April 3, 1994, Page 002026 The New York Times Archives AT VERVE RECORDS' 50th Anniversary this Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, hoopla of all sorts will go on, celebrating the record label that has profoundly influenced music in this century. Ella Fitzgerald, the Velvet Underground, Louis Armstrong, Frank Zappa, Lester Young, the Righteous Brothers, Charlie Parker, Janis Ian, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz all recorded for Verve. Subtract just Ms.
Bud Powell was the most important pianist in the early bop style, and his innovations transformed the jazz pianism of his time. Powell’s playing was sustained by a free unfolding of rapid and unpredictable melodic invention, and great creative intensity.
Fitzgerald's series of American standards, the early encounters between Afro-Cuban and jazz musicians, Getz's bossa nova albums, Parker's sessions and Billie Holiday's lavish recordings and the 20th century already sounds different. In recent years, Verve has enhanced its reputation by restarting the careers of older musicians like Abbey Lincoln, Joe Henderson, Shirley Horn and Betty Carter.
And it's angling to become a force for the future, having signed young artists like the trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton, the bassist Chris McBride and the pianist Stephen Scott. There's isn't a label in jazz that is better at positioning its artists commercially. Behind Verve's dominance lurks the specter of Norman Granz, its founder and a towering figure in the American arts.
The rich, smart impresario, now 76, lives in semiretirement in Switzerland; it's uncertain whether he will show up at Carnegie Hall to toast his own legacy. Those who make money off culture aren't supposed to be good guys in white hats, but Mr. Granz has had an especially beneficial effect on jazz though he is not known as a particularly amiable person. And while others were trying to make a mark in jazz without losing the family fortune, he managed to wend his way between the commercial and the uncommercial without falling. Advertisement Mr.
Granz knew about jazz as show business, but his particular genius was to make show business subservient to jazz. He demonstrated that business savvy in his first concert in 1944, a benefit performance for the defense of Chicano youths held after the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. The show, which included Illinois Jacquet, Nat (King) Cole and Les Paul, was recorded, and a single by Mr. Jacquet, 'Blues, Part 2' became a hit. The concert's success clearly shaped Mr.
Granz's thinking. Later, he regularly sent out groups of musicians across the country (and ultimately abroad) to perform concerts, in a program called Jazz at the Philharmonic. Granz always spent heavily on publicity and tried to make the concerts into events - the place to be. He believed in jam sessions, which let the performers stretch out and allowed occasional duels, crowd-pleasing tactics that audiences loved and critics lambasted for their commercialism. The concerts gave the performers a platform to exhibit what they knew best, from ballads and blues to standards. No fool, he recorded many of them, making it possible for him to sell the music twice.
Americans after World War II were primed for a more literate and worldly music while still looking for a good time. Just as important, the Jazz at Philharmonic shows made jazz concerts a regular event, nationally and internationally, and presaged the arrival of jazz festivals. At those concerts, Mr. Granz regularly included a rider in his contracts requiring that audiences and backstages be racially integrated. Granz entered the music business, small, independent labels like his were flourishing. On the East Coast, Blue Note, Prestige and Savoy were all recording important music. And Los Angeles was chock full of independent jazz and rhythm-and-blues labels, all catering to the new tastes in music; he caught a culture in transition.
Granz had that no other label had was his Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, and their success afforded him the financial independence to record music he liked, or thought worthwhile. In the mid-1950's, when be-bop was the dominant jazz form, he recorded many of the greatest swing-styled improvisers, including Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. He recorded Gerry Mulligan and Getz and Oscar Peterson and Gillespie, even though the trumpeter was known for not selling records. He recorded marginal figures like Lee Konitz, and an important ones like Parker, and he made plenty of recordings that for years never broke four figures in sales. And he recorded Holiday extensively, even through she was seen as a spent force. Granz obviously loved mainstream jazz, he had another idea, one that translated into his biggest success.
He eventually made enough money to produce orchestral sessions, and had a strong sense of what was commercial. He had worked as Ms.
Fitzgerald's personal manager, but in 1956 her contract with Decca Records ran out. He picked it up and started on the songbook series for Verve, featuring her singing the music of Harold Arlen, Cole Parter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, all arranged by the best arrangers of the time. THE RECORDINGS NOT ONLY made Ms. Fitzgerald one of the top draws in America but also helped solidify the material's reputation as a subject worthy of interpretation. The sessions set a paradigm for what could be achieved at the border of popular music and jazz. Nearly 40 years later, the music not only sounds unravaged by time but is still being imitated.
Advertisement In 1960, Mr. Granz sold his company to a major corporation, MGM, (which in 1972 sold it to a company that has become Polygram). After he left, Verve had mixed success at best. It broadened its purview, recording everyone from the pianist Bill Evans and the guitarist Wes Montgomery to seminal rockers like Zappa and the Velvet Underground.
It recorded well-known comedians like Shelly Berman and Jackie Mason, and completely unknown and long forgotten acts like Barnswallow Farquahr. The producer Creed Taylor took over its jazz department and balanced classic recordings (the pairing of Getz and Chick Corea, for instance) with the heartbreaking but commercially successful dreck of the string-laden later Wes Montgomery sessions. The label clearly had lost the uncompromised vision that Mr. Granz had used so effectively. That lack of vision will be evident at the 50th anniversary concert in its uneasy mix of older and newer artists, including Jackie McLean, Astrud Gilberto, Lionel Hampton, Mel Torme, Benny Carter, Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson and Shirley Horn. There will be a Japanese pianist, Yosuke Yamashita, a concession to Japanese television, which will film the event.
Peter Delano, a 17-year-old pianist as yet more interesting for his age than his ability, will perform. And there will be a set of fusion music, featuring, among others, Jeff Lorber. It's jazz as business, with an eye to videos, television (PBS will broadcast the concert on May 18) and future recordings. Clearly, the compromises needed to support every Mr.
Henderson or Mr. Scott, the pianist, now mean the promotion of a child pianist or a Japanese tie-in or a mundane fusion group. More than anything, the unpleasant balance that contemporary jazz companies affiliated with major labels have had to find means that jazz's relationship to popular culture has changed irrevocably. It's hard not to believe that in 50 years, for the label's 100th anniversary, the fusion groups and child acts will have been forgotten. The Jazz at the Philharmonic recordings will, albeit slowly, still be selling. Granz's stewardship of a great label is both a lesson in the right way of doing things and a sign of how things have changed.
A SHORT COURSE IN VERVE'S JAZZ THE VERVE DISCOGRAPHY runs to 800 pages, so any selection is by definition limited. Here are a few high points of the music produced by the label's founder, Norman Granz. Ella Fitzgerald, 'The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books' (Verve 314 519 832-2; 16 CD's). She sings with an orchestra, and the formula has never worked better. Stan Getz, 'The Girl From Ipanema: The Bossa Nova Years' (Verve 823 611-2; four CD's). The records that launched the bossa nova in America.
Dizzy Gillespie, 'Sonny Side Up' (Verve 825 674-2; one CD). The title refers to the saxophonists Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, and the record is a jam-session masterpiece. Billie Holiday, 'The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959' (Verve 314 517 658-2; 10 CD's). Holiday in all sorts of contexts, from live jazz sessions to small groups to orchestras. Lee Konitz, 'Motion' (Verve 821 553-2; one CD).
The alto saxophonist is at the peak of his powers, his playing abstract and beautiful. Advertisement.
Charlie Parker, 'Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve' (Verve 837 141-2; 10 CD's). Almost the book on Parker, including the saxophonist with the Jazz at the Philharmonic and an Afro-Cuban orchestra. Bud Powell, 'Jazz Giant' (Verve 829 937-2; one CD). The pianist, backed by two great rhythm sections, plays some of his finest compositions.
Art Tatum, 'The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces' (Pablo 4404-2; seven CD's) and 'The Complete Pablo Group Masterpieces' (Pablo 4401-2; six CD's). Nearly 200 performances by the pianist Fats Waller once called God. Ben Webster, 'Ben Webster and Associates' (Verve 835 254-2; one CD). The associates include Coleman Hawkins and Budd Johnson on saxophones and Roy Eldridge on trumpet. Lester Young, 'Pres and Teddy' (Verve 831 270-2; one CD). The saxophonist Lester Young and the pianist Teddy Wilson play a magnificent set of standards.