Pressed for All Time

Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

Michael Jarrett

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469630595
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

In histories of music, producers tend to fall by the wayside--generally unknown and seldom acknowledged. But without them and their contributions to the art form, we'd have little on record of some of the most important music ever created. Discover the stories behind some of jazz's best-selling and most influential albums in this collection of oral histories gathered by music scholar and writer Michael Jarrett. Drawing together interviews with over fifty producers, musicians, engineers, and label executives, Jarrett shines a light on the world of making jazz records by letting his subjects tell their own stories and share their experiences in creating the American jazz canon. Packed with fascinating stories and fresh perspectives on over 200 albums and artists, including legends such as Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, as well as contemporary artists such as Diana Krall and Norah Jones, Pressed for All Time tells the unknown stories of the men and women who helped to shape the quintessential American sound.

Chapter 1: Cutting Sides

Producing 78-RPM Discs, 1936–1949

EXEMPLARY RECORDING—BILLIE HOLIDAY, “STRANGE FRUIT”

Long before magnetic tape—which was one of the spoils of World War II—record-company managers called “recording directors” controlled the preproduction phase of record making. They chose artists to record, and they paired songs from the music-publishing firms of Tin Pan Alley with those artists. Thus, these early record producers came to be more generally known as A & R men—short for “artists and repertoire.” In the studio, during and after supervising the recording of 10-inch, 78-rpm discs, they could do very little that, by today’s standards, would qualify as production (and nothing resembling postproduction). Artists could do even less. Back then, in order to stamp records, steam-powered machines—housed inside large pressing plants—were fitted with molds derived from the masters cut in the studio. The very same process is used today to press vinyl records, but with one huge difference. Stampers are derived by a process that begins with taped or digital masters. Before the invention of tape, masters of wax and, later, lacquer or acetate—discs with one song per side—made it physically next to impossible for artists to own the actual products of their labor. To fall back on a Marxist phrase, they had no access to the means of production. Consequently, the record industry was highly concentrated, especially after the Depression. Material conditions practically assured that it would take the form of an oligopoly.

As Milt Gabler tells the story, Billie Holiday was in a serious bind when she complained to him in 1939. Columbia Records would not permit her to record “Strange Fruit.” The song had been a hit with the left-leaning crowd at Café Society, a racially integrated Greenwich Village club where the singer enjoyed a regular gig. Gabler solved her problem. After successfully obtaining an exception to Holiday’s contract, he recorded Lady Day singing “Strange Fruit” for Commodore, his own record label. The record was pressed (mass produced as shellac discs) by Vocalion, a company owned by CBS which, not so coincidentally, owned Columbia.

Again, Gabler cut “Strange Fruit”—straight to a lacquer or acetate disc. All of the records described in this chapter, focusing on the 78-rpm era, were recorded to exactly the same medium. Thus, at that time “records” meant what we’d call “singles,” and “albums” meant multidisc sets of “singles” devoted to classical music. The first jazz albums, at least of newly recorded music, originated when Decca Records bought a college sophomore’s idea: issue three multidisc packages of hot music from Chicago, New Orleans, and Kansas City. The college kid, George Avakian, produced the Chicago Jazz Album (1940), the first installment of this projected series and, therefore, the first jazz album. It was a set of six 10-inch records, again, recorded at 78 rpm.

Jazz albums as we know them—programs of music taped and then reproduced on 12-inch LPs or “long-playing records” played at 331/3 rpm—would have to wait more than ten years, until Avakian, back from World War II and employed by Columbia Records, would score another of many “firsts.”

Orrin Keepnews (Riverside)

Until you get into the LP period—and I make no particular distinction between the 10-inch and the 12-inch LP—and the automatic-album approach that the long-playing record ushered in, the producer, as such, was not a terribly noticeable figure. But there were exceptions: above all, Milt Gabler and John Hammond. They were fairly unique—noticeable and influential producers—in the days when you were dealing, primarily, with individual records, 78-rpm singles.

Go back to the days of the 78, and that really was a vastly different approach to recording. Even though some records did come out in groups—two or three 78s as an album—you didn’t have the benefit of the kind of album thinking that we later had. The ability of Gabler and Hammond to transition into the contemporary world, to come into the LP world, was a tremendous accomplishment. It was as if D. W. Griffith had been able to make talkies.

Next week, I’m going to be in the studio editing and sequencing a CD. The fact that it was recorded digitally, which is very different from early LPs, does not impact my work in the studio. Technology changes but, with jazz, neither the product nor the vocabulary has changed that much. Today, with reissues we use computerized noise-removal techniques. Years ago, we used industrial razor blades and spliced tapes to do noise removal. The technologies are very different, but the reason why it’s being done and the effect that we’re trying to accomplish is exactly the same.

As a record producer who, in 1956, was producing Thelonious Monk, I frankly don’t think any challenge anybody can throw at me today is going to be any more demanding than that challenge was then. I am saying that the key element in jazz is, as it always has been, the artist. The key challenge to the producer is to establish a successful relationship with the artist. Technological differences between present and past are secondary to that.

BILLY BANKS’ RHYTHMAKERS, “MARGIE” (1936, UNITED HOT CLUBS OF AMERICA; ORIGINALLY ISSUED, 1932, ARC)

Milt Gabler (UHCA Reissues)

After World War I, after 1918, there were hot records of orchestras that people danced to. There were solos on them, and that’s what collectors were looking for [in the thirties]. The solos were the interesting parts. They were jazz. Dance music came out of jazz. The soloists on those dance records—that went back as far as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Red Nichols and His Five Pennies—were mostly white musicians, but the black artists were the ones who were really putting down the right music.

I started to reissue records in the middle thirties at my Commodore Music Shop [which opened in New York in 1926]. Mostly, they were jazz records [recorded in the twenties]. I put out some Bessie Smith. I never put out Ethel Waters. I should have. There was Louis Armstrong, the Hot Fives and Sevens, and there was Duke Ellington. There were a lot of hot records, but the greatest tool for selling them was Charles Delaunay’s Hot Discography [1936]. I used to import them from Europe and sell them in my store. I started the United Hot Clubs of America with Marshall Stearns. I put out the UHCA label. I wanted people to join the Hot Club in order to buy the original Hot Clubs of America records.

To build up my discography and record label, I used to lease the masters from the major companies. There was no tape; you couldn’t copy them. You had to have shellac records or mothers. You could play the mothers like records. Stampers were negatives of the mothers. I had to buy the pressings from the company that owned the masters. You couldn’t copy them and make your own masters. That would be bootlegging. You had to go back to the company to press the records on shellac. It took steam and pressure and a cooling system. They had the masters, the mothers, and the stampers—everything.¹

We developed a following. Guys like John Hammond, the Erteguns, and Jerry Wexler, they were all my customers. They used to come in and collect records in my store. [French jazz critic] Hugues Panassié used to buy records from me through the mail. My UHCA reissues started to work so well that the record labels, who used to lease me the masters, decided that they would put out the records themselves. After we’d built up the market, John Hammond went to Columbia and got the job of reissuing their catalog. “That’s the end of my Hot Club records,” I said. “We built up the market, and now the major companies—Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick—they’re putting out the records themselves with a special label.” I could see that the Commodore Music Shop and the Hot Club label couldn’t compete with the majors.

I was the first one ever to put the personnel and the history of the recording on the label. I used to sell the reissues that I put out on UHCA for seventy-five cents and for a dollar. Even the rarer ones—where I had to make masters, mothers, and stampers—sold for a dollar and a half. When the labels started to put out their own reissues, they could sell records for a normal price [i.e., at the same price as a new record]. The handwriting was on the wall. That was the end of my UHCA label—or almost the end. I did start to reissue Gennett and labels like that.

“I better make my own label,” I said. That’s when I started Commodore Records. By 1938, I’d started to record my own records.

George Avakian (Columbia)

When Louis [Armstrong] came back from Europe in 1933, Joe Glaser took over his business affairs entirely and immediately got his career started again with a contract at Decca Records. That was a natural for Jack Kapp, who had been the head of Brunswick. He hadn’t recorded Louis, but Kapp was from Chicago. He and Glaser knew each other.

Glaser saw that the Decca label might take off under Kapp. Their price for records was half of that charged by the other popular lines, of which there were really only two. There was the Brunswick label which, later, became part of the Columbia/CBS operation and the Victor label, both selling for seventy-five cents. Decca was selling for thirty-five cents. I remember buying three for eighty-eight cents at Macy’s whenever my mother took me shopping with her.

I’d head for the record department on, I believe, the fifth floor and get lost there for a half hour or so listening to the latest records. I’d end up buying three Deccas or one Brunswick. There weren’t very many Victors that I liked. I think Ellington was the only person who I bought on that label for quite a while.

Milt Gabler (Decca/Commodore)

In those days, if you sold Victor—before it was RCA Victor, it was the Victor Talking Machine Company—if you got a license to sell Caruso, you couldn’t sell Columbia records. It was like an automobile franchise. When I went into the record business, I couldn’t get Victor records because there was a dealer around the corner. I had to wait until he went out of business, and then I got the Victors. Before that, I had records on Columbia, Brunswick, Harmony, and Perfect. Perfect sold records for twenty-five cents. There was even a paper record, sold at newsstands, for fifteen cents. It bombed, but they did have them. Jack Kapp decided that Decca would break the main record line. He thought records were too expensive for the times. It was just coming out of the Depression. They were in business in ’34.

BILLIE HOLIDAY, BILLIE’S BLUES (1936, VOCALION)

George Avakian (Columbia)

John Hammond produced Benny Goodman studio recordings in ’31. In 1936, I was in college, thinking of John as a veteran. Incidentally, I must tell you I don’t like talking about John. I liked him very much, but many times he was a remarkably insensitive and dishonest person.

None of us ever talked about it, but John did some really terrible things, which you couldn’t do much about. He was a powerful and rich man. In an interview with Chris Albertson, I finally broke down and talked. When I did, Chris—who worked at Columbia when John came back to the company in the sixties—Chris called me and said, “Am I glad you did that! I’ve been bottling up all this stuff about what Hammond did, and not talking about it. I feel released.” Then he told me some things that were just about as shocking as what I had experienced.

There was a conspiracy not to talk, and besides John had the remarkable ability to tell a whopping lie, looking you in the eye, which left you with the feeling that, if you ever tried to fight this lie, he had the power to get away with a bigger whopper. So leave it alone. It was quite incredible what he was able to do.

There was a behind-his-back joke that collectors used to repeat [that] at first I thought was a little unfair and then I realized no, it’s true. One collector meets another. To make a point stick, he says, “Well, I was in the studio at the time.” The other collector would know he was hearing one of John Hammond’s pet phrases, which simply meant, “I am positive that what I say is so.” John would constantly—even in print—talk about how he was “in the studio at the time.” You could mention somebody by name in a conversation, and John would cut in and say, “I discovered him.” Sometimes it was true, but he said that all the time. That was a great need that he had, reflected in this attitude where he wanted it to be his thing. It was embarrassing and overrode other considerations.

Sadly, you’re not a Vanderbilt. Such power makes “discovery” problematic. As often as not, the artists are doing the looking. They’re the bears actively seeking a honeypot.

John always had a feeling that he had enormous power. He really did, I guess, but he hurt so many people. Take Billie Holiday, for example. John is generally credited—and he grabbed the credit all the time—with discovering and promoting Billie.² But Billie herself—in [Lady Sings the Blues] the book that was written through interviews with her by Bill Dufty and his wife—talks about Bernie Hanighen as the really important person in her early record career. He was a songwriter who wrote the lyrics to Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” among other things. Bernie was a freelancer in the record business. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Biographical Sketches
• Editor’s Note
• Cadenza
• Chapter 1: Cutting Sides
• Chapter 2: Rolling Tape
• Chapter 3: Laying Down Tracks
• Chapter 4: Recording to Hard Drive
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Index