Joe Fields RIP

[paul secor]

A friend just forwarded me an email from Jazz Promo Services stating that Joe Fields, record producer/label owner - Cobblestone, Muse/Savoy Jazz, HighNote/Savant - has passed away at age 88.

I can't find anything else to confirm this, but funeral arrangements are listed, so I assume he has passed.

[Ted O'Reilly]

Saddened to hear that...he seemed to me to be one of the good ones.

[Chuck Nessa]

I first met Joe in 1968 and have bunches of memories and opinions. I will be back later to expound.

[AllenLowe]

think again.

[AllenLowe]

would be very interested in what you have to say. A record producer I used to work for was not a big fan.

[Chuck Nessa]

Sorry I missed Pauls topic. Please merge them.

[Larry Kart]

Merged.

[Chuck Nessa]

First met Joe in '67 or '68 while working for Discount Records in Chicago. Joe was a salesman for Prestige and was all excited about selling us overstocks/cheap pressings of the various Prestige labels. I think the price at that time was something like $.35 for our company. I remember taking him and "Rene" (anyone remember her) to a Braxton concert at the U of Chicago in the '70s. When he was first starting Muse he invited me to NY to discuss becoming a third partner with him and Schlitten. I declined. By the mid '80s I was involved in distributing Muse in the midwest and he spent a night in our house and he ate pancakes with the kids.

He always seemed to view himself as a "sharp" businessman which meant "tight" or just plain cheap to a lot of artists. I always thought he was trying to be Bob Weinstock without Bob's love for the music.

He wound up with a sizable recorded legacy. YMMV.

[Ken Dryden]

I never met Joe Fields but when I called Jimmy Ponder to seek a phone interview for background in writing liner notes about an unissued solo live recording, he responded, "They recorded that?" Joe Fields got involved because Ponder was a HighNote artist and he was trying to block its release. I didn't pursue the project out of respect for Ponder, though a well known writer took it on and was evidently unaware of its sketchy history. Joe Fields had a Jimmy Ponder session already in the can and hired me to writer liner notes for it, Somebody's Child, which turned out to be Jimmy Ponder's last release prior to his death.

 

[JSngry]

Joe Fields kept the records coming, RIP for that if nothing else!

[paul secor]

And hey - he made much of the Savoy jazz catalog available again back in the day. That meant something to me.

[Bill Nelson]

In 1974, I phoned Joe Fields at Muse Records to get promos for my college radio station (WRIU-FM, Kingston, RI).  Nice enough that he took my call and even better when he said, "I'll add you to our mailing list but you gotta promise me you won't take 'em home or sell 'em on the side."  (Both conditions honored while I was there.) 

[AllenLowe]

Fields and Schiltten had a a cataclysmic split over ethics.

[JSngry]

Anybody remember Jazz magazine from the late 70s? They ran a blurb about Schlitten instituting a profit-sharing plan at Xanadu, and then a while later another one about cats actually getting paid out of the plan.

[HutchFan]

  On 7/15/2017 at 6:46 PM, JSngry said:

Joe Fields kept the records coming, RIP for that if nothing else!

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Absolutely.

[AllenLowe]

  On 7/17/2017 at 12:23 AM, JSngry said:

Anybody remember Jazz magazine from the late 70s? They ran a blurb about Schlitten instituting a profit-sharing plan at Xanadu, and then a while later another one about cats actually getting paid out of the plan.

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I worked for Don at that time. The plan, as I recall it, was that they would share royalties even before the money was paid to recoup the sessions; in other words, he would share the debt with musicians instead of making it all come out of their end before showing any payments, as most (if not all) record companies do.