

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46 minutes ago, Chuck Nessa said:

I saw him be nasty to sidemen.

That's the incident I witnessed. And Frank was wholly in the wrong in his nastiness there. As Willie Pickens said, when Frank was a kid, whatever happened, it was never his fault. And in this case there was no reason to blame anyone for anything. The band played a set of standard bop lines, blues, etc, in perfectly acceptable fashion. Frank berated Wilbur Campbell, of all people -- and  Wilbur was really bothered by this -- for not following certain routines that Frank  claimed to have had in mind, but as usual at the Showcase there had been no time for any rehearsal. Were Wilbur and Willie and the bassist supposed to read Frank's mind? But again, nothing that they all played was other than what one would have expected to hear on that material in terms of routines. 

 

 

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3 hours ago, BillF said:

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1957 - after the Hard Bop Big Bang, and while they were at Columbia. The band had a brand name now!

per:

https://www.discogs.com/The-Jazz-Messengers-Featuring-Art-Blakey-Ritual/release/7029816

Notes

This album was produced for Pacific Jazz by George Avakian in exchange for a Chet Baker album produced for Columbia Records by Richard Bock
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11 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

According to Jimmy Heath's autobiography, the Philadelphia police narcotics squad was hell on wheels. As for Frank Morgan, aside from the obvious, his problem was that he was a dyed in the wool con artist .Indeed IIRC that How Frank got busted in addition to drugs, for cheating elderly women out of their savings.I witnessed some behavior from him of that general sort at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago after Frank made his comeback. Willie Picken, who was a member of the rhythm section for that gig and who grew up in Milwaukee with Frank said to me as we shook our heads over what Famk had just tried to pull, "Frank was always that way."

Sure, but that doesn't answer the question of how Frank Morgan hooked up with Gene Norman. Was he actually working at the Crescendo, or what?

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Criss was in with Norman Granz at one point, actually did some sides of his own for Clef in 1949, but, you know, Bird, YIKES!

Then...comes 1956(!) and three albums for Imperial (maybe courtesy of Ricky Nelson?)...fast forward to Don Robey & Peacock for an album in 1959...then a 1963 record in France...finally he finds Don Schlitten (or they found each other) in 1966...

I get that Bock needed to make Bud Shank records & Koenig Art Pepper records, and I get that Criss might have difficulties of various types, but jeezus...it is not an accusation of racism to note that the people who were the main creators of the Los Angeles Jazz Recording Infrastructure were not looking at the overall talent base of the city when building their catalogs. Teddy Edwards did indeed record for Contemporary - starting in 1960.

Somebody like Criss or Edwards might well have had the support of a different type of infrastructure had he lived elsewhere. But hey, home is home.

 

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Very considerate of him to invite Vic, who had recently signed with Contemporary. :g

Leroy: Hey, Les, here's who I want on my record...etcetcetc

Les: Sure Leroy, you've been good to us, we'll be good to you now.  Just one suggestion...

Reminds me of the "God's got this chick singer..." joke of years past.

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Very considerate of him to invite Vic, who had recently signed with Contemporary. :g

Leroy: Hey, Les, here's who I want on my record...etcetcetc

Les: Sure Leroy, you've been good to us, we'll be good to you now.  Just one suggestion...

Reminds me of the "God's got this chick singer..." joke of years past.

You may be right in your speculation/suspicion above, Jim, but IIRC Feldman had an immediate impact on the West Coast scene as a whole. And he certainly fit in musically. You or I might have preferred Carl Perkins, but he might have been on the nod.

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Not about Feldman, who certainly stood on his own, just laughing about, oh, here's Teddy Edwards in the role of "outsider" and then here's Vic, who had recently signed with Contemporary.

Vic goes home after the gig and thinks wow, this is going to be great, this deal with Contemporary, gonna be some good work here, glad I moved here! Teddy, otoh, goes home and thinks...

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Harold Land began recording for Contemporary in 1956 as a member of the Curtis Counce Group.

During that same period of 1956-1958 Land recorded a number of times on the West Coast. As well as his own session as leader for Contemporary, he recorded with Herb Geller  with Frank Rosolino, and with Elmo Hope on a few different labels.

Both Teddy Edwards and Harold Land were with Clifford Brown and Max Roach (at different times) which may have been helpful for contacts with record labels?

 

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A rare feat indeed!

I was wondering how Bock got in on Gerald Wilson in such a big way at Pacific Jazz in 1960, and it wasn't reall him, apparently, it was Albert MArx, which makes sense.

http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2017/10/gerald-wilson-then-and-now-1918-2014.html

Richard Bock, president of Pacific Jazz records, had a roster of some of the most prominent musicians in what had come to be called the West Coast Jazz movement. They included Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Bud Shank and Bob Gordon. Bock did not have a big band on his label.

 
"I knew Dick Bock and had followed his work," Wilson told me. "The first time I approached him about recording, in 1953, was at a Billy Eckstine record date I was visiting. And there were other occasions through the '50s when I ran into him and brought it up. He explained that, for various reasons, it was hard to record a big band. But in 1960, he called me. He had set up a deal through Albert Marx to record me."
 
Wilson was under contract to Marx, the president of Discovery and Trend Records. Bock recorded the successful series of Gerald Wilson albums for Pacific Jazz, but Marx owned the records.
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2 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

As well as his own session as leader for Contemporary...

1958.

Although the Fox (1960) came to be on Contemporary, it was not recorded for them. It was recorded by David Axelrod for the HiFi Jazz label.

For that matter...the Counce group didn't put out records until 1957, didn't even do their first session until late 1956, after Clifford Brown was dead.

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