Joel Dorn - RIP

[analogak]

listening to "joel's domain" right now. respect.

[sidewinder]

I'll miss him. His liner notes for 32Jazz were quirky and real. The pricing was excellent and he made the reissue category come alive.

Easy to under-estimate just what he did with 32Jazz - OK, the packaging was weird but for just getting all of that material back out there, including all those Woody Shaws, we owe a major debt.

Edited December 19, 2007 by sidewinder

[Free For All]

OK, the packaging was weird but for just getting all of that material back out there, including all those Woody Shaws, we owe a major debt.

Absolutely! And the Rahsaan stuff too!

I would have loved to have met him, so I could thank him.

Rest In Peace.

[king ubu]

OK, the packaging was weird but for just getting all of that material back out there, including all those Woody Shaws, we owe a major debt.

Absolutely! And the Rahsaan stuff too!

I would have loved to have met him, so I could thank him.

Rest In Peace.

Yes, Woody Shaw and Rahsaan were the finest chapter of the 32jazz reissues to me! The beautiful 3CD set by Rahsaan with live material (and the solo album) - excellent!

Also those mighty fine Sonny Stitt albums, "Tune Up/Constellation" (as "Endgame Brilliance"), "12" etc. - great music!

And the Eddie Harris 2CD set (with four albums, incl. the full sessions with Cedar Walton, Ron Carter and Billy Higgins and more) - another winner!

His notes always put a smile on my face, always!

[Chalupa]

Joel Dorn, Grammy-winning producer

By JOHN F. MORRISON

Philadelphia Daily News

morrisj@phillynews.com 215-854-5573

"IT FEELS like there's a big gaping hole in the universe," said an associate of Grammy Award-winning record producer Joel Dorn.

Kevin Calabro, of Hyena Records, a company Joel helped found, described the "soulful and inspired way he lived his life," the kind of "amazing life you can lead by keeping it real. Joel kept it real to the very end."

Joel Dorn, who grew up in Delaware County and got his start on Philadelphia's jazz station WHAT-FM in the late '50s, died Monday of a heart attack in New York. He was 65.

He was the producer behind many of Atlantic Records' most successful jazz releases in a seven-year association. He also produced for a number of other labels and branched out to include pop music, rock 'n' roll and R&B.

When he started at Atlantic in 1967, "it was an age of musical exploration, in jazz as well as rock, and Dorn's approach behind the boards - fashioning a framework that would allow musicians maximum freedom - brought out the best in such artists as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef and Herbie Mann," wrote John Hagelston, publicist for Warner Music Group.

In 1972 and 1973, Joel won consecutive "Record of the Year" Grammys as producer of Roberta Flack's hits "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song."

Joel, who was born and raised in Yeadon, started his music career while still a teenager as a disc jockey for WHAT-FM. He had a great impact on impressionable young fans like a 13-year-old kid named Jonathan Takiff, now pop-music critic for the Daily News.

"I'd call him up and request songs from people like Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderly and Oscar Brown Jr., and he was nice enough to schmooze with me, even though I was clearly a pipsqueak," Takiff said.

In those days, the late '50s and early '60s, Joel followed Sid Mark doing late night stints on the station.

"He was extremely influential on me as a listener," Takiff said, "helping to develop my taste and knowledge."

Although Joel was a successful DJ, his heart had always been in producing, and he specifically wanted to work for Atlantic Records.

At the tender age of 14, he began sending letters to the label's co-founder, Nesuhi Ertegun.

"I'd send letters telling him who I thought they should duet with Ray Charles, what talent they were missing out on, all sorts of critiques and suggestions," he once said.

The producers were no doubt aware that as a DJ, Joel was pushing many of Atlantic Records' discs, and in 1963, Ertegun offered Joel the chance to produce one record by an artist of his choice.

He chose Hubert Laws, a young flutist he had seen in Philly performing with Mongo Santamaria's band. The resulting album, "The Laws of Jazz," was a success and Nesuhi Ertegun hired Joel as his assistant in 1967.

Altogether, he accumulated 10 gold albums, five platinum albums and seven gold singles before he left Atlantic in 1974.

Besides Roberta Flack's records, Joel produced Bette Midler's debut album, "The Divine Miss M."

"Some of the best times I've ever had involved recording artists who were completely unknown at the time, like Roberta and Bette, and then watching them ascend to national prominence," he once said.

He produced for a variety of labels and artists in subsequent years, and won another Grammy for "Best Country and Western Instrumental" with Asleep at the Wheel's "One O'Clock Jump."

He helped create Hyena Records, an independent label, in 2003.

"Joel bridged the worlds of jazz and pop with enormous skill and grace, never compromising the integrity of his artists and their music," said Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman and chief executive of Warner Music Group.

Joel lived in Bala Cynwyd for a time. He is survived by three sons, Michael, David and Adam (aka Mocean Worker), and his longtime girlfriend, Faye Rosen.

Services: Were being arranged. *

Find this article at:

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/obituaries...g_producer.html

Joel Dorn, 1942-2007

Producing records was his 'art form'

By Dan DeLuca

Inquirer Staff Writer

Joel Dorn, the Grammy-winning record producer from Yeadon who got his start as a jazz DJ in Philadelphia and went on to work with Roberta Flack, Max Roach and Charles Mingus, died of a heart attack on Monday in New York City.

He was 65.

Mr. Dorn got his start in the music business in 1961 as a DJ for Philadelphia radio station WHAT-FM. "The DJ gig was a great way to get to know all record companies and get involved in the business, but I had my heart set on producing the entire time," Mr. Dorn said recently.

In 1967, he moved to Atlantic Records, where until 1974 he worked alongside the label's jazz head, Nesuhi Ertegun - with whom the young Mr. Dorn had begun corresponding when he was 14. Herbie Mann, Les McCann, Eddie Harris and David "Fathead" Newman all recorded for the label in that period.

In 1972 and 1973, Mr. Dorn won back-to-back record-of-the-year Grammys for Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song."

Throughout his career, Mr. Dorn said recently, his strategy was to "bring pop techniques and pop sensibilities to jazz and R & B records." He cited songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and producer Phil Spector as his biggest influences.

"He had a very good ear," Newman, who worked with Mr. Dorn on more than a dozen albums for Atlantic, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "And he also had very good ideas and concepts for the music, a lot of which he got from his experiences as a DJ."

Newman had good reason to pay attention to Mr. Dorn's radio show: the young DJ turned Newman's song "Hard Times" into a hit by opening his WHAT show with it every night.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the saxophonist famous for playing three instruments simultaneously, would only work with Mr. Dorn, recalled his widow, Dorthaan Kirk.

"Rahsaan wasn't easy to work with," she recalled with a laugh. "But he had come to trust Joel. He didn't want to work with anybody but him. And after he died [in 1977], Joel was the single person responsible for keeping interest in his music alive."

Mr. Dorn "was a giant in every way," said producer Hal Willner, the producer and Northeast Philadelphia native who is music director for Saturday Night Live. In an e-mail yesterday, Willner called Mr. Dorn "the funniest man I ever met."

"As a producer he understood record making as an art form like painting, film and literature. His influence is far deeper than the general public will ever realize. He was truly a magician, and the trick never showed."

In 1974, Mr. Dorn, who signed Bette Midler as well as Flack to Atlantic, left the label and went on to produce albums by Lou Rawls, Leon Redbone, Mink DeVille and the Neville Brothers.

Along with knob twiddlers like John Hammond and Joe Boyd, Mr. Dorn, who was celebrated by the Recording Academy in a tribute yesterday as "a true music lover," was was one of the greatest of a brand of producers who weren't musicians, but worked in a broad range of musical styles and shaped the careers of artists they worked with.

When Willner, who apprenticed under Mr. Dorn in the '70s, first went to work for his mentor, "he was mixing Jimmy Scott, doing overdubs on Peter Allen and recording Don McLean. Plus, I got to see two Roland Kirk records done. It was incredible to watch."

Mr. Dorn founded a series of independent record labels beginning in the 1980s, including the Hyena label, whose artists include his son Adam, recording under the name Mocean Worker.

In 1997, he released Songs That Made the Phones Light Up, on his 32 label, a collection of soul and jazz tracks that were favorites in the early days of his music career when he was spinning records for WHAT. He expressed his appreciation for his listeners with a credit line that read: "Produced by the audience of WHAT-FM 1961-67."

Mr. Dorn produced the 13-CD boxed-set history of the Atlantic Jazz years for Rhino and earned a Grammy nomination for a seven-CD John Coltrane set called The Heavyweight Champion. At the time of his death, he was working on a boxed set for the reissue label called Homage a Nesuhi, a tribute to the executive who handed him his first job as a record producer, with flutist Hubert Laws' The Laws of Jazz in 1963.

Mr. Dorn is also survived by his sons David and Michael, and longtime companion Faye Rosen.

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com.

Find this article at:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/obituaries/..._1942-2007.html

[Kalo]

[Chalupa]

Wow. I was just listening to this album

and just realized it was produced by Joel Dorn. This album has to be one of most sampled albums ever released.

Edited January 2, 2008 by J.H. Deeley

[BFrank]

Wow. I was just listening to this album

and just realized it was produced by Joel Dorn. This album has to be one of most sampled albums ever released.

That's a wild album. I didn't realize that it was a popular sample.

[medjuck]

Nice piece here about Dorn by his son.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=17703687