JazzWax

Interview: Brian Wilson on SMiLE

Last week I traveled to Los Angeles to spend time with Brian Wilson at his home in Beverly Hills. My interview with Brian is in today's Wall Street Journal (pick up a copy or go here if you're a subscriber). As the founding member of the Beach Boys and the musical wizard behind the group's most absorbing recordings, Brian also is probably rock's most direct link to the California's jazz scene of the 1950s.

What many jazz fans may not realize is that Wilson modeled the Beach Boys after the Four Freshmen. During our conversation last week, Brian expressed how much he enjoyed the swinging vocal quartet of the 1950s, particularly Four Freshmen and Five Trombones. But once 1960 rolled around and Phil Spector in Los Angeles began producing singles by the Crystals and the Ronettes—dense-packed with instrumentation and overdubbing—Brian fell in love with Spector's Wall of Sound approach to recording.

While Pet Sounds (1966) is widely regarded as the group's finest work and one of the decade's most radical rock albums, the material that Brian recorded next for a project known as Smile is even better. Let me explain:

After Pet Sounds, Brian set to work at home and in the studio writing and recording the music for the Beach Boys' next album. After using LSD and marijuana, he produced inventive tracks illustrating a psychedelic road trip of the U.S., as seen through a teenager's eyes. Brian enlisted the help of lyricist Van Dyke Parks, and through the summer and fall of 1966, they worked industriously on Smile.

Unfortunately, Brian didn't have a George Martin to crack the whip, and his quest for perfection and a layered, textured sound began to buckle under its own weight. By December, it was clear that the album wasn't going to make its January 15, 1967 deadline set by Capitol Records. As the months of the new year dragged on, it became clear to all involved that the music was too surreal, too exotic and ahead of its time. In addition to being a major break from what the Beach Boys' fan base was used to, it was almost impossible to perform the material on stage, where the band's money was being made.

When the album was aborted by Capitol, Brian went into an emotional slide. He already had had a nervous breakdown in 1964 in response to all of the pressure and anxiety he was under to write, play and produce the band's songs while still in his early 20s. But a failed album at the height of the Beach Boys' popularity in 1967 was too much to bear. Brian and the Beach Boys fought for years afterward and only recently reconciled.

You have to remember that in 1966, the Beach Boys were more popular than the Beatles in Britain. And in the U.S., the band was riding a double wave. Mass market fans loved their surf-girls-cars' themed music and more sophisticated fans wanted something more sophisticated like Pet Sounds. The Beatles had abandoned touring earlier in the year and were slipping in popularity.

What's most remarkable is that much of the music for Smile was recorded before the Beatles even began working on Sgt. Pepper's. Which, of course, makes you wonder whether the Smile tapes were shared with the Beatles surreptitiously, since the material hadn't been released at the time.

Long story short, the Smile tapes remained in the Capitol vaults, though many of Smile's songs wound up on subsequent Beach Boys albums in an abbreviated form. Then in 2004, Brian agreed to re-record many of the Smile project's songs (Brian Wilson Presents Smile) and performed them briefly. Now, on Nov. 1, Capitol is finally releasing The Smile Sessions, two-CD and five-CD sets with all of the outtakes and the order in which Brian wanted the material to appear. I find it to be an extraordinary work on many levels.

When I arrived at Brian's home last Wednesday at 1 p.m., Jean, his media rep and assistant opened the glass front door. Brian's home is neo-Spanish in style, with marble staircases and lots of wood paneling. Jean led me back to the home's giant kitchen. There, Brian was waiting for me. As I entered, he stood up and we shook hands. He was wearing baggy chinos and a plaid shirt. I couldn't help but notice that he's taller than I thought he would be—probably around 6'-1" or 6'-2". [Brian Wilson's piano by Marc Myers]

Jean asked where we wanted to chat. I suggested a quiet place. Brian said, "Let's go up to my music room," and up the stairs we went to the second floor.

Once inside Brian's wood-paneled room—jammed with two pianos, dozens of awards and framed gold records—Brian plopped into a leather chair and put a pillow on his lap. He suggested I turn around the desk chair. I flipped on my two digital recorders, and we began to talk about Smile. [Photo by James Minchin III]

This was a difficult interview. Brian is not overly talkative, but not for the reasons you probably imagine. Many people have wrongly labeled him "fried" or "catatonic." But that's not the case. If you've heard his superb recordings made in the past year (the Gershwin album, Listen to Me on Listen to Me: Buddy Holly and the upcoming In the Key of Disney CD), you'd realize much of his brevity has to do with shyness and depression.

But since this issue was the elephant in the room, I asked him about right off the bat. His answer is in today's paper. Among the revelations in our conversation: Performing Good Vibrations makes Brian uneasy; he has only so much tolerance for hearing Smile because of the sour memories recording it; he doesn't regret taking LSD back then; and he didn't see Bob Dylan as competition—only the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector.

Here's what didn't make it into the Wall Street Journal today...

Marc Myers: What was your obsession with youth on Smile?
Brian Wilson: We lose our childhood spirit as we grow older. When you hear this music, it takes you back to your childhood. That’s one of the reasons why we released all the tapes now. We want people to get a taste of what we were into. We want them to flash back to their youth.

MM: Back in ’66, what was driving you?
BW: My youth. I had a lot of youth energy. Look at George Gershwin. He was 26 years old when he wrote Rhapsody in Blue. When you’re young, all that matters is excitement and positive feelings. We have that for only a brief time. Then it’s gone. 

MM: Smile was originally going to be called Dumb Angel?
BW: Yes. I was stoned one night sitting in my office in my home in Beverly Hills. I said to myself, “Dumb Angel. Hmmm, hey that’s going to be the name of the album." I told [lyricist] Van Dyke Parks. He said, "No way. We’re going to call it Smile. I said, "Alright you win." He said, “Alright, I win."

MM: You didn’t put up a fight?
BW: Nah. Smile was better. More happier. No one would have understood Dumb Angel anyway.

MM: Do you hear Smile on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's?
BW: Not at all, no.

MM: You don’t hear Surf’s Up in Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane?
BW: No, no way.

MM: Or your Fire in A Day in the Life?
BW: Oh, the big buildup—interesting.

MM: And the end of Child Is the Father of the Man seems to have found its way into the beginning of Paul McCartney's Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.
BW: I’ll be darned. I never would have thought of that. Yeah, actually.

MM: Could someone have shared Smile's tapes with the Beatles before Sgt. Pepper's was recorded or completed?
BW: Nah.

MM: So you don't think the Beatles heard the Smile tapes before they recorded Sgt. Pepper’s?
BW: No, I don’t think so.

MM: Why are listeners ready for Smile now?
BW: Because people who were young then have grown older. Now they miss their youth. Their minds have grown musically, too. Now they can understand the music we made. A lot of people tell me that when they hear Smile, they feel like a kid again.

MM: Why was Smile abandoned?
BW: We just had enough. Van Dyke and I had come to the conclusion that the music was too advanced. The music would not be appreciated. It’s not really rock and roll. What would you call Smile? [Photo of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in 1966]

MM: Impressionistic psychedelic folk-rock.
BW: Ah, OK. Folk-rock—there you go. Why?

MM: The album has a heart. And it has feelings. It expresses what it’s like to be a kid in an impressionistic way. Most rock to me is about adulthood. Smile depicts the psychedelic magic of childhood.
BW: I love that. You coin those just right. By the way, I still love to listen to Phil Spector's records. You can write that.

MM: What do you like about them?
BW: The teenage drama. The tension. I love Be My Baby [the Ronettes], Da Doo Ron Ron [the Crystals], River Deep Mountain High [Ike & Tina Turner]. And… I can't think of it...

MM: The Ronettes' Walkin in the Rain?
BW: Whoa! Now you’re talking business. You're talkin' business now.

MM: Since most people will be importing Smile into iTunes, should they change the order of the master takes in the folder? Or leave it as is?
BW: They should leave it as is. Because it’s the adventure I want them to take, the order it is now.

At the end of the interview, Brian asked me to come out back with him. Down the stairs we went and out the back door to a sitting area, with a fenced-in swimming pool across a short distance of lawn. Brian originally had agreed to let me tag along on his daily walk. But I sensed he wanted to ask me if he could return to the studio, where he spends much of his time. Then he asked me just that.

What was I going to do, insist that Brian Wilson—the guy who shaped the California surf sound in the early 1960s and pioneered the concept album and psychedelic rock album mid-decade—live up to his agreement? "Of course, Mr. Wilson, we're good," I said. At which point he jumped up and thanked me. In the house, he graciously signed my copy of his autobiography, said he loved our chat and headed out the front door. [Photo by James Minchin III]

As I stood inside the rotunda of his home's entrance, I watched Brian walk off down the stairs of his house to the driveway with a bounce, happy as a lark on a perfectly warm sunny day.

JazzWax tracks: You'll find The Smile Sessions available in multiple formats on November 1. The full box is here, a two-CD set is here and vinyl is here.

JazzWax notes: If you're interested in more information on Brian, Smile and the entire rock scene in Los Angeles in the '60s, I recommend the following books: Brian Wilson: Wouldn't It Be Nice (go here), Domenic Priorie's Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece (go here) and Domenic Priorie's Riot on Sunset Strip (go here).

JazzWax clip: Here's Heroes and Villains from Smile. Keep in mind, this was being recorded months before the Beatles went into the studio to record Sgt. Pepper's...

 

Here's Surf's Up from Smile. Sounds a bit like Surf's Up wound up in the Beatles' Lovely Rita about 3:30 in...

 

And here's Child Is the Father of the Man. At about 1:06, I hear the intro to what would become Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey...

 

And for you Four Freshmen fans, here's Brian and the Beach Boys singing Graduation Day...

 

Tad Hershorn: Norman Granz (Pt. 4)

Like the late Steve Jobs, Norman Granz was someone who loved exceptionally creative people and helped make technology accessible to millions of consumers. In the case of Granz, that technology was jazz ablums. In Tad Hershorn's Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), we learn things about Granz we didn't know before. Among them are revelations that Granz had a strong leftist background, that he took big risks as a major advocate for civil rights in the early 1940s, that he was one of jazz's biggest champions who had a national vision for its popularity, that he was a shrewd businessman who fully understood the record industry and the mass market, and he knew how to turn great musicians into stars through buzz, synergistic tours and monumental recordings. Rock 'n' roll would use Granz's package-tour approach throughout the '50s with great success. [Photo at top of Ella Fitzgerald and Norman Grantz at the Hollywod Bowl in August 1973 by Paul Slaughter]

In Part 4 of my conversation with Tad, the author and archivist talks about Granz's business smarts and his passion for the American Songbook...

JazzWax: Granz in 1947 became head of Mercury’s jazz division. Why?
Tad Hershorn: By aligning himself with Mercury, Granz was able to use their studios and staff, and develop his recording chops with the understanding that the master recordings he made belonged solely to him. His deal stipulated that he was free to walk with the masters when he decided to leave Mercury and start his own company. 

JW: Why was this a sticking point with Granz?
TH: Early on, Granz was associated with record producer Moe Asch, who was responsible for releasing some early volumes of Jazz at the Philharmonic and a few other Granz recordings. But when Asch filed for bankruptcy, those recordings were forever out of Granz's reach, since they were attached to Asch’s financial settlement. Granz vowed that would not happen again.

JW: What was the purpose of Granz’s many labels?
TH: Granz's first label was the Clef series on Mercury beginning in 1948. This arrangement continued until the end of the agreement in 1953, when he established the independent Clef Records label. A year later, he founded Norgran Records, which he said helped solve distribution problems that arose when so many records were issued on the Clef label. He then folded both labels, along with Lu Watters' traditional Down Home Records, into Verve Records at the beginning of 1956 after acquiring Ella Fitzgerald's recording contract.

JW: What is Granz's role in reviving and aggrandizing the American Songbook?
TH: He played a huge role in giving these songs a hugely prestigious and honored position in our culture. Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook albums remain healthy and steady sellers and evidence of this enduring legacy. But Granz was just one of many important factors in the ‘50s that elevated traditional Tin Pan Alley songs. The decade had been defined by the success of Frank Sinatra in the late ‘40s. His success brought singers to the forefront and further demoted bands from their dominant perch during the swing era. [Photo of the Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe passing the time on a train platform on a snowy day in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1947, courtesy Hank O’Neal]

JW: What about the rise of the 12-inch album in the mid-'50s.
TH: Yes, of course. The LP made its mark by providing a new platform for the vocal. The era also was characterized by superb arrangers groomed in the big bands, most notably Nelson Riddle. His arrangements propelled the career of Nat Cole, all but saved Sinatra’s and, later, assisted Fitzgerald and Granz in finishing the songbook albums and many other projects in the years that followed. [Photo of a November 1953 reception for JATP in Tokyo, which included being driven through the streets in open convertibles, courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University]

JW: Granz’s approach, of course, was a bit different than Capitol’s.
TH: The albums Sinatra recorded for Capitol in 1954, as well as Fitzgerald’s songbooks beginning with Cole Porter two years later, point to two different approaches in enhancing the status of what came to be known as standards. Sinatra accomplished this with mood albums incorporating his proven technical mastery at its peak and a singing style forged by the dramas of his larger-than-life romp through American life. [Photo of Norman Granz and Oscar Peterson posing at the base of the Russian War Memorial in East Berlin in the '50s, courtesy of Hank O’Neal]

 

JW: And Fitzgerald?
TH: She bathed the standards with her near-perfect voice, relatively straight readings and exquisite diction. All three combined to render encyclopedic collections of both the most famous as well as lesser-known works, many of which gained new currency because of their inclusion in her songbooks. Of course, developing albums for Ella with a single songwriter's compositions in mind wasn't a Granz invention. Decca in 1950 recorded and released Ella Sings Gershwin, her first 10-inch LP. Granz, however, formalized the model.

JW: What was most startling about Granz's oversight of the songbook project?
TH: That he had pressured an initially resistant Fitzgerald to learn all the verses of the songs, which he rightly believed added authenticity and a level of authority over the material. Her command over the work sustained her for the remainder of her 56-year career.

JW: And yet these standards were being recorded just as new teen music was being written for early rock and rollers.
TH: John McDonough’s comments in Down Beat when Fitzgerald died in 1996 sums this up:

“[Just as Fitzgerald began recording the songbooks in 1956], the barbarians were already at the gate… The [Elvis] Presley phenomenon and the rock ’n roll revolution that issued from it would signal the collapse of the composer’s place in American popular music. That it should happen precisely at the moment Miss Fitzgerald offered a new perspective on its appreciation and demonstrated that their work could be treated in a definitive manner as a body of literary work seems an astonishing irony. The songbook project would become an unexpected and historic elegy to a vanishing age of literacy, intelligence and elitism in American music.” [Photo of Elvis Presley in 1956]

JW: Where do you suppose Granz's fealty for standards comes from?
TH: Granz saw George Gershwin in person 10 months before his death on July 11, 1937. Granz was a UCLA student at the time and on campus when it was announced that Gershwin would perform the school’s new fight song in the gymnasium. Granz was in the audience when Gershwin reworked a version of a previous hit as Strike Up the Band for UCLA. This reference showed up in transcripts of taped conversations between Granz and his wife Grete [pronounced Greta] in 2000 and was confirmed by a brief item in the Los Angeles Times.

JW: Granz knew Ira Gershwin, yes?
TH: Yes. Granz’s friendship with Ira Gershwin actually preceded the recording of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book. Ira Gershwin was the lyricist for many of his brother’s classic melodies and was the only honoree besides Duke Ellington whom Granz invited to participate in the songbook project for fear of undue interference. 

JW: What did Gershwin do for the Fitzgerald date?
TH: He made some slight adaptations of lyrics. Granz and Gershwin's friendship was long-lasting. In 1959, Ira Gershwin presented Granz with two self-portraits and three self-portraits of his brother, along with an early lead sheet of It Ain’t Necessarily So in George’s hand as well as additional sketches.

JW: By the way, what happened to Granz’s art collection?
TH: Granz sold off a sizable part of the collection built up during the ‘60s at a Sotheby’s auction in London on April 23, 1968. The Picasso portion of the auction, one of the first blockbuster events of its type, was telecast live on the BBC.  The magnitude of the sale in sheer numbers, along with another that same month in New York, allowed art dealers to establish prices of the work of several major modernists.  Granz retreated more and more to his dealings and contacts within the world of art as his active involvement in jazz waned.

JazzWax pages: Tad Hershorn's biography, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), is available here.

JazzWax note: If you're in New York tonight, Tad Hershorn will be hosting a "Listening Party" at 7 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Tad will talk about his book and play audio and video clips of Norman Granz. For more information, go here.

JazzWax clip: Here's one of my favorite tracks from Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin songbook album...

 

Tad Hershorn: Norman Granz (Pt. 3)

Tad Hershorn spent decades working on Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press). For his newly published biography, Tad interviewed Granz multiple times before his death. Though Tad had enormous respect for Granz and his accomplishments on behalf of jazz and civil rights, he maintains a steely objectivity in his writing, determined to paint a portrait of Granz that's both detailed and honest, warts and all. [Photo of Tad Hershorn by Ed Berger]

Among the most intriguing parts of the book are the sections that tightly render Granz's clashes with heavyweights in the music industry. Most surprising of all, perhaps, is Granz and Frank Sinatra's mutual animosity. Granz fairly or unfairly brands Sinatra a boor and a racist. Much of Granz's beef with Sinatra was professional and his displeasure with the callous and shabby way in which Sinatra treated black jazz greats.

In Part 3 of my four-part interview with Tad, the author and archivist talks about Granz's early sensitivity to social and racial issues as well as the Granz-Sinatra feud:

JazzWax: What was the most mind-blowing thing you learned about Granz’s early years?
Tad Hershorn: By tracking down Archie Green in San Francisco in July 2001, I was able to gain insight into what shaped his youth. Granz and Green had become close during their days at Theodore Roosevelt High School in the racially and ethnically mixed Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles between 1932 and 1935. “The best thing that happened to me in high school was meeting Archie Green,” Granz wrote in a passage from his unfinished autobiographical writings.

JW: What did those two share in common?
TH: Green, like Granz, was the son of Ukrainian Jews who had fled their homeland around the turn of the last century. Green, whose father was a socialist, had known Granz’s parents and steered Granz’s insatiable thirst for knowledge toward such opinionated publications as The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. They also attended what Green called “New Deal Culture,”—Works Progress Administration’s productions of The Hot Mikado and The Swing Mikado, the Sinclair Lewis play It Can’t Happen Here, as well as Duke Ellington’s racially aware musical Jump for Joy, which played at Los Angeles’ Mayan Theater for three months in 1941.

JW: So Granz was socially conscious from an early age?
TH: Yes. Green went on to a storied career in folklore and folk music and the history of working people and labor unions, virtually inventing the field of “laborlore.” As Green once said, “I went vernacular, and Granz went jazz.” The highlight of Green’s career came after lobbying in the halls of Congress almost single-handedly for 10 years when the law creating the American Folklife Center at Library of Congress passed in 1976.  [Photo of Norman Granz and Nat Cole posing backstage after the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert on July 2, 1944, courtesy of Jean Bach]

JW: Both went folk, in some ways, if one considers jazz essentially black folk music.
TH: That two such major American cultural figures emerged from one high school is nothing short of amazing. Talking with Green about his lifelong friend was like a college short course in Granz’s early life and intellectual development. It is rare enough to find contemporaries when chronicling the lives of people of advanced age. But Green was singular in being able to share his detailed experiences and observations and to interpret Granz on such an intimate level.

JW: How does Granz's exposure to New Deal arts and criticism affect his choices early on?
TH: We see it in Granz’s deep commitment to civil rights dating back to the beginning of his career in 1942. He was in communication with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations by mid-decade. Early on he also adopted confrontational direct action strategies that did not come into wider use by other civil rights activists until the ‘50s and ‘60s. Granz’s uniqueness among 20th century progressives cannot be overstated in upholding what was in the ‘40s a radical social agenda while finding a way to make it pay. [Pictured: Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet in the Houston police station following a racially motivated arrest in October 1955. Photo from the  Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, courtesy of Tad Hershorn]

JW: Granz seems like the type who held grudges. Did he?
TH: Yes. According to Virginia Wicks, his publicist in the ‘50s, he actually kept a grudge list. He forgave few slights, mistakes or breaches of integrity. Things were right or wrong. And he liked something or somebody—or he didn’t. One example is his attorney, who had negotiated the non-compete clause that MGM added that wound up keeping Granz out of the recording studio for seven years following the sale of Verve. Granz resented that clause and held his attorney partly responsible. Although he and his lawyer had had a friendly relationship over the years, the lawyer sadly concluded that an invisible wall had come between them that never lifted.

JW: What about musicians?
TH: He didn’t like Frank Sinatra, who had a special place in the hell of Granz’s deepest, most enduring animosity.

JW: Why?
TH: The episode that apparently kicked off their animosity occurred in the late ‘50s, when Sinatra, according to Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist Lou Levy, had Granz removed from a television studio.

JW: What happened?
TH: Granz had suggested material that the two singers might perform together. Sinatra didn’t like that at all. Levy shared the story with another of Ella’s accompanists, Paul Smith, who later passed it along to Fitzgerald biographer, English jazz historian Stuart Nicholson. 

JW: I don’t recall reading that in Nicholson’s book.
TH: When Granz saw the English edition of the book in 1994 with that story in there, he hit the roof. He threatened to sue Nicholson in Britain, where libel suits are far easier to prosecute than in the U.S., if Nicholson did not excise the story in the American edition, where it indeed did not appear.

JW: How did this animosity spill over into music?
TH: For one, it dashed Sinatra’s hopes of buying Verve in 1960. Sinatra was prepared to match any offer. His only condition was that Granz continue to oversee operations, which ran counter to Granz’s irrevocable choice to retire from the record business. Granz also balked at the prospect of regular dealings with Sinatra. So Granz unloaded Verve to MGM, while Sinatra established Reprise Records with the assistance of former Verve executive Mo Ostin, then on the threshold of an illustrious 50-year career at the top of the record industry.

JW: Did Granz and Sinatra clash again?
TH: The most rancid expression of Granz’s contempt for Sinatra came in the form of a 1975 letter that he wrote New York Times’ jazz critic John S. Wilson on the occasion of The Big Show. The blockbuster event teamed Sinatra and Fitzgerald with the Count Basie Orchestra at New York’s Uris Theater in September of that year.

JW: What was the issue?
TH: Wilson lamented in print that Basie band didn't receive enough playing time, which was a veiled barb at Sinatra. After returning to California following the show’s launch, Granz said in the letter that Sinatra had bullied Ella and Basie into accepting his programming changes. He also switched closing numbers with Fitzgerald, while trimming the band’s portion of the program. Granz knew that Ella and Basie were loath to make waves with Sinatra on such matters.

JW: It sounds like their feud was personal.
TH: Actually, much of Granz’s displeasure with Sinatra had to do with professional issues. Granz accused Sinatra of being a racist, pointing to remarks he had made onstage about Lena Horne when the Sinatra-Fitzgerald-Basie extravaganza first premiered in Las Vegas in 1974. As he wrote in his letter to John Wilson, “This arrogance carries over into his allotment of time to artists whose asses he couldn’t wipe today… I thought you might like some of the insights as to what really goes on backstage. I think it was a great insult to Basie that he wasn’t given a decent time to play.” This is from the John S. Wilson Collection at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

JW: One wonders whether their animosity altered recording history.
TH: Oh, it did. Their revulsion for each other had profound consequences. By ultimately stymieing golden opportunities for Sinatra and Fitzgerald, the two premier singers of the '50s did not record together, though they did appear on stage together quite a bit. Both Granz and Sinatra had formidable power within their realms. But Sinatra’s unique and unprecedented level of fame, alloyed with that power, trumped anything Granz could muster in their few but memorable skirmishes. [Photo of Ella Fitzgerald and Norman Granz in 1964 by Roberto Polillo]

JW: What was Granz’s relationship like with Duke Ellington?
TH: Granz made it clear on several occasions that he had a greater love for Duke Ellington’s music than for the man himself. And the feeling was mutual. That said, Granz made important contributions to the bandleader’s success when he toured the band to Europe in 1958 and again the following year. He also brokered Ellington’s break into scoring major motion pictures with Anatomy of a Murder and Paris Blues. Their dealings, which notably included Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book, continued well into the late '60s, when the two men had a bitter falling out. [Photo of Norman Granz making a point to Duke Ellington during one of the tours promoted by Granz in the late '50s, courtesy of Tad Hershorn]

JW: Did they ever patch things up?
TH: Their relationship healed toward the end of Ellington’s life in 1974. Ellington had made two recordings for Granz, and Granz posthumously issued a handful of earlier performances from the bandleader’s vault for his last label, Pablo Records.  They last saw one another a couple of days before Ellington’s death from cancer at a New York hospital. Granz also was among the first people Ellington’s sister Ruth Ellington Boatwright reached out to with news that Duke had died.

JW: And yet Granz had enormous respect for Ellington’s art.
TH: One of Granz’s lesser known gifts to Duke was managing the band from time to time for free in what Granz saw as a service to jazz. Granz also prodded Ellington to overcome his fear of flying. This would allow the band to bypass time-consuming modes of transportation, book more dates, and exponentially boost income. According to Clark Terry, Ellington was an immediate convert to air travel after what for him was a terrifying flight into West Berlin.

JW: What happened?
TH: Duke worked over a set of worry beads when he saw the pilot walking down the aisle. Only later did he learn that the plane was on automatic pilot.

Tomorrow, Tad takes rapid-fire questions, and we talk about Granz's impact on the American Songbook.

JazzWax pages: Tad Hershorn's biography, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), is available here.

JazzWax note: If you're in New York this Thursday, Tad Hershorn will be hosting a "Listening Party" at 7 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Tad will talk about his book and play audio and video clips of Norman Granz. For more information, go here.

JazzWax clip: Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sang together numerous times. In almost each case on-camera, Sinatra seems slightly intimidated by Fitzgerald's vocal power and dexterity, not to mention her licorice-smooth intonation. One can only assume Sinatra rightfully feared having his voice, as fine as it was, compared with hers, back to back. Among their many encounters, this one is my favorite (apologies that the clip is slightly out of sync)...

 

Tad Hershorn: Norman Granz (Pt. 2)

Norman Granz wasn't a complicated man. He was merely an entrepreneur who loved highly creative people and felt their brilliance deserved wider recognition. Once you understand this about him, much of what comes next falls neatly into place. For years Granz has been considered an enigma because most people like him tended to go into other lines of work or rarely cared as much as he did about the creative people in their employ.

Through Tad Hershorn's new biography Norman Granz: the Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of  California Press), we now see a picture of someone who championed genius and spent so much time around major artists that he cared little for those who weren't among his favorites. To Granz, art mattered more than almost everything else, a passion and viewpoint that is exceedingly rare among to today's successful entrepreneurs.

In Part 2 of my conversation with Tad, the author and archivist talks about how Granz pulled high-level jazz out of the smokey clubs and put it on the stages of concert halls, and why art and artists held a special place in Granz's heart:

JazzWax: Your book’s subtitle says Granz used jazz for justice. How so?
Tad Hershorn: Granz’s overriding aim was to challenge segregation in theaters, hotels, trains, buses and society at large, using jazz as his medium. He also strived to show that good money could be made in jazz, and he was quick to spread the wealth down to those who created the music. Their dignity and well-being were of the utmost importance to him. [Photo of tenor saxophonist  Lester Young and Granz signing autographs around 1947, courtesy of Tad Hershorn]

JW: Was part of Granz’s motivation a desire to see jazz elevated to classical music’s level?
TH: Granz’s vision for jazz’s long-term prominence as an art form was explicitly stated in many early press accounts as well as in his concert programs. In 1944 he wrote, “A good concert is better for music-making than a nightclub full of patrons more interested in drinking than listening. A good acoustically alive theater or hall is the best place to hear jazz. A dark, smoky cellar may look romantic in the small hours, but late night sessions produce more bad music than people are capable of realizing at the time.” Granz's motive was to gain acceptance for a form of music that he always found astonishing and exciting.

JW: But there was always the risk of stiffening jazz in the process, no?
TH: Granz worked to overcome the rigidity of the concert-hall sites. Nevertheless, he took flak from many different corners regarding his phenomenally successful shows. Grief came from critics who believed jazz did not have a place in august cultural palaces such as concert halls. Others felt that jazz did not have to prove itself outside of its traditional environment, which had nurtured the music. And then there were those who did not care for JATP’s exhibitionist ways. Granz didn’t care about any of it. He was more than satisfied to present JATP before the multitudes whose enthusiasm and dollars left critics in the dust as far as he was concerned.

JW: Was part of his motive for large-scale events simply a need to generate revenue?
TH: Absolutely. Granz explained to me that his cumulative weekly salaries approached $20,000 by the early ‘50s and required venues large enough to make his payroll. To fill halls, he constantly looked for ways to emphasize the entertainment value in an effort to sell out houses. His attitude about his critics was pretty much “screw ‘em.” To Granz, he had taken jazz to places outside of New York that they’d never heard of. He also felt that his critics had no clue about business matters or the burdens of keeping a show on the road. [Photo of Jazz at the Philharmonic musicians posing on the tarmac in Honolulu en route to Tokyo in October 1953, courtesy of Hank O’Neal]

JW: By today's standards, Granz seems to have had it right.
TH: Granz’s vision of taking jazz outside the nightclub and onto the concert-hall stage presaged the establishment of Jazz at Lincoln Center by decades. He sensed the attrition of jazz’s originators and that the music would eventually reach a repertory stage. By the late ‘80s, with the sale of Pablo Records in 1987, Granz sadly concluded that jazz had passed him by. 

JW: Why was he so detached from the jazz scene?
TH: Most of jazz’s newer movers and shakers in the '60s and beyond were little more than names to him. That feeling was only enhanced by his self-imposed exile from the jazz scene by living in Europe. He was saddened and embittered by the ongoing depletion of the giants whose careers he had helped and whose music he had recorded. Their hallowed names, for Granz, embodied jazz itself. Nothing else would do. [Photo of Norman Granz writing on his balcony in Geneva, Switzerland, about three months before his death of cancer on November 22, 2001, courtesy of the Grete Granz Collection]

JW: Much of his success rested on jazz’s adaptation of the 12-inch LP in the mid-‘50s, yes?
TH: Absolutely. Granz pounced on the advent of the long-playing 10-inch record in the late ’40s. The same was true with the 12-inch LP. He imagined that the LP would benefit jazz two ways: First, the 20-plus minutes contained on each side of a 12-inch disc could capture entire extended jam sessions that were his bread and butter and first love. In the days of the 78-rpm record, solos had to be spread out over three or four discs. Second, he saw the more meaningful sequencing of songs and the possibility for concept albums devoted to single composers, for example.

JW: Why did Granz move from Los Angeles to New York in the late '40s?
TH: Just as Jazz at the Philharmonic was constantly on the move, so was Granz in the early years as his enterprises took form. First, Granz and JATP were a Los Angeles story—but only until he established himself as a force in jazz in 1945. Then Granz promoted concerts in New York, becoming the head of the jazz division of the newly founded Mercury Records in 1947.

JW: And then he was back in California.
TH: Yes. Granz worked out of the offices of a Detroit advertising executive in 1948 and early 1949 after meeting his first wife. They had one child, who was born with development disabilities, and soon moved to California along with a daughter from his wife's previous marriage. Granz established permanent offices at 451 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills in 1952, which served as headquarters for his record labels, concerts and management operations for Ella Fitzgerald. [Pictured, the address and new building today, using Google Maps]

JW: Why did he move to Switzerland in 1959?
TH: Granz knew that Europe was destined to be his ultimate home after his initial trip there in 1950. Particularly in later years, he transacted much of his business by phone, since he loathed time-consuming face-to-face meetings that cramped a way of life that was both intensely focused and laid back.

JW: Granz sold Verve to MGM in 1961. Why?
TH: The sale of Verve was negotiated during much of 1960 and culminated in the final transaction in January 1961. The price tag was around $2.8 million, which Granz received in Deutschmarks, which were then stronger than the dollar. By then he was in Europe enjoying a new lifestyle.

JW: Was it a good deal?
TH: Whether the sale or its timing was a good or bad move is not obvious at first glance. Granz’s attorneys tried to dissuade him on the grounds that Verve would become an even more valuable property within a few short years. Of course, Granz could have made out well in the rising rock market by hiring young producers to sign emerging and top talent for his label. But Granz was never a conventional businessman. As with his abandonment of domestic touring of JATP after 1957, he wanted out of the recording business, and only a clean break would suffice.

JW: Was there a drawback to the sale?
TH: The negative side effect was that Granz reluctantly agreed to a seven-year, non-competition contract that kept him out of recording studios—except for continuing to produce most of Ella Fitzgerald’s records in the sixties.

JW: What did he do with profits from the sale?
TH: Granz took the money and immediately began amassing a vast world-class collection of modern art. He had long haunted art museums and galleries across Europe and the U.S., developing an eye for fine art and, later, the art of the art deal. Granz's self-education in art finds its analogy in how he learned the concert and recording business, cooking, literature, philosophy, politics, economics and any number of other topics of interest to him. [Pictured: Seated Woman by Pablo Picasso, an oil painting that is part of the Norman Granz Collection]

JW: Did he run out of money?
TH: Hardly. In the ‘60s, art collectors like Granz could acquire museum-quality works by Picasso from across every period and style for just tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, in the coming decades those same works would fetch millions. 

JW: So was art collecting a business move?
TH: No. He bought neither for investment nor social cache. He acquired what he liked in bulk and even became friends with Picasso, in part because Picasso admired his great eye for the artist’s tougher, more offbeat works. Granz’s holdings by the late ‘60s represented an immense fortune if it had been kept together. [Photo of Pablo Picasso and Norman Granz posing with Ping-Pong paddles in the late '609s, courtesy of the Grete Granz Collection]

Tomorrow, Tad talks about two mindblowers he encountered while researching Granz's life, and why Granz held grudges.

JazzWax pages: Tad Hershorn's biography, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), is available here.

JazzWax note: If you're in New York this Thursday, Tad Hershorn will be hosting a "Listening Party" at 7 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Tad will talk about his book and play audio and video clips of Norman Granz. For more information, go here.

JazzWax clip: Here's Charlie Parker and strings in 1952 with Stella by Starlight, a session held under the "personal supervision of Norman Granz..."

 

Tad Hershorn: Norman Granz (Pt. 1)

Norman Granz played perhaps the single biggest role in the spread of small-group jazz in the years following World War II. As a concert promoter and record company founder, Granz had tireless drive, an undiminished passion for the music and musicians, and a buzzsaw personality that came in handy along the way. Yet little is known about what made him tick or how he managed to promote bebop's popularity and legitimize the American Songbook.

Until now, that is. Tad Hershorn's just-published book, Norman Granz: the Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), provides an in-depth and analytic look at the impresario. Tad is an archivist at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University and over the years had extensive access to Granz and those who knew him best. (Full disclosure: the University of California Press is also publishing my book on jazz in the fall 2012.)

In Part 1 of my multi-part conversation with Tad, he reflects on Granz's flinty personality, how Jazz at the Philharmonic got its name, and Granz's role as bebop's early champion:

JazzWax: Was Norman Granz a cranky guy?
Tad Hershorn: Granz’s feistiness was an open, non-secret from the beginning of his career. A copy of Jazz at the Philharmonic, Volume I in Granz’s personal collection is signed by most of the musicians featured, including a sketch of Granz by David Stone Martin [pictured]. Martin added the following inscription: “For Norman Granz, whose criticism can be heard—without a mike.” Granz lived up every bit to his legendary, consistent crankiness and irascibility.

JW: How did you find him during your interviews?
TH: Dealing with him by phone for over five years leading up to four face-to-face meetings—including his last interviews in Geneva in May 2001—was always touch and go, just more intense in person.
 
JW: How so?
TH: I’ve come to look at it this way: The only thing we all share in common is time. Great men with energy and large purpose like Granz employ proven ways of continuously clearing debris between them and their objectives. His brusqueness was one way he took command of a situation to expedite things. His temper and fearlessness allowed him to cut to the chase—whether he was negotiating contracts or facing down racist detectives. 

JW: What was behind it?
TH: Granz did not suffer fools or even the well intended and well informed. I first met him in March 1980 at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, my hometown. Ella Fitzgerald was appearing there for two weeks. I had photographed his artists during the years his Pablo label was in operation and offered my images for free in exchange for his records. Four cases of Pablo Records ended up on my doorstep within two weeks. To complete the bargain, we arranged that I would call Granz from the lobby of his hotel at 10:30 a.m. to show him the images.

JW: What happened?
TH: I called him at 10:25. He answered and said, “You’re early. I’m on the phone to Europe, and I have more important things to do than come down and look at your pictures. I’ll be down in 10 minutes.”

JW: What happened when Granz came down?
TH: He began perusing my book of photos as if they were blank pages. “You know,” he said, “my records are so esoteric that people would buy them even if they were in grocery bags.” Despite his initial remarks, Granz did use some of my photos for covers, beginning with the back cover photo of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Antonio Carlos Jobim Song Book, a photo that was also used as Ella's standard PR photo in the eighties. Other photos for covers included A Classy Pair: Ella and Basie, Easy Living (Ella and Joe Pass), Basie and Friends and Fancy Pants, Basie's last album, 1986.

JW: Was Granz always so sweet at first?
TH: Twenty-one years later, we met at his apartment. It was appropriately named “House of Picasso” for its 30 drawings and a sculpture by the master. As I fumbled through my two identical black bags for a fresh tape to record him, Granz said in his chilly, flat tone, “You’re probably smarter than you present yourself.” [Photo of Norman Granz in front of Picasso's drawing of Ella Fitzgerald by Tad Hershorn]  

JW: Ultimately, how did you two get along?
TH: Granz and I never bonded.  Although that would have been a fitting and desired end from my perspective, it was not necessary for me to chronicle his life.  He was one of my heroes—then and now. 

JW: And yet Granz was pretty generous.
TH: He was. He could be generous in both what he said and did. Granz frequently and quietly provided financial gifts to many musicians whose fortunes had slipped or were suffering from illnesses. He did this quietly to avoid calling attention to himself or compromising the dignity of the musicians.

JW: But from a jazz perspective, what exactly irritated Granz so consistently?
TH: He felt that America was behind the curve in honoring its major cultural contributors. That tone spilled over, and he could be provocatively rude to those he did not consider to be his equal. His temper might also have been a defense mechanism to hide a less visible and unexpected trait—shyness. That shyness extended to avoiding direct displays of affection, such as when the JATP troupe once threw him a surprise birthday party or when Oscar Peterson’s wife Kelly embraced him backstage at a concert.

JW: What was his vision for Jazz at the Philharmonic?
TH: The name actually was a last-minute edit by a printer, who changed the original “Jazz Concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium” to "Jazz at the Philharmonic" to better fit the space on flyers and posters for the first concert on July 2, 1944. 

JW: Was Granz angry?
TH: No. He immediately saw the change for what it was—a sleeker, more elegant and tradeable name for his enterprise. But officials at Los Angeles’ Philharmonic Auditorium were displeased. They saw it as implying a direct affiliation with them and wanted the name changed. They had already pressured the independent Los Angeles record label Philo to change its name, which it did—to Aladdin.

JW: What did Granz do?
TH: He at first tried to placate them by calling the events “Norman Granz Jazz Concerts” and other off-brand names. But even that could not put to rest their hidden objections to integrated seating, interracial couples and raucous audiences that greeted the fiery jam-session concerts. 

JW: What happened?
TH: Granz’s concert series finally got the boot by the Philharmonic Auditorium in January 1946, after he hosted the West Coast Down Beat awards concert that featured Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other top-flight jazz musicians. That was all too much for the Auditorium. So he had to stage the concerts elsewhere, continuing to call them “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” which was generic since he was no longer affiliated with the Auditorium. It’s just one example of Granz absorbing an idea he encountered by chance. [Photo courtesy of Tad Hershorn]

JW: His ability to flip an idea successfully also can be said about the live JATP recordings, yes?
TH: Absolutely. The first concert was a fund-raiser for the defendants in the notorious ethnically charged Sleepy Lagoon murder case in Los Angeles. Given the thunderous, sold-out endorsement of his jam session concerts, Granz staged another at the end of July—this time, strictly commercial. He cobbled together tours up and down the coast of California through the end of the year. The next year Granz inaugurated annual tours, following up these with spring and fall seasons from 1947 until 1950 before conquering the European market and beyond beginning in 1952.

JW: What about the live recordings?
TH: Granz saw the recordings as documents of the event—clinkers, crowd noises and all. The public thought so, too. Jazz at the Philharmonic, Volume I was one of the first commercially issued live concert recordings in 1945. It sold about 150,000 copies upon release. Succeeding volumes of JATP concert records created a new model for publicizing concerts and jazz stars, which in turn sold more records. Oscar Peterson appropriately said in an interview for my book that “Jazz at the Philharmonic was like having your record collection come to town.”

JW: Granz was really the first post-war jazz entrepreneur, wasn’t he?
TH: Granz’s projects may not have always resulted from forethought, but his instincts for acting on a good idea when it landed on his doorstep were near faultless.

JW: Does Granz play a critical role in the rise of bebop in the late 40s? 
TH: Unquestionably, Granz was a significant factor in the spread of bebop. But Granz carved out his role as a popularizer rather than an innovator, a title that better suited people like record producers Ross Russell of Dial and Teddy Reig of Savoy.

JW: How did he popularize bop?
TH: One of the less apparent hallmarks of Jazz at the Philharmonic was putting the best swing and bop era musicians together on one stage, a nearly inconceivable idea at the time given the polarization of the two different fan bases.

JW: For example?
TH: One of my favorite recorded examples of this was from an April 22, 1946 concert at the Embassy Theater in Los Angeles. Following solos on I Got Rhythm by alto saxophonist Willie Smith and trumpeter Buck Clayton, the three reigning saxophonists of the day—Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker and Lester Young—implicitly state jazz’s past and future in the course of one tune. And who else but Norman Granz would have presented Parker in Salt Lake City, in 1948? The JATP tours brought Charlie Parker to the rest of country. At the time Parker was a musician who was almost comparable in his influence with Louis Armstrong but up until then had been known only as an East Coast myth.

JW: What was the initial reception to Granz’s recording of Charlie Parker?
TH: They were actually among his most controversial, given the saxophonist’s meteoric recordings on Dial and Savoy. Granz conceded in a 1966 interview that Parker’s earlier recordings for those labels, when Parker was at the height of his innovation—like those of Lester Young and Billie Holiday's—were unquestionably more significant. However, Granz took great pride in providing Parker and other top jazz musicians with steady work in later years, which helped keep their troubled lives and careers on track.

JW: Granz also appreciated and adored Dizzy Gillespie, yes?
TH: Absolutely. Granz hailed Gillespie’s accomplishments in defining bop and Afro-Cuban jazz along with his decades-long global career. Granz actually believed that Gillespie was more significant than Parker. He thought Gillespie remained underrated even at the time of his death in 2001.

JW: So was Granz a bebopper?
TH: Granz’s musical values were essentially formed by the swing era. The format offered by Jazz at the Philharmonic and the concert recordings, focusing on instrumental virtuosity, provided bop with huge audiences throughout the country in the music’s heyday. The new music prospered in part by Granz featuring it alongside elements of swing. And he often featured concert segments that were dedicated exclusively to bop.

Tomorrow, Tad talks about Granz's vision, his move from Los Angeles to New York, and his role in legitimizing the American Songbook through jazz recordings.

JazzWax pages: Tad Hershorn's biography, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press), is available here.

JazzWax note: If you're in New York this Thursday, Tad Hershorn will be hosting a Listening Party at 7 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Tad will be talking about his book and playing audio and video clips of Norman Granz. For more information, go here.

JazzWax clip: Here's I Got Rhythm, one of Tad Hershorn's favorite Jazz at the Philharmonic tracks, from April 22, 1946...

 

Sunday Wax Bits

Uan Rasey (1921-2011) Trumpeter Uan Rasey and I were supposed to talk a week ago. Sadly, Uan died on the very day I was to interview him. When I called him a week earlier and asked if we could chat, he was gratified and said sure. He asked me to call him Uan (pronounced YOU-in). He  mentioned he was legally blind and made a point to tell me he wasn't a jazz musician.

"I was a big band player who recorded in the studios," he said. This wasn't a boast on Uan's part or a way to tell me that he was less of a musician than I thought he was. It was simply a distinction he wanted to make. Trumpeters are like that.

When we spoke initially, Uan touched briefly on Billy May and his many recordings for the bandleader and arranger. When I asked him about my favorite recording of his—the theme to the movie Chinatown—Uan didn't recall it specifically. "You have to understand," he said, "I recorded on thousands of records and movies, often several a day."

I'm certainly sorry I didn't push to interview him on the spot. But in such cases, musicians like a little time to gather their thoughts so they're prepared. In most cases, that gap produces a better, more memorable conversation. In this case, I gave him that period of time. In retrospect, it was a mistake. [Photo below—front row, from left:  Jack Sheldon, Uan Rasey and Mark Lewis. Back row, from left: Bob Bain, Chuck Berghofer, Rick Baptist, Gary Halopoff, Jeff Bunnell, Chuck Findley, Wayne Bergeron, Bill Peterson, Carl Saunders, Charlie Davis, Bob O'Donnell, Rob Schaer and Arturo Sandoval. Courtesy of Rick Baptist and Gary Anderson]

When I was just out of high school in 1974, I spent a summer working at a movie theater before college began that fall. As a ticket-ripper and usher, I had the pleasure of seeing a single movie upward of 25 times. One of those was Chinatown.

When the General Cinema theater was quiet on afternoons during the week, the ushers and candy salespeople (guys and gals) would sit in the theater in the same row. We all had seen the same movie over and over. As the movie unfolded on the screen, we'd say the lines out loud, just before the actors did. For Chinatown, I was land baron Noah Cross (John Huston), and the great moment for me was bellowing, "The future, Mr. Gittes, the future."

Naturally, after watching a film or parts of it over and over again, you fall in love with the music. That was true with Chinatown, a score arranged by Jerry Goldsmith [pictured]. In the early 80s, when I had a chance to visit a friend who lived in Huntington Beach, Calif., I took a cassette of the Chinatown music and drove around old Los Angeles with the theme playing on my Walkman. You really feel the intent and mood when you do stuff like that.

At any rate, I digress. Uan Rasey was a gorgeous player and brilliant technician. I'm truly sad we didn't get to know each other better. Here's Uan Rasey's robust and steamy noir solo on the Chinatown theme...

 

Finding Carlton screening. Jazz in India has a rich history. Clubs in Bombay's major hotels were centers of jazz activity from the 1920s on and American records and American jazz musicians had a major impact on local musicians. In the years after World War I, American black jazz musicians began to spread the music to cultures throughout the world. When work dried up for musicians who had moved to Paris in the '20s, many shipped off to Shanghai, stopping off in India. [Photo of a tribute to Glenn Miller in the 1950s in Bombay]

Now director/producer Susheel Kurien has completed a documentary on India's jazz musicians and singers. His film, Finding Carlton, will be screened in New York this Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m.—at DCTV, which is located at 87 Lafayette St. (at Walker St.). For more information about Finding Carlton, go here. For information about the screening, go here. To reach the director, go here.

Here's the trailer...

 

Jo Jones radio. My boy "Symphony" Sid Gribetz tells me that today, Sunday, at 2 p.m., WKCR will kick off a week-long marathon  broadcast celebrating drummer Jo Jones. A week of Jo Jones and authoritative radio hosting!! You can access this marathon on your computer from anywhere in the world by going here.

Miles Davis—two points! Here's an artsy home movie of Miles Davis and John Lennon shooting hoops, circa early '70s. Further proof that all great music interconnects and that most high-end creators operate on the same frequency. Hats off to Jim Eigo for sending it along. And for more on the film, go here.

Carol Sloane. Here's Carol Sloane—one of the great jazz vocal stylists—singing It's Easy to Remember in 1990. The woman fully understands how to launch a lyric like a kite and tell a story without ever over-selling or over-acting. It's a confidential, deeply felt delivery, which is Carol's hallmark. Pure perfection! For my multi-part interview with Carol, go here. Carol's blog can be found here.

 

Hal Blaine. When an email pops in from the famed Wrecking Crew drummer, I always know there's going to be something fun going on. Here's one he sent along last week.

CD discoveries of the week. Vocalist Shirley Crabbe has a big, wide-open optimistic style that's reminiscent of a young, excited Sarah Vaughan. Crabbe's honest, swinging attack is fully evident on Home (MaiSong). Backed on select tracks by tenor saxophonist Houston Person, Crabbe runs through songs that are perfectly tailored to her barefoot-in-the-grass style—Lucky to Be Me, You Taught My Heart to Sing, Roland Hanna's Seasons, Detour Ahead, Not While I'm Around, Oscar Brown's Strong Man and Carole King's So Far Away. This is a gorgeous album from a lovely singer—proving that vocalists can indeed choose lesser-known gems rather than adhering to glue-factory Songbook fare. You'll find this one here. More on Shirley Crabbe here.

Jackie DeShannon is back—with When You Walk in the Room (Rockbeat). You probably know Jackie best as the voice of Put a Little Love in Your Heart and What the World Needs Now Is Love. What you may not know is that she was one of the first and most prolific female singer-songwriters in Los Angeles in the very early 1960s. She wrote Put a Little Love in Your Heart, co-wrote Bette Davis Eyes and composed dozens of other songs for others and herself. Jackie opened for the Beatles in 1964 and sang gospel with Elvis Presley. Her new album of originals and collaborative songs is superb. It's just Jackie, an acoustic guitar and strings. It's tender and honest, a folk-country album that will take you back to a purposeful age. You'll find this one at iTunes or here. More on Jackie DeShannon here.

Johnny Winter is still at it, and he's swinging quite an axe. The rock-blues guitarist has just released Roots (Megaforce), an album produced by guitarist Paul Nelson that pays tribute to blues legends. On each track, Johnny's high-voltage guitar is teamed with a different rock and country heavy. Blues rippers include Muddy Waters' Got My Mojo Workin', Lightnin' Hopkins' Last Night and Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights Big City. And dig Vince Gill singing Maybellene. I caught Johnny at B.B. King's a week ago, and his electrifying guitarwork brought the house down. I'd go see him and his band again in a heartbeat. I also tested this CD on the highway; it's great driving music. You'll find this one at iTunes or here. More on Johnny Winter here.

Oddball album cover of the week. Here's one that JazzWax reader Rick Dobrydney sent along. Recorded in 1967, the Count's album for Brunswick featured pop-rock hits of the day (Hang on Sloopy, Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying, etc.). Our cover features Basie seemingly happy to be depicted as a sack of cats or today's mail delivery. Hard to imagine Benny Goodman or Woody Herman being portrayed this way in '67. Or why being "in the bag" is a good thing for anyone.