Door to Door Collecting in the 1930s
The Reminiscences of Ross Russell
Transcribed by Horace Meunier Harris
Let me say that being in London for this Conference is a very happy event for me, where there are people who have collected and understand jazz and are active in keeping it going. I am going to talk about my own experience in collecting records in America, in time from about 1930-1931 until about World War II, and for that we need a very short historical perspective.
America at that time was a very different place than it is today. The Western movement was over, the covered wagons were gone, the railways were built and State boundaries established. All of the buffaloes had been killed, half the beavers, half of the Indians, and we had a kind of people who were aggressive, acquisitive, capable of being violent, but people who were also interested in farming and settling down, and people who were serious about their culture. All of our culture actually comes from Europe.
But the country of farms, cattle ranches, small cities, many towns, settled families, some of them several generations living in the same house - none of that exists today.
As the Ragtime era ended, about 1920, the piano was found in every parlor of every respectable middle class family in this period. They were obsolete. Nobody wanted to learn to play piano and the Rags they use to sell in Woolworths were not selling any more. The pianos were all junked or sold off to furniture stores and they were replaced by phonographs, and this was the beginning of the phonograph record era.
The next big change that came was the Depression, which was extremely severe in the States. A lot of families went broke, their homes were foreclosed. Anyway, their phonograph records and their furniture ended up in junk shops and used furniture stores. That became for us the first place to look - in furniture stores and also door to door - the kind of gimmicky title of this lecture.
At the same time the Southern blacks were practically wiped out when the Civil War was lost by the South, and above all when cotton was no longer a major commodity on world markets. The Southern blacks became migratory, to the Northern cities - Kansas City, Nashville to Detroit, especially to Chicago, where we started to have large colonies of Black people. Ghettoes actually. Very poor people without skills, most of them without education, but they found jobs and they became the major market for the so-called Race records. Catalogues appeared on Paramount - even Okeh - which was a very big operation, with conditions directed towards this particular market.
I’m going on to say that my beginnings and my role, which was a minor one, were at UCLA, where there were two upper class men, Campbell Horne, who was the son of an old Californian family - he looked like David Niven and tried to act like Niven - and Myron Freedman, the son of a manufacturer of women’s blouses. They had been sent to Europe for a year of culturalisation.
They were in Heidelburg and there they encountered German collectors, French collectors, jazz literature such as Jazz Hot, the writings of Robert Goffin, the works of Panassie, and they became very interested in jazz and started collecting records. They came back and finished at UCLA, where they tried to get anybody whose arm they could twist to come and listen to their jazz records. Not so many people wanted to listen - they didn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
They said jazz was a beautiful flower, growing up unattended at America’s back doorstep. Well, I kinda got pulled into this and for some reason I liked jazz. I liked the white kind of jazz first and I thought Adrian Rollini was wonderful, better than anything else, but gradually, as I started to hear Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, I came round to more serious records.
Now these records were played on a wind-up phonograph - the one that had the big model tulip horn on it. This had a spring wound motor - had to be wound every one or two playings - and they were played with cactus needles. They sounded louder if you played them with steel needles, but after 15 or 20 playings with steel needles the tell-tale gray started to appear in the grooves and that was the beginning of the end, but with a cactus needle they had pretty good durability.
The one thing that kept our group going was a visit, once or twice a year, by a man called Bill Russell. I’m sure that most of you are familiar with Bill Russell. He had a job with a touring Chinese puppet show, The Red Gate Players, and Bill supplied all the musical effects. Basically Bill was a violinist but he played a lot of other things - gongs and things to go with the puppet show. This show, during the years of the Depression, did quite well, with the sort of people who read the wrong books and liked the bad poets. They went for this kind of thing, so The Red Gate Players did pretty well and toured back and forth across America for all these Depression years.
This gave Bill a wonderful opportunity to look for jazz records. Wherever he went he spent all his spare time looking for jazz records. He did go door-to-door, but he was also on the look-out for unsold stocks, sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Well, Bill kept us going, kept our spirits up, told us what to look for, even before Delaunay’s Hot Discography came out.
A lot of this was by word of mouth - well, what are you going to collect? Finally we got down to a basic list of what to look for - anything by Jelly Roll Morton, anything by Armstrong, anything by Bessie Smith. Then we found out that some Clarence Williams had Louis, so we got up a good Wants list of what to look for.
Collecting in America was a very different affair than collecting in Europe. The reason for this was that the European labels, like HMV, Parlophone, German Brunswick, had well informed people who kept up with jazz criticism in the jazz magazines, and they knew what records were worth collecting. They said wisely to the people running these companies, when they made deals for masters from the American labels, to order these things.
Collecting, for Europeans, was a matter of budgeting. You didn’t go out and look in junk shops very much [Actually this was not so, we were active junkshoppers. -H.M.H.], let alone go from door to door. You just bought what you could afford when it came out - the Fats Wallers, the Mortons, or the Billie Holidays - that came out on these labels.
Do you remember Morton’s Doctor Jazz? It starts out, “Hello, Central, give me Doctor Jazz.” It’s a wonderful idea. In the early days there were no cellular phones. You picked up the phone, cranked the handle, held the receiver to your ear, and a woman’s voice answered, “Central”. This was the switchboard and Jelly’s voice said, “Give me Doctor Jazz”. Well, there’s this wonderful, almost surrealistic, idea of thinking of Doctor Jazz as somebody who can cure everything. He has a nostrum for every possible ill. The record goes on in that vein.
But you notice that in all these records by Morton the solos are freely improvised, while everything else is very carefully laid out. It had all been rehearsed. Everything is cued from the piano. There are little cue signs, little things that Morton does, and a very strict structure on all these Morton records, including this one, Hello, Central.
For my collecting I was going along at rather a slow pace, until I hit upon The Spanish Music Center in Los Angeles. This is down in the Mexican area and they had a big Okeh envelope in the window. They had been legitimate Okeh dealers. The guy was stuck with a huge stock of mint Okehs, but he insisted - absolutely insisted - that he had the full retail price, 35 cents, which was quite a bit of money then. It meant blowing your lunch or dinner money to buy one record. We would buy them as we could afford them. We went down there and could pick out Sunset Café Stomp, Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa, Jazz Lips, West End Blues - all mint, in the original Okeh jackets. Gradually I built up a pretty good Louis collection.
Then the thing happened that really put me in business. I wanted an automobile. You could buy a Model T Ford for $100 [approximately $1600 in 2006] and I had one to commute to school, and I got around more than these other guys. Myron had more money, so he delegated people to look for records and then he paid them. I went with some of the boys to Burbank and we found an electrical supply store, a radio repairer - something of the sort - and he had the Gennett label on the window. Gennett!
This record label was difficult, because the records weren’t very well made and so brittle as well. I talked to this guy and tried to con him. I didn’t want to give away the game. He said yes, he’d been a Gennett dealer and the damn records didn’t sell, so he’d had to take them, three crates, to the edge of town where he’d thrown them in a barn. It took about a month to get him to the point where I got in the barn. I told him I was a trumpet player and I was trying to copy a guy called Beiderbecke on Gennett records.
There were the three crates. A big automobile jack had been thrown into one of them, smashing about half of them, but the rest were in great shape. I’d saved up some money and I finally got out of there. I’d spent $74 [approximately $1000 in 2006] on a complete run of Olivers and a complete run of The New Orleans Rhythm Kings. There were no Beiderbeckes and no Wolverines, but I was pretty happy with all I had.
I had many duplicates, in fact I think I had a double set of Olivers - things like Chimes Blues, and this put me in business, because I had some client trading material. I could get maybe four records out of Chicago collectors for one Gennett by Oliver.
In San Francisco I ran into another defunct dealer and he had been a Vocalion dealer. There I found a mint copy of Head Rag Hop by Romeo Nelson, a wonderful record not then very well known, and a mint copy of Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie, which is the kind of cornerstone of the whole boogie-woogie tradition. That was helpful.
Then I have a story - maybe I shouldn’t tell it - it’s kind of off-color. I got into a store in L.A. that had a tremendous number of records. Their jackets were thrown away and they were piled up the wall. He only wanted a penny a piece for these things, but he was tired of collectors who would come in and buy three or five records. He said he was only going to let me meander if I would guarantee to buy 50 pence worth. I said that’s OK, but then I got in there and I found quite a bit of good stuff, but it took a long time going through them, what with all the dust.
I finally got to the point where I had to ‘go’. It became terribly urgent and I did not want to go back to the dealer - it would have been the end of the transaction. There was no Men’s Room, but there was a big Chinese vase, an antique, so I used the Chinese vase. I’ve often wondered what the reaction was when somebody took this vase down to examine it. The look on the dealer’s face!
In the next phase of my life as a record collector I was trying to write for the pulp magazines. I don’t know if you Europeans or British remember these magazines. They were paper bound magazines - detective stories, Westerns, all that kind of thing. They sold for 10 or 15 cents, in drug stores and on news stands, in big racks, higher than my head. I figured if I could sell to those magazines I could make a living by writing.
It took about three years, but I finally zeroed in on a publisher who only paid half a cent a word. That was the lowest possible payout, which means, for a 6,000 word story you got $30. I sent him a bunch of stuff and I did not hear anything. They usually give you a report or return the manuscript within a couple of weeks, but he kept them for six weeks. Then one day I got a check in the mail for $105. I said to myself this is my chance to get to New York, where I can talk to editors, get assignments. This proved to be the case. Anyway, I left California with one suitcase, a Corona portable typewriter and a plastic case full of ten inch records, all prime ‘traders’.
I headed for Chicago. There was an odd business in Los Angeles called Ride King, who for five dollars would put you in touch with somebody driving where you wanted to go. I wanted to go to New York, but he didn’t have any rides going there. He did have one going to Chicago so I took that. They were four guys about my age and I think I paid them $20 for the ride. We made it in a Durant touring car, with them taking turns driving.
People in Europe do not realize how big America is. The distance from the West Coast to Chicago is over 2,000 miles. At that time most of the roads were dirt roads. The trip went fine but these guys were fans of hillbilly music. They had the car radio tuned in to one band covering California to Albuquerque, then another band to Denver, and so on. We’d get these electrical waves coming in - has anybody ever heard of Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers? One of the unbelievable titles of Gib Tanner’s records was, Sal, Lemme Charm Your Life in Song ! [Actually, Sal Let Me Chaw Your Rosin; Tanner’s group was a Venuti-influenced, three-fiddle band, probably the best players of mountain music of their day – Ed.].
I survived the trip and the hillbilly music and I got to Chicago. I found a furnished room and the first thing I did, I got in touch with two people I had been trading with. They proved to be upper middle class types and they were beautiful people. They gave me a wonderful welcome. The first night they took me around town and I’ll give you a note of the clubs we visited - The New Plantation Café on the South Side. The band there was Baby and Johnny Dodds and Natty Dominique. Then we went to Paul Mares’ Barbecue on State Street and he was playing. Of course he was with The New Orleans Rhythm Kings and was a riverboat veteran. He had a band but I don’t remember who else was in it. Then we went to The Three Deuces on the North Side and heard the Eldridge brothers. The sound was the music to come, with Roy already hitting high notes and playing very fast.
We heard a very interesting musician, very little known, who has a slender discography - Boyce Brown. Has anybody got any Boyce Brown records? Well, Boyce was a very tall, austere, monkish individual. I don’t have any notes on who he was playing with. He later did become a monk, Brother Mathew, and died in a monastery aged 40, another very early death. But he had an advanced saxophone style - a pure white tone, halfway between Jimmy Dorsey and Charlie Parker.
All I could find in Rust’s Discography were three sides by Charles LaVere’s Chicagoans in Chicago, 1935, quite a mixed Marty Marsala group with Jabbo Smith. Other titles from a later date were issued on a Tax LP. Then he made a date with Paul Mares’ Friars Society Orchestra, also 1935, four sides on Okeh, with Wettling and Stacy. Finally he made his last date, as far as I can tell, with Jimmy McPartland and Bud Jacobsen. I believe these came out on Decca. These came to total of eight sides of hard core Chicago jazz, very little known just now.
A very interesting development took me to a large office cum warehouse. All the collectors in Chicago had rented this and they had it as their headquarters. They went there to trade or to just listen to records. On the wall they had a marvelous map of the city of Chicago showing all the streets. They had divided the map into areas - A, B, C, D, and so forth, and they had drawn lots to see who got which area.
Their experience in collecting records was exactly like that of everybody else. When they went in the white homes they found records in very good shape, usually in their sleeves, little played. What did they find? They found Nat Shilkret, they found Enrico Caruso on Red Seal Victor, they found the Six Brown Brothers Saxophone Ensemble, they found Joseph C. Smith’s Orchestra.
But when they went in the Black districts it was pure gold, only the records had been removed from their sleeves, they had been rubbed together, they had been played with steel needles and were badly worn. What did they find? Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, King Oliver - all the good stuff. This was the dilemma of collectors going door to door. White homes - maybe a 5% or 3% chance of success; Black homes - a 99% chance of success.
The next day when I went out with these guys, I went into the Black section, to a large store they told me about. They were Paramount dealers and had a large stock. They had all the Ma Raineys - Blues the World Forgot, Boll Weevil, See See Rider - all of which I bought.
I also went to a burlesque show. Jimmie Noone was the clarinetist in the pit band, playing Apex Blues for the strippers. He composed that for strippers, because it was ideal for somebody taking them off!
Then I met a man called George Hoefer, whom most of you are familiar with. He had the first genuine record column, in Down Beat - it was called The Hot Box. He discussed rarities - what to look for and things that were of interest to record collectors. He was working as Manager of a large and successful department store. I was invited to his home, which was a hangout for musicians and collectors. I kept up with George until the time of his death. In fact he came to New York and we attended Lester Young’s funeral together.
The highlight of the Chicago trip was a visit I made on my own to The Grand Terrace Ballroom, which was a former theater which had been made into a cabaret. It was a very big venue and it was Chicago’s answer to The Cotton Club. It was what was called a ‘black-and-tan’ place, with a mixed crowd of middle class Blacks, while the white people were a lot of big spenders who also liked to listen to jazz and understood it very well.
The band in residence made a tremendous impression on me. They played on a platform, which was raised for the performance. It was Earl Hines’ Orchestra. They broadcast directly from the club. There was a pretty fancy floorshow with a chorus line, the girls coming down the runways. It was rather expensive but it was well worth it, because this band had Freddy Webster and Walter Fuller on trumpets, Omer Simeon and Budd Johnson on reeds, and a wonderful drummer named Wally Bishop. This band really moved and Hines was in the middle of the hall, sitting at a grand piano.
I don’t think Hines ever had a bad period, but this was the period after he made the records with Louis Armstrong and he was playing a somewhat more complicated style - marvelous piano. This was an unforgettable experience. The floor show had Ralph Cooper as the presenter. Cooper turned up in New York and I heard him at The Apollo Theater, where he appeared in a zoot suit in the post-war period.
They were playing all their good stuff - Cavernism, Deep Forest, Pianology, Bubbling Over, Rosetta, Fat Babes, Down Among the Sheltering Palms, Grand Terrace Shuffle. Absolutely no commercial things and no dross in this performance. It was just high powered jazz of the highest quality all the way through.
That was a round-up of my Chicago experience. At this point I must mention a collector called Art Cudlipp. Anybody heard of him? He was a ‘ghost’ collector. Nobody ever met Art but everybody dealt with him. Postcards were one cent at the time and he would send you penny postcards, offering ‘Bessie’s Backwater, Good+,’ or other jazz, and if you did business with him the records would arrive, well packed, no breakages and with the condition exactly as represented.
Well, Art Cudlipp, we finally discovered that his job was a railway mail clerk. This is before there was airmail distribution and the mail going out of Chicago would be put in a mail car, which was next to the locomotive on the train - say, the Chicago-Kansas City Limited. He would be locked in there with all the mail in huge bags and also valuable stuff. They might be carrying jewellery or currency, something like that. He would spend the whole day, picking these letters up and sorting them into boxes, then once they get to Kansas City they go on to other cities outside of Kansas City, like Birmingham.
On the run to Kansas City Art would put in nine or ten hours. Then he would have a day off, book a hotel room, then next day go out looking for records. He would have the same experience - the Black neighbourhoods would have the good stuff. So nobody ever met this guy - they just traded with him.
I’ve got some pictures here and I’ll put them on the table, so that people can look at them. This is Professor Marshall Stearns, lecturing at The Newport Jazz Festival. He got a degree from Harvard, taught there and at Yale and eventually in New York City at Bernard. He’s the one who started the jazz clubs in the Ivy League schools. He also had the largest collection in America and, starting early, he had a really good salary to buy what he wanted. That collection is now at Rutgers University. A very nice man. He looks rather austere, dressed in dark trousers, a white jacket and wearing horn rimmed glasses. He had very good speech - a very high type of individual.
This is Bill Russell who worked with The Red Gate Players and came to visit us. First, Bill as a child, Bill as a young man, Bill recording Bunk in New York, and Bill in New Orleans with Vic Dickenson. As you know, Bill spent the last years of his life at Preservation Hall. He had an instrument repair shop and a book shop, in the same building as the Hall.
This picture is the man who would probably have been the world’s biggest collector, but he got killed during the war, in a Jeep accident - a man named Hoyt Kline. On the back he has written,
‘The legendary Kline worrying (note furrowed brow) about the 23 Armstrongs he lacks. 24 hours after this photo was taken he had news of Oliver’s Okeh Riverside, Chippie’s Lonesome Lovesick, and Red Onion Nobody Knows were on the way. Too late to call in brow uncurved, so posed that way. Leica, taken with 300 watt lamp. Not bad.”
He was the son of a wholesale grocery dealer, a very affluent guy, a very nice man, but very pleased with his possessions. The first Magnavox [radio] I ever saw was in his home in Cleveland, when I stayed there a couple of nights. Here’s his Christmas card, showing his collection. Everything is in custom made heavy card jackets. He is holding up one of his prize records. There wasn’t much to do there except to trade records and listen to what he had.
Then I took a train to New York. It wasn’t called The Apple then. New York has always been a city that’s throbbing with life. It’s been the center of everything, especially the Arts - all the literary things, the publishers, the painters - it’s all in New York. I think it’s still number one.
I got an apartment in Greenwich Village and the first thing I did, I bought a wind-up phonograph and started looking for records. Then I called on the pulp magazine editors and got some commissions. I soon went to Milt Gabler’s Commodore Record Shop, in the Commodore Hotel, and met Milt.
As you probably know, Bill Russell and Steve Smith started something called The United Hot Clubs of America - UHCA. While Bill was travelling Steve saw to everything. Steve was an artist. I don’t know whether he was a real painter or a commercial artist. Anyway, they ran UHCA and as we know they were the first jazz auction house, in America at least. They put out the UHCA Rag, which gave New Orleans musicians ongoing publicity, they reported on discovered rarities, and so on. Then they started the UHCA label, issuing great rarities at the time. The first issue was Louis’ Cornet Chop Suey, which is a wonderful record. Anybody listen to that lately? There are enough ideas on that record for six or eight jazz compositions. The man was so creative - it just came out. What a wonderful title.
I started meeting collectors. There were two guys from Berlin, Alfred Lion and his business partner later in Blue Note, Francis Wolff. Well-educated German émigrés, they were very sophisticated and they formed a little collectors’ club - I have forgotten what it was called. Anyway, there were about five or six of us in it and they saw fit to give everybody in it a jazz name. For instance, I was ‘Stompy.’
Another guy who belonged to this club was Dan Qualey. He started the Solo Art label and I saw the whole beginning of Solo Art. I used to go to Nick’s a lot, which was the last stopping place for Chicago musicians, and the two longest residents were Eddie Condon and Pee Wee Russell. The rest of the group changed constantly, but always of Chicago persuasion.
Well, Qualey himself was a bartender. He was completely atypical of the American collector, who at this time was college educated and middle class, whereas Qualey was a red-necked Irish type. They told me he worked at a place called The Cob, which was an Irish bar in the longshoremen’s district. One night I went over to see what it was like and it was full of Irish longshoremen, while the juke box had ‘chicken reels’ on it. I couldn’t understand how he stood it, until someone told me what scale was for union bartenders.
One night he brought Mezzrow down to Nick’s. I’m working on a series of profiles and the one on Mezzrow is finished. He was an extraordinary individual. Not a very good clarinet player, but the funny thing about Mezz is, every date he was on things happened.
Just think of the records he made, like those Panassie dates for Bluebird. They came to life and had a great sense of time, but he was so musically illiterate - he couldn’t even handle a ninth chord, it was just too much for him. But his sense of time! He came down with Zutty and Al Hall and I had a chance to talk to him. Anyway, it’s in this story and maybe it will be printed some time. [see article in Journal Vol 39, No 1].
Qualey got the idea of starting Solo Art label. He hustled all of us record collectors at Nick’s into subscribing. We had to pay him bucks. It was $10, which is still quite a bit of money [approx. $135 in 2006]. You were promised ten records a year. They would come by mail and, curiously enough, they did come and they were well made records.
Qualey was a strange sort of a collector. He collected skiffle bands, boogie-woogie, stuff like that. He heard that Meade Lux Lewis was driving a cab in Chicago and he decided to take a vacation and go to Chicago for a week or two. When he came back his ego was rather inflated and he felt very pleased with himself, as he’d found Lux Lewis driving a cab, sure enough. He’d also found Albert Ammons and a guy from Kansas City, Pete Johnson, and he’d found Jimmy Yancey, by going to a house rent party where Yancey was playing. [Of course, all these were initially ‘discovered’ by John Hammond three years earlier. H.M.H.].
He brought three of these people to New York. They played at Nick’s and he recorded them. This was the basis of the Solo Art catalog. The strange thing is, when boogie-woogie finally took off, and this must have been the thing that lit the fuse under it, and the big labels got interested in it, he didn’t try to hold these people to a contract. He let them go and record as they pleased. [Subsequently Ross wrote an article, The Solo Art Label, which was published in the Fall, 1995, Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4. H.M.H.]
Another person I met was John Hammond, who was the scion of a very wealthy family. He’d been educated at a leading prep school, gone to Harvard, but dropped out. He lived in the Village in a three storey brick house. He drove a Hudson Terraplane car [small but powerful, the least expensive of the Hudson line, last built in 1938, as in Terraplane Blues. – Ed.], dressed in Ivy League clothes and didn’t mix with the other collectors. I didn’t like him at all, but you have to give John credit for bringing the Basie band out from under the place they were hiding in Kansas City. While he was trying to get Basie a contract they signed with somebody else. They got a little cash up front, but discovered they had signed for something like 30 sides.
The reason those sextet records were made under Jones-Smith Inc., was that Hammond was trying to record them and get round the contract they had signed with Decca. For me at least, the Jones-Smith sides are among the finest jazz records of all. You wonder how jazz can produce something so sophisticated.
I didn’t get along with Hammond, but he did a lot of good things. He was chief of A&R for Columbia, responsible for recording a lot of important things, but he abhorred bebop and thought Parker was dreadful. He recorded none of it.
Another collector of interest was a man named Bruce Mitchell, who was a pencil boy - a successful artist. He came along to my Parker sessions and he’s the one who thought up the title, Scrapple from the Apple. Bruce was not really a collector. He had never heard of Hot Discography. He just collected what he wanted. He liked skiffle bands, he liked any kind of scat singing, and he loved Parker and Ellington. That was about it.
I talked to Max Harrison. He’s no longer with The Times. He’s retired, but he gave me a pretty good rundown on the earliest writings about jazz. The Melody Maker started in London in 1926, while a Belgian writer, Robert Goffin, in 1920 wrote an article called Les Disques Verts for a Belgian magazine. In the same year he published a poem called Jazz Band. In 1932 his Aux Frontieres du Jazz was published in Paris, and this helped form a lot of my ideas. He thought jazz should be improvised, that it should have a hot sound, and above all it should be polyrhythmic. These things are gospel for me.
This is why there is not very much after Parker that interests me. For me, Coltrane just does not swing very much. I know a lot of people are going to disagree, but I just don’t like twenty minute solos.
Also in the same period Le Jazz Hot magazine began publication, somewhere around 1935, and, forgotten by many people, Orkester Journalen, published in Stockholm and still going, is a very good magazine. And the first discography was by Hilton Schleman, published in London, covering 1906 to 1936, while Delaunay’s Hot Discography came out in Paris that same year.
I think that brings me to the end of these rather diffuse remarks about collecting, which was so different in the thirties, also different in America, so that concludes my lecture and I thank you very much for your attention.
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Ross Russell gave this talk at the IAJRC Convention held at Canary Wharf, London, on the first full day, Friday, 6 August, 1994. He had been a member of the IAJRC since 1991 and was then aged 85.
He was born in Los Angeles, 18 March, 1909 and graduated from UCLA in 1932. After service in the Merchant Navy he opened his Tempo Music Store in 1945. When Dizzy Gillespie brought a band to California including Charlie Parker he was much taken with their music and set up Dial Records. The full story is told in his authoritative biography of Parker, Bird Lives! which was published in 1973.
His other works include a well written jazz novel, The Sound, published in 1961, and Jazz Style in Kansas City & the Southwest (1971). His entry in the 1995 Membership Directory shows his interests as ‘All New Orleans, swing, bop, Morton, early Armstrong, Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker.’
I had several chats with him and found him gregarious. He kindly signed my copy of The Sound. He was living at Niland, California, but was contemplating moving to Spain and asked many questions about life there. This did not happen and he died in March, 2000, aged 90.
H.M.H.
(6 February, 2006)