Patton/Green Left Bank Jazz Soc. recording

[Soul Stream]

On July 31, 1966 the Left Bank Jazz Society held a concert at the Crystal Ballroom in Baltimore with John Patton, Grant Green, Harold Vick and Hugh Walker.

Since many of these concerts were recorded, and many have since come out on CD, how can I find out if there is an existing tape of this. Who controls the Left Bank tapes, and does anybody know how to contact them?

Thanks for any help....

[Soul Stream]

...up...somebody....there's a tape out there somewhere...

[bertrand]

Soul Stream,

I don't want to discourage you, but the odds of finding this tape, if it exists, are slim to none.

When I first started finding unrecorded Lee Morgan tunes at the Library of Congress, I started looking around to see if any private tapes existed that might include some of these pieces. My theory was that even if a tune never made it to an album, it might have been performed live.

Of course, live gigs with Lee Morgan from the mid to late sixties aren't exactly floating around. One lead was the left bank jazz society stuff. I knew there was one CD on Fresh Sound from these gigs (1968, with Clifford Jordan, Ed Blackwell and John Hicks), and I thought perhaps there could be more. Somewhere, I read that the left bank tapes had wound up at Morgan State University near Baltimore. In those days, the society was still holding gigs (they now stopped about 3 years ago), and I called the number I got for tickets to ask about the tapes.

I came across a guy named Leon Manker who was thoroughly unpleasant. He essentially said that he was only willing to let people listen to the tapes if they were from a record company and interested in buying them. So the trail ran cold.

Then, of course, a few years ago Joel Dorn started putting stuff out but that didn't last long. I was told that Dorn had to put aside some stuff because the sound was just too crappy (for some reason, the left bank people took pride in using bad equipment for their recordings - I read this in some article about them a few years ago).

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of the whole story of the left bank tapes and the Morgan state lead by a friend of mine. So I called the Morgan State library.

The librarian asked around and called me back. The tapes were there for a long time (20 years?) for storage purposes, but were never integrated into the collection. At this point, he did not think they had them anymore. He cited a Baltimore Sun article that mentioned the whole Dorn thing, and the librarian was under the impression from the article that Dorn actually owned the tapes now. I doubt this.

So where do we stand?

1. Perhaps Dorn does have the tapes. Does anyone here know him?

2. A lot of the left bank people are dead now, but Leon Manker may still be living. I'll let someone else call him.

3. There is a DJ on WPFW in D.C., Rick Williams, who is a nice guy. He used to be the D. C. contact for the LBJS (he sold tickets), so he may have a line on them. I suspect he will just send me back to Manker, however. I'll try calling him.

So, as you see, the trail is pretty cold. But the tapes are out there somewhere. I'd love to hear the Roy Haynes Quartet with Wayne Shorter, since I was told they were playing Wayne's Blue Note material on the gigs ('House Of Jade' was specifically mentioned by the band's bassits, Larry Ridley). I think Albert Dailey was also on the gig. if Dorn has tapes that are unreleasable, this is the kind of thing that could be made available for download at least.

Someone needs to pursue this, but probably not me.

Bertrand.

Edited October 8, 2005 by bertrand

[Soul Stream]

Bertrand,

Thanks for the spirited reply. Sounds like you've been involved at a fairly active level in pursuing these left bank tapes. Somehow I KNOW there are John Patton tapes out there from the 60's SOMEWHERE. The left bank seems like a good lead since they recorded, and Patton/Green played there during this time frame.

I'd love to e-mail Dorn, anybody got an e-mail on him?

[JSngry]

Try Hyena records hyenarecords@aol.com They've already reissued the Label M Left Band sides.

[Dan Gould]

I'm nearly certain that Dorn said in one of those goofy liner notes that he has the Left Bank tapes and that more would be forthcoming. Of course that was before he went belly up yet again.

[bertrand]

It's possible that Dorn is in actual physical possession of the tapes, but somehow I have my doubts. It seems hard for me to believe that Manker and co. would have tunned them over lock, stock, and barrel. I could be wrong. Dorn is the one to ask.

Bertrand,

[Vincent, Paris]

The article from the Baltimore City Paper (10/4/2000). This seems to imply that Dorn had then got an hand on those tapes.

The Closet Tapes

A Treasure Trove of Classic Live Recordings Revives BaltimoreÆs PremierJazz

By James D. Dilts

"IN THE MOMENT" is a phrase popular among jazz musicians. It translates, roughly, to "now." More precisely and ideally, it is a state wherein the players, individually or collectively, having transcended their long hours of practice and rehearsal, their preconceived notions, and the mechanical barrier of their instruments, attain a higher, almost spiritual plane of pure musical improvisation. "Not the last moment," singer Bobby McFerrin once explained to an audience at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, "but the moment." Since jazz at its best is constantly being created anew, it is also constantly being lost.

Many such moments occurred at Baltimore's weekly Left Bank Jazz Society concerts over the years--and they, at least, have not been lost. The society recorded some 350 shows between l965 and l980, when many of the artists involved were at their peak. These tapes have achieved near legendary status among jazz fans.

The names are enough to set the mind in motion. Ellington, Basie, Herman, Gillespie, Mingus, Coltrane--they all played upon the stage of the Famous Ballroom at the invitation of the Left Bank Jazz Society. So did the big bands of Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Don Ellis, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, and Sun Ra. The Left Bank's first concert at the Famous on North Charles Street--and a memorable Sunday afternoon it must have been--presented Herbie Hancock with Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette, all leaders or featured players today. John Coltrane made one of his final appearances there, in May 1967, two months before he died. (Unfortunately, it was one of the few concerts that was not recorded.)

The small groups that played for the Left Bank make up their own encyclopedia of jazz: Baltimore's Gary Bartz, Jimmy Heath (who provided the model for the Left Bank's logo: a profile view of a tenor saxophonist, feet planted, back arched, horn uplifted), Blue Mitchell, Benny Golson, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Clifford Jordan, Julian "Cannonball" Adderly, Charles Lloyd, Roy Haynes, Jackie McLean, Wynton Kelly, Donald Byrd, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Hank Mobley, Lucky Thompson, Tony Scott, Phil Woods, Art Farmer, Elvin Jones, Kenny Burrell, Coleman Hawkins, Sam Rivers.

And that was only in the first few years. Still to come were Sonny Stitt, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims (who brought along vocalist Anita O'Day on one of their many visits), George Benson, Milt Jackson, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Bob Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, Lee Morgan, Chico Hamilton, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Lee Konitz, Roy Haynes, Joe Henderson, Pat Martino, McCoy Tyner, Lionel Hampton, Chick Corea, James Moody, Cedar Walton, Stanley Turrentine, Louis Hayes, Mongo Santamaria, Louie Bellson, Chet Baker, Randy Weston, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ahmad Jamal, Howard McGhee, Grover Washington Jr. The singers were not slighted either: Carmen McRae, Shirley Horn, Etta Jones, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Joe Williams (with pianist Ellis Larkins), Arthur Prysock, Jon Hendricks, Eddie Jefferson. Most of these artists were recorded.

The tapes, made by the Left Bank's Vernon Welsh, had been stored in the Morgan State University library since 1975. But this year they found a new home with veteran producer Joel Dorn of the Label M record company in New York. He plans to reissue many of them as CDs. The first two albums, featuring Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt, are just out. "People will be stunned by what we've found," Dorn told Down Beat magazine.

This is the story of the Left Bank Jazz Society's unique collection of tapes--the legacy of a relatively brief but significant moment in Baltimore's cultural history--and of the resurrection through the recordings of the city's venerable jazz organization. The tapes, made with the artists' permission and the understanding that they would not be used for commercial purposes, had lain dormant for years--so this is also the story of how the Left Bank's will and testament, so to speak, was changed.

In an interview for Ken Burns' upcoming PBS documentary Jazz, Dave Brubeck says the history of jazz in America is the history of the African-American struggle for freedom. At times, the music has served as an early indicator of the changing state of race relations--the nation's bandstands were integrated long before its schools and public accommodations. Race also provided the backdrop for the formation of the Interracial Jazz Society, predecessor to the Left Bank. Both groups served as early meeting places for blacks and whites in Baltimore and as barometers, however imperfect, of the city's racial climate.

In 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools in America, the Interracial Jazz Society was founded in Baltimore. Its ultimate purpose was to bring more jazz to the city, but its immediate task was to protest the city liquor board's decision to prevent two Pennsylvania Avenue nightclubs from serving white patrons. Pennsylvania Avenue was then Baltimore's equivalent of Harlem's 125th Street, home to the Royal Theater and several other clubs offering jazz to which adventurous whites were drawn.

By the following year (during which a Baltimore judge overturned the liquor-board ruling), the Interracial Jazz Society had attracted the attention of segregationist city officials. The group's Madison Avenue headquarters was put under police surveillance, and after an article describing the society's goals appeared in The Baltimore Afro-American, the harassment campaign culminated in a tragicomic police raid on the group's basement clubhouse/concert hall.

The late Mickey Fields, a Baltimore tenor saxophonist of note, was on the bandstand as six officers descended the stairs and stopped the music. (Significantly, in view of later events, the session was being taped for the society's library, and the exchange between the police and the club members was recorded.) The raid revealed no illegal activity, but not long afterward, the Interracial Jazz Society died a quiet death. The members must have felt some vindication when the police officer who led the raid was later jailed on a bribery charge in connection with a numbers racket.

In 1964, the year President Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act became law, prohibiting discrimination in voting, education, and the use of public facilities, the Left Bank Jazz Society was founded in a bohemian South Baltimore nightclub. Several members of the Interracial Jazz Society were involved in forming the new group. Benny Kearse, an African-American freight dispatcher, was elected president; Vernon Welsh, a white professional guitarist, was one of the charter members. For many years, these two were the public face of the Left Bank Jazz Society--and, as such, the public face of the city's jazz scene.

The Left Bank's first concert with local talent was held in August 1964 at the Al-Ho Club in the 2500 block of Frederick Avenue. "The back room at the Al-Ho had a circus motif with iridescent lights," recalls John Fowler, another charter member who is currently the society's president. "It was a very weird place but it had a great stage and the [proprietor] liked the music." The club's headquarters were upstairs at the Al-Ho and remained there long after the concerts moved elsewhere. Until 1975, when they were transferred to the library at Morgan State, the society's tapes were stored in a closet at the Al-Ho Club. (The club has since been torn down; a school now occupies the site.)

Baltimore vocalist Delores Lynn and Washington, D.C., tenor saxophonist Buck Hill were among those who played for the Left Bank at the Al-Ho before the group shifted its concerts in early 1965 to the Madison Club, at Madison and Chester streets in East Baltimore. The Madison Club consisted of a bar and kitchen on the first floor and a long, narrow upstairs room with a stage at one end. The place would get so packed sometimes that part of the audience would be seated on the side of the stage. An early photograph shows Vernon Welsh in a characteristic pose at his tape deck, headphones on, back to the audience.

The saga of the Left Bank as a jazz powerhouse begins at the Madison, where it started attracting nationally known musicians, who sometimes brought their own groups but often were backed by locals. "We made some calls and basically we found some [jazz musicians] willing to come down to Baltimore for our price," Fowler says. The range of talent was considerable, from promising new stars such as a very young Chick Corea to elder statesmen like Coleman Hawkins. The Left Bank began to draw media attention in addition to crowds.

The crowds and the notice followed when a fire at the Madison Club forced the society to move its shows to the Crystal Ballroom on North Avenue for a few months in February 1966. It returned to the Madison, but a second blaze in late '66 sent the Left Bank packing to the Famous Ballroom at 1717 N. Charles St., the current home of the Charles Theatre. There it stayed, for an astonishingly rewarding18 years.

In the mid 1960s, many of the bars and clubs in Baltimore were still segregated. Bands had to be of one color, and so did the clientele. African-Americans were regularly refused service in bars patronized by whites. Jackie McLean, a black New York alto player, once returned to the stage of the Crystal Ballroom after an intermission incensed that he had been refused service at a nearby bar on North Avenue; he emphatically urged the audience to boycott the place.

Things were different at the Left Bank's shows at the Famous Ballroom. Like the Madison Club, it was an upstairs space, but much larger. Once past the ticket window, patrons entered an enormous if somewhat down-at-the-mouth room with well-worn banquettes along the wall, a bar and kitchen in the rear, and a sea of round or rectangular tables set with chairs. The stage was nearly opposite the entrance. Overhead was a blue ceiling painted with white clouds and stars and, in the center, a mirrored globe that revolved. Sometimes, if the mood was particularly festive, the globe was turned on at the end of the concert, spraying the tawdry surroundings with spangles--a real live make-believe ballroom.

The Left Bank's Sunday-evening concerts provided a welcome respite, as one week shifted into the next, from the difficulties and contentions of the real world. The well-dressed crowds brought food and drink in picnic baskets or paper bags and for the most part left their attitudes outside. Conversations bloomed as students met jazz musicians from England, writers encountered civil-rights activists and members of the demimonde, whites and blacks found common ground.

"See ya at the Famous" was not just a slogan on the Left Bank's fliers. So sure were people of spending a congenial few hours with good food, music, and friends that they would show up without even knowing who was playing. The ones who arrived without their picnic baskets could rely on Chef Jim Willis for superb soul-food dinners of chicken, greens, and barbecue, for a nominal price. Interracial friendships developed at the Famous, and a new generation of fans cut their jazz teeth under the aegis of the Left Bank. The Famous even hosted a jazz wedding, between tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and Sandra Lee Williams in July 1975.

Throughout the years, there were many indelible characters and scenes that made the Left Bank shows more than just a concert series. George, a hairdresser by day, was a weekly fixture near the bandstand, dancing with such gusto that occasionally even the musicians couldn't take their eyes off him. A professional tap dancer named Baby Laurence, a card-carrying member of the jazz underground, materialized to dance with Count Basie's band. John Coltrane, on an atypically angry afternoon, lowered his horn and beat his chest with his fists.

Coltrane's outburst predated by about a year the much larger outburst on the streets of Baltimore. Riots broke out in the city on April 7, 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In the Left Bank Jazz Society's 1968 yearbook, the entry for that date reads simply, "No concert. (Disorder in the city.)"

The riots were a watershed in race relations here and elsewhere, and afterward things were not the same in Baltimore. Whites were no longer welcome in the clubs on Pennsylvania Avenue. But the Left Bank Jazz Society picked up where it left off and continued to host concerts at the Famous Ballroom. Benny Kearse was usually near the door to greet the guests, and Vernon Welsh made the announcements and the recordings. During these years, Welsh also hosted a Saturday-night radio show on WBJC, playing jazz and interviewing musicians. Kearse, who had an urbane radio voice, was a frequent guest. The Left Bank sponsored satellite organizations in Washington and in Maryland prisons, and obtained grants to hold touring musicians over an extra day or two to do workshops and concerts in schools.

The Left Bank ended its run at the Famous Ballroom in 1984, four years after it stopped taping its concerts amid increasing concern among musicians about the rights to their work. The society had been renting the North Charles Street space on a weekly basis from Bernie Allen, a local bandleader, who leased it from building owner Alan Shecter. When Allen retired, a group that included some Left Bank members assumed the lease. The concerts continued for a time, but the ballroom badly needed renovation. "The roof leaked, the toilets overflowed, and the air conditioning went out, so we couldn't use it during the summer," Fowler says. "It became unrentable, and [the society] refused to make repairs."

The building had begun life in 1892 as a cable-car barn and subsequently housed an automobile showroom, a 100-lane bowling alley, and a newsreel theater called the Times that later became the Charles Theatre. After World War II, Shecter's father, Louis, converted the second floor into a ballroom that featured big bands. Later, when the Left Bank left, Godfrey's Famous Ballroom took over and did make some renovations. That operation, which hosted rock 'n' roll shows and drew increasingly unruly crowds, ended in 1990 when, after several disturbances and shootings, the liquor board revoked its license. In 1999, following a $1.6 million renovation, the current Charles Theatre multiplex opened in the building. Nothing remains of the former Famous Ballroom save memories--and tapes.

The Left Bank Jazz Society moved several times after leaving the North Charles Street building, first and briefly to a former movie theater on Reisterstown Road that had been converted into a health spa. (There was a swimming pool at the edge of the stage, "which made the musicians quite nervous," Fowler remembers.) After that it traveled successively to Coppin State College on North Avenue; Baltimore City Community College on Liberty Heights Avenue; the Baltimore Grand, a short-lived catering establishment on Eutaw Street downtown; and most recently to the Teamsters Union hall on Erdman Avenue in Southeast Baltimore. As the golden age of modern jazz receded further into history and the Left Bank shifted operations from place to place, the crowds dwindled and the society became ingrown. It had lost its audience, Fowler says, and was broke. After an early-1998 concert, the shows stopped. The Left Bank's moment had passed.

In the mid-1980s, I heard about the Left Bank Jazz Society collection," Joel Dorn says. He's in Sear Sound Studio on 48th Street in New York, waiting for drummer Leon Parker to show up for a recording session.

"I had a live label called Night Records, and we went down for a meeting. It wasn't the right time; they weren't ready," Dorn says. "They had concerns about the collection. There was no unanimity of spirit about letting the tapes go into somebody's hands for release. They were nervous about whether it was feasible. They felt they had been ripped off. Some of the musicians had taken their copies of the tapes and sold them for commercial production, and there was nothing coming back to the Left Bank. They were worried that they were opening a can of worms."

Dorn has been producing records for most of his 58 years. He started out as a teenage disc jockey at Philadelphia's pioneering jazz station WHAT. His real interest, however, was in production. Still a teenager, he started sending letters of advice to Nesuhi Ertegun, co-owner of Atlantic Records. Eventually, Ertegun began to take the letters seriously and, in 1967, he hired Dorn to be his assistant at Atlantic. Some of Dorn's early discoveries were Leon Redbone and Bette Midler; he also recorded Rahsaan Roland Kirk during the tenor-sax legend's late-'60s/early-'70s peak years at the label.

Dorn left Atlantic in 1974, and since then he's consistently mixed production work with searching for and releasing out-of-print jazz treasures and unreleased live recordings. In the 1980s, he traveled the country looking for concert tapes and put several of them out on his own Night Records. In the 1990s, Dorn formed 32 Records and reissued 250 titles, mainly from the Muse and Landmark jazz vaults. This year, he started another outfit, Label M, as a division of the multimedia company Paradise Music and Entertainment.

The Left Bank collection was one of Dorn's early discoveries. "You know, you hear rumors in the jazz life, and I had heard about the tapes the Left Bank Jazz Society had made of their concerts in Baltimore," he says. "The Left Bank Jazz Society tapes comprise one of the most extensive 'live' collections I've ever run across. Its value is that it covers a great many of the major names in jazz when they were at the height of their powers. The recordings open a window to that magical time and place."

For years, the window remained closed. Left Bank officials had never intended the tapes for public release and they wanted to keep it that way.

"We told the musicians we were doing it for our private archives," society president Fowler says. "We never had any inclination we would do anything with them other than listen to them ourselves. . . . When we first talked to Dorn, there was a lot of mistrust within the organization, concerns that he was going to rip us off."

But that attitude changed with the club's fortunes, as it became increasingly difficult for the Left Bank to survive on the revenues from its concerts. As the legends who brought folks flocking to the Famous aged and died, Fowler says, the society found it harder to attract an audience. "Baltimore is a strange town: If it's not a name they recognize, they won't come out. We said, 'You should trust us--we don't book any bad acts.' We brought in Don Braden and Terri Lynn Carrington [a young saxophonist and drummer, respectively], and nobody came. . . .

"We need 300 people to break even [on a show]. For many years, all we had to do was open the door to the Famous Ballroom and 800 people would show up. Those days are gone," Fowler says. "When we looked, the only things we had of value were our reputation and the tapes."

Dorn, in the meantime, had stayed in contact with the society since making his initial mid-'80s inquiry about the tapes. "Sometimes you have to develop a relationship," he says. "They started to see that the tape collection was aging. Maybe somebody told them that tapes don't last forever and that, if they could agree, this was the time to do something. There was a change in the feelings of the organization."

Fowler says Left Bank members knew they needed to turn the tapes into revenue, but they also knew they would need help. "We had talked to quite a few people who told us that dealing with the musicians, the estates, and so on could be quite expensive and time-consuming," he says. "We knew we couldn't handle the copyright, the estates, the rights. Most of this music has never been heard since it was recorded. We want to see the music out there, professionally produced."

Fowler, with the help of attorneys from the University of Maryland School of Law, concluded the deal with Dorn in May after nine months of negotiations. "Dorn has a five-year exclusive right to produce these tapes," Fowler says. "We received an advance on royalties that allowed us to get back on our feet. It will be that endowment we've always looked for to keep us going, a $10,000- to $15,000-a-year stipend that we've needed."

Dorn makes the arrangements with the artists or their estates. "The advantage will be to them," he says. "The living artists will get paid. The sidemen will get paid. Everybody will get paid. Nobody will not get paid." He eventually hopes to glean 40 to 50 CDs out of the 350-tape Left Bank collection, making digital transfers from the aging analog tapes. Not everything is releasable.

"These are amateur recordings," Dorn notes. "The tapes are old. These are 7 1/2-inch reels with quarter-inch tape. Sometimes you get great sound and a so-so performance, sometimes the reverse. The sound and performance both have to be right. It's like tumblers in a lock--everything has to line up for the thing to work. . . .

"Say you get two songs off one of the Roland Kirk Left Bank tapes. You have two songs. It's a start. Maybe we'll do a 'great tenors' album."

On Sunday, Sept. 17, the Left Bank Jazz Society presented its first concert after the two-year hiatus, at the Teamsters hall. David "Fathead" Newman and James Moody performed with their groups. John Fowler greeted the guests. About 500 people filled the room, sitting at round tables with wine coolers and bottles of brandy. Jim Willis was at his usual post in the kitchen, and there was a long line for $6 chicken dinners. The buoyant crowd included dozens of Left Bank old-timers. Some of the dashiki-clad members now carry canes and cell phones have proliferated, but those were about the only things different from the classic days.

Moody has appeared at Left Bank concerts several times, going back to the group's earliest years (although there are no tapes of his performances in the collection). He is 75 but appears much younger. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit, he opened by playing, singing, and adding a little rap interlude to "I'm in the Mood for Love," a takeoff on the song made famous by King Pleasure. It has become a jazz anthem. "Am I insane," Moody sang, "or do I really see heaven in your eyes?"

Benny Kearse was not at the reunion show. He died last year, at the age of 67. Nor was Vernon Welsh. A few days before, at his Catonsville home, Welsh, now 81, recalls the society's golden age. It was his idea to record the Left Bank shows, Welsh says; he used his own equipment--Shure microphones, a reel-to-reel Akai recorder, Ampex BASF tape. "I made them so that we would have something to show for our efforts," he says.

"I haven't played any music since Benny died," he says, recalling his longtime friend and Left Bank partner. A visitor hands Welsh the first two CDs to come out of the society's archives. The warm sounds of Stan Getz fill the room. "It sounds pretty good," he says.

To be read with pictures here

[Vincent, Paris]

Found another article online which discuss how badly those recordings were done :

LABEL M: THE ART OF THE JAZZ ARCHIVE

Robin Tolleson

Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM

Joel Dorn is a lifer, in a musical sense of the word, and his latest venture, Label M, gives him a crack at bringing a lot of important, historic, previously unheard jazz before the public.“This is exciting — there's a sense of discovery every day,” says the producer. “It's like going into a mine and saying, ‘That looks like gold,’ and you come out with something. We listen to a lot of tapes — you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before one of them turns into a handsome prince. But we found some great Coleman Hawkins the other day, at the end of his life. That's a big deal.”

“Technology has allowed us to put this stuff in a form where people can still look and listen. It's almost a teaching tool to young students,” says Dorn's engineer of some 30 years, Gene Paul. “You listen and realize that people don't play that way now. So you are privy to being as close to that club, as close to that performance, as close to that spirit that was happening at the time, and technology is allowing us to snoop back into that zone.”

Dorn's previous venture, 32 Jazz, was successful in deconstructing and reconstructing the Muse record label and creating “lifestyle records” — compilations of work by jazz artists, such as Ron Carter, Woody Shaw, Houston Person, Hank Jones, David Newman and Sonny Stitt, known as the “Jazz For…” series. “Not bullshit jazz, not cop-out jazz, real jazz,” Dorn says, “but real jazz that was accessible to people who weren't necessarily jazz fans. We made mood albums, and basically it was an extension of my DJ days, where you put on an hour of good music.

“At Label M, we don't have an existing label as our wellspring,” he adds. “What we have are collections of live music that I've been stashing for the last 15 or 20 years. The hope has been to someday have a label built around live unreleased music in a variety of genres by major artists at the peak of their powers.” Much of the first live product on Label M is from a large collection of reel-to-reel tapes originally recorded by Vernon Welsh at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, chronicling Left Bank Jazz Society events in the 1960s and ’70s. First releases included Stan Getz' My Foolish Heart, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims Live at the Left Bank, Cedar Walton Live at the Left Bank and Sonny Stitt's Just the Way It Was.

There is also a subterranean world of people outside the music business who have tapes that were recorded on an amateur basis. “Someone else might say ‘illegally,’” Dorn quips. “What we do is get clearances on them, get the rights, pay the artists and make them legal and legitimate and put them out. Once the word gets out that you're looking, lots of musicians have tapes of their own. A soundman will say, ‘Here — here's your performance tonight.’ Now we get tapes every day from people.” Dorn's son, Adam, helps to gather and listen to material, along with others at the label. “The jungle drums are out there on us in the tape collecting world,” Joel says. “Lots of people are contacting us. So you put it on — you either like it or you don't like it. I don't want to make this sound like there's any great mystery to it.”

Most of this stuff is just feathers — the more you touch it and make it right, the wronger it becomes. As stupid as it may sound, it's what you don't do to it that makes it great. Leave it as honest as you can.

— Gene Paul

“Most of this old stuff was recorded almost by mistake,” says Gene Paul. “The Left Bank collection was recorded reel-to-reel, 3¾, half-mil, Mylar tape, quarter-track. I don't think you could do any worse. They put the piano in mono on one side, with the drums and the bass. The other side would be two horns or a horn and a vibe or something. And we would make a DAT of these tapes right away, because with the mylar tape, being half-mil, you run into certain problems. When it stops quickly, it stretches the tape, and the tape literally turns into a thread, so that portion of tape you cut off and throw away. Once the mylar stretches, it's over. Once you put it on and start playing it, you must continue through the whole side. It's so thin that you can barely thread it without it bending and fraying and falling apart. And it's quarter-track, which means you have two channels going one way, and then you turn the tape over and there's two more. But when all is said and done, the music really lifts it to a point where you say, ‘Listen to what he's playing.’

“It's brilliant Stan [Getz],” Paul continues. “Sonny Stitt's the same. We had to have gone through eight or 10 hours of music. Joel and I just sit there, and when it hits, it hits. Joel says, ‘Do you think you can dig the sound out?’ If it survives getting through it and everybody says, ‘Did you hear Getz?,’ that's the key. Getz was on a good night. There are moments that you hear the honesty. You hear something go down that had nothing to do with the red light. That privilege of searching in the treasure chest is just overwhelming, because many times you see a side that never existed on record. When this one came by, everybody in the room sat up. And if you can polish it a little bit and not lose that…

“We do a little No Noise, we do a few things of the technical world; we're not the Flintstones,” the engineer continues. “But when No Noise starts to become music, I stop. I'd rather hear noise than hear the band scalped. So I'll stop there, and noise is my friend. The music has to be so focused and so spectacular that it truly extends all of the flaws. You just don't see them anymore. If you're into Getz, there's no way you're going to stop listening to Getz to listen to some flaw.

“We're using Sonic Solutions,” Paul says. “In this case, we're coming off an Otari 50/50 quarter-track reel-to-reel. We're going through some real fine Apogees, and we're going into a Yamaha digital mixer in order to try and spread this a little bit. And then the mix is mostly passive. It's just a tool to add maybe a little room sound, a little echo and spread it out very gently. Most of this stuff is just feathers — the more you touch it and make it right, the wronger it becomes. As stupid as it may sound, it's what you don't do to it that makes it great. Leave it as honest as you can, and then through that process we go into Sonics, and if we have to brush it, we'll brush it, and if we have to do some little level increments inside, we'll do that. A little bit of No Noise, something minor that doesn't take the room out.”

Dorn and Paul were behind the board during pop's “Golden era,” as staffers for Atlantic Records in the ’60s and ’70s. Dorn won Grammys with Roberta Flack (“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song”) and produced the likes of Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Leon Redbone, Bette Midler, the Neville Brothers and Lou Rawls, after an apprenticeship under Neshui Ertegun. They were magic times at Atlantic. “It screwed me up for the rest of my life, because I thought that's the way it was,” he says. “I figured I'd still be making records at Atlantic with Fathead [Newman]. A little naive on my part.”

One of the hardest parts of Dorn's current job is hearing a great live performance on tape and realizing there's no way to make the audio presentable. “There's a delicate balance there,” Dorn says. “There's a point at which I don't care how great the performance is; sonically it has to at least be sound. What we obviously listen for is ‘A’ performance and ‘A’ sound. But if you have ‘A+’ performance and ‘B’ sound, after a moment or so the performance transcends the sound. But we won't go too far. For an absolutely brilliant performance we'll bend a little bit for sound, but not much. And, conversely, brilliant sound in and of itself means nothing if the performance is dull. So our batting average is very low. We'll listen to 100 tapes and we'll get two-and-a-half or three albums out of it. But those albums meet the requirements.”

Editing is just a part of the process, according to Dorn. “You don't over-edit, like you don't over-equalize or over-Sonic Solution. But after you've been doing this for a while, you get a sense of how to reduce a performance without changing its basic character. Maybe focus a little better. It still has to be natural, it has to have its feel. If someone says that was a great live performance and doesn't know we took four minutes out of a 12 minute piece, we did okay.”

“Some of these choruses are way over-extended,” adds Paul, “and everybody but the bartender takes a chorus. The good part is that they play enough that within that passage you've got a moment there that's brilliant. Then you've got an option to tighten it up a little bit.”

Label M is also in the business of re-releasing out-of-print records, such as Joe Williams' classic vocal album A Man Ain't Supposed To Cry (Roulette), as well as Atlantic classics (produced by Dorn, Arif Mardin and Neshui Ertegun) by David Newman, Les McCann and Eddie Harris, and Rufus Harley. But Dorn and Paul are focusing the label more toward live performances. They received a four-star review in the February 2001 Downbeat for Ray Bryant's Somewhere in France. Gene Paul recalls the discovery of that concert tape: “Joel kept prodding Ray to see if he had any tapes, and Ray finally called Joel up and said, ‘You have no idea what I've found. I've got a performance from Europe — I don't know where it was.’ The quality of the performance and the sound is so good you'd swear it was done with a truck. The crowd sounds like Avery Fisher Hall, the talking is just marvelous and it was all done on an audio cassette.”

“The beauty of what we have with these tapes is that the musicians never knew they were being recorded, so they were just doing their gig,” says Dorn. “The pressure of recording live wasn't there. In the ’60s and ’70s, I saw Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver a hundred times. I know what it was like back then, and I'm trying to document that period. With the live records, some of them are stunning, some of them have incredible sound, but all of them have something that's evocative of that era.”

“We can go in there and divide people, and make it so quiet that you'd swear it was done six years ago,” says Paul. “But when you finish with it, it doesn't have the magic like when you went to a club and saw a performance that was just incredible, even if the sound was mediocre. It all had to do with the atmosphere, with the air conditioning and the smoke…and they performed to whatever the bad parts of the room were. And when you try to correct that, it alters what they're doing. It really boils down to, do you have goose bumps going up your arm and how does it feel? We like to get as good a top end and as good a bottom and clarity as we can get, but never giving up that feeling.”

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_label_art_jazz/

[Soul Stream]

Thanks for all the great help. Would like to contact Dorn as he seems to have gone through most, if not all, of the Left Bank tapes. If the Patton/Green concert were recorded, perhaps he has already heard it.

[Soul Stream]

Try Hyena records hyenarecords@aol.com They've already reissued the Label M Left Band sides.

←

Jim, is this another Dorn enterprise? Or is there another label just reissuing Label M?

[kh1958]

It's another Joel Dorn label.

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=101

Try Hyena records hyenarecords@aol.com They've already reissued the Label M Left Band sides.

←

Jim, is this another Dorn enterprise? Or is there another label just reissuing Label M?

←

[Vincent, Paris]

Yeah, Hyena Records is Joel Dorn's fourth label (after Night Records, 32 Jazz and Label M). You should check its website. On Heyna have been reissued some recordings from the LBJS first released on Label M (such as the Hubbard/Heath and Sonny Stitt).

[Dan Gould]

From the first article posted above:

Fowler, with the help of attorneys from the University of Maryland School of Law, concluded the deal with Dorn in May after nine months of negotiations. "Dorn has a five-year exclusive right to produce these tapes," Fowler says. "We received an advance on royalties that allowed us to get back on our feet. It will be that endowment we've always looked for to keep us going, a $10,000- to $15,000-a-year stipend that we've needed."

The byline says 10/4/2000 which means that if this is accurate, Dorn's rights to produce those tapes just expired, with what? Maybe six issued concerts?

[bertrand]

Thank to contacts I made in Baltimore last night, I have some new leads. The saga of the LBJS is still unfurling...I'll keep you posted.

Bertrand.

[Soul Stream]

Thank to contacts I made in Baltimore last night, I have some new leads.  The saga of the LBJS is still unfurling...I'll keep you posted.

Bertrand.

←

Thanks Bertrand. Did contact Dorn's assistant and was told they didn't have the tapes anymore...

[bertrand]

Not surprised. Did she say where they sent them to, or did they never actually physically own them?

The next step is to contact a mysterious dry-cleaning joint in Baltimore, which may just be a front. There my be some bodies and other skeletons in the closet. Perhaps I should start packing heat. I may be in way over my head.

Bertrand.

Edited October 17, 2005 by bertrand

[kh1958]

Is your real name Marlowe?

Not surprised.  Did she say where they sent them to, or did they never actually physically own them?

The next step is to contact a mysterious dry-cleaning joint in Baltimore, which may just be a front.  There my be some bodies and other skeletons in the closet.  Perhaps I should start packing heat.  I may be in way over my head.

Bertrand.

←

[Soul Stream]

Not surprised.  Did she say where they sent them to, or did they never actually physically own them?

The next step is to contact a mysterious dry-cleaning joint in Baltimore, which may just be a front.  There my be some bodies and other skeletons in the closet.  Perhaps I should start packing heat.  I may be in way over my head.

Bertrand.

←

Yes, He said they physically had them.... but not anymore.

[bertrand]

Hmmm...We need to find out who they were sent back to.

I'm pretty sure someone told me that Dorn decided some of the stuff was unreleasable due to sound quality. So no one profits from them, but they still are a useful research tool.

Perhaps they need to finally go where they should have gone a long time ago, namely some research institution where the public can listen to them on a playback basis. I'm thinking Library of Congress, IJS, Felix Grant Jazz Archives, something along those lines.

So the next steps are:

1. Who has the tapes?

2. Who should take the initiative to try to convince these individuals to donate them to a worthy archive? I have no experience in these matters, and I am no diplomat.

More to come...

Bertrand.

Edited October 17, 2005 by bertrand

[phunkey]

Sorry for taking up an old thread again, but I wondered whether there are any news on the whereabouts of the LBJS archives. I guess that after Joel Dorn passed away in December 2007 it will be even more difficult to track down the tapes.

I'm particularly interested in the collection after reading in a Bennie Maupin interview that he played his first gig as part of Herbie Hancock's Sextet there, and by coincidence this also was Albert Tootie Heath's last one. Fair to say a LBJS recording would be of somewhat historical importance. If there's any helpful info, I might be able to lure Bob Belden on the trail.

[bertrand]

I tried again a few months ago, I even spoke at length to someone who really looked like he could put me in contact with the right people and then, again, the trail went cold.

Bertrand.

[andybleaden]

hmmm interesting one this ...wish there was something I could actually do...

[mjzee]

Up.

[bertrand]

I mentioned this a while back in another thread. The Patton/Green was recorded, and Uptown records bought it along with about 20 other tapes.

Sunenblick only put out two 2 CDs before he died. I asked him a couple of times about putting out the Patton/Green, but he was always evasive.

We can assume his estate has the tape. How can we go from here?

Bertrand.

 

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 05:56 AM by bertrand