[Dixielandjazz] Verve Records book reviewed - the Sound of America'

[Robert Ringwald]

'Verve: the Sound of America' by Richard Havers
by Mick Brown
London Telegraph, November 8, 2013
Commenting on the accusation that Louis Armstrong had "sold out" by playing an Uncle
Tom figure to gain the approval of white audiences, Billie Holiday once remarked
that "of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart".
Two of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, Armstrong and Holiday both recorded
for Verve, one of America's premier jazz labels, quite late in their respective careers,
at a time when jazz had long since left the ghetto of being "black" music to become
justly recognised as "America's music". As this exhaustive, weighty and beautifully
packaged history of the label demonstrates, Verve -- and in particular its founder
Norman Granz -- was to play a significant role in this transformation.
If we think of the Blue Note label as having the monopoly on modernist cool, embodied
by such artists as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Lee Morgan, then Verve, by contrast,
oozed a more swell-egant sophistication, building its reputation on "heritage" artists
such as Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and Count Basie.
If Blue Note was the music of the clubs, Verve was the music of the concert halls
-- which was precisely Granz's intention. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Granz
began his career in Los Angeles in the early Forties, promoting club dates with musicians
such as Nat King Cole and Lester Young, challenging the colour bar by negotiating
with the non-integrated white and black unions to have musicians from both sides
working together.
Granz's dream was to take jazz out of the clubs, to a wider -- which is to say white
-- audience, and in 1944 he staged a concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium, the
traditional home in Los Angeles of symphony concerts, as a benefit for alleged gang
members who had been arrested during the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. It was the starting
point for his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) tours, which would eventually travel
all over the world, providing a stage for virtually every major figure in jazz of
the time, from Fitzgerald to Dizzy Gillespie.
Granz released recordings of the JATP on his own labels, Clef and Norgran. But in
1956 he founded Verve, initially as a vehicle for Fitzgerald, whom he was also managing.
She was already enjoying success singing bebop and scat; but Granz broadened her
appeal by focusing her repertoire on work by popular songwriters. She would later
describe her first Verve album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook as
"the turning point in my life".
Fitzgerald would go on to record seven more "songbook" albums, which established
her as the pre-eminent interpreter of what became known as the Great American Songbook.
Ira Gershwin noted of her readings of his and his brother George's work that, "I
never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." The
same formula would be applied to the Canadian pianist Peterson, who also recorded
eight "songbooks", including the music of Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern.
Granz's personal interest in Verve was to be short-lived. In 1960 he sold the label
to MGM to concentrate on managing Fitzgerald and Peterson, promoting the JATP tours,
and adding to his collection of Picasso paintings at his home in Switzerland.
Under the direction of Creed Taylor, the label enjoyed enormous success with the
organist Jimmy Smith, guitarist Wes Montgomery and pianist Bill Evans. In 1963 Charlie
Byrd and Stan Getz's milestone recording Jazz Samba went to the top of the American
charts, launching the bossa nova craze, quickly followed by Getz/Gilberto, which
launched "The Girl From Ipanema", Astrud Gilberto.
In more recent years, the label has existed largely through extensive repackagings
of recordings from its golden period.
Richard Havers does an excellent job of contextualising the story of Verve within
the broader development of jazz, from its birthplace in the bordellos of New Orleans's
Storyville to its place on the world stage.
The assemblage of glorious archive photographs, tour posters, album sleeves and ephemera
is eye-poppingly beautiful, incidentally reminding you of two cardinal rules about
jazz musicians in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Everybody looked ineffably cool,
and everybody smoked. The plume of smoke curling up into the spotlight, as a symbol
of the transporting evanescence of the music, is the great motif of the golden age
of jazz.
-30-


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

"When they operated, I told them to add in a Koufax fastball. They did – but unfortunately it
was Mrs. Koufax's."
- Tommy John N.Y. Yankees, recalling his 1974 arm surgery.