Bebop and the Recording Industry_The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered

American Musicological Society

Bebop and the Recording Industry: The 1942 AFM Recording Ban ReconsideredAuthor(s): Scott DeVeauxSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 126-165Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831753Accessed: 02/11/2010 06:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=amusoc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/831753?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

Bebop and the Recording Industry: the 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered*

BY SCOTT DEVEAUX

F THE MANY WAYS in which jazz differs from European art music, none is as dramatic as the means by which it is preserved and

disseminated. The jazz tradition as we know it could not exist without recording technology. The special nuances of jazz-the details of rhythm, timbre, pitch variation, and dynamics, to say nothing of the art of improvisation-simply cannot be accurately represented with conventional notation. For better or for worse, the history of jazz is a history of recordings.

For the historian, working with recordings has proven to be something of a mixed blessing: along with obvious benefits come certain challenges. One must be ever mindful, for example, that recordings preserve only a minute fraction of the total activity-and a potentially unrepresentative fraction at that. Unlike written scores, which may represent months and months of accumulated labor, recordings (especially in the era before modern multi-tracking) are notoriously casual affairs. They resemble in this respect the photo- graph: capturing the moment with a remarkable fidelity which often penetrates to the heart of the matter, but which offers only a glimpse nevertheless. A few of the most important recordings in all of jazz, like Coleman Hawkins' "Body and Soul," are essentially lucky accidents. . On the other side of the coin are the musicians from all periods who, despite being spoken of glowingly by their contempo- raries, remain shadowy and almost forgotten figures because they rarely, if ever, stepped into the recording studio.

* This article is based on a paper read at the national meeting of the Sonneck Society (Boulder, CO 1986). I wish in particular to thank Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Carl Scheele, Kip Lornell, and Lawrence Gushee for their sound advice and encouragement during its preparation for publication.

'"Body and Soul": Bluebird B-1o253, ii October 1939. Hawkins has stated on several occasions that he had no intention of recording "Body and Soul", but was talked into it on the spot by Victor recording executive Leonard Joy. "I didn't want to play it at all so I just played it through once and made up the ending when I got to it". down beat 22 (12 January 1955): i8. See also Coleman Hawkins: A Documentary (Riverside RLP 12-1I17/1i8), an interview with Hawkins recorded in 1956.

BEBOP AND THE RECORDING INDUSTRY 127

Equally problematic, perhaps, is the process by which the existing repertory of recordings has been chosen. We may prefer to think that the decision to record one tune and not another rests with the artist; but more often than not, that responsibility has been taken by the recording company, which has in recent times largely displaced the music publisher as the chief broker between the artist and the public. A recorded jazz performance is an artistic statement, to be sure, but it is also an industrial product in a modem mass-market economy, subject to the complex interaction of art and economics which some sociologists have termed the "production of culture" (Ryan 1985). One need not accept an economically determinist view of art to recognize the extent to which the body of available jazz recordings has been shaped by this process.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between jazz and the recording industry during a crucial period of stylistic development: the transition between the styles of swing and bebop during the late 193os and the early i940s. These issues have, in fact, been raised before, and quite often, in the literature on the period, but primarily with respect to one of the most dramatic events in the history of commercial recording-the ban on recording called by the musicians' union in 1942.

I

James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musi- cians (or AFM), was not one to underestimate the importance of recordings. The recording industry brought $3 million in income annually to members of the AFM.2 Petrillo saw the danger for musicians in recordings as coming not from the recording industry itself, but from the chief commercial users of recordings: from radio broadcasters, who during the 1930os were capable of playing either commercial recordings or selections from special discs called "electric transcriptions"; and from owners of juke boxes, which by the 1940s had become ubiquitous fixtures of small restaurants and night clubs.3 By making recordings which could be used in place of live performances on radio and in clubs, Petrillo argued, union members were putting themselves out of work. Somehow, they ought to be compen- sated.

2 The figure comes from a study commissioned by the AFM for its annual convention in 1941. down beat 8 (1 July 1941): 4.

3 By 1942, juke boxes were estimated to account for 44% of total sales volume. Barry Ulanov, "The Jukes Take Over Swing," Billboard 54 (3 January i942): 67.

128 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

At first, the union tried to insist that recordings be manufactured "for home use only" (and pressured companies to have that phrase stamped on the label of each recording). But the leverage of the union was limited by a general principle, later confirmed by the Supreme Court, which ended the control of performing artists over their own recordings at the time of sale.4 Once juke box operators and radio broadcasters had purchased recordings, they were free to use them as they saw fit.

In February 1937, Petrillo, then head of the Chicago local, forced the issue by prohibiting the musicians within his jurisdiction from making records, and convincing the full union membership at the national convention in July to threaten a similar ban. But the goal of the ban was vague. The union ended up withdrawing its threat in exchange for promises of increased employment of union musicians by radio stations.5

In i940, Petrillo became president of the national union. Two years later, he revived the idea of a total ban on recording activities by union members. In the intervening years, Petrillo had strengthened his position, forcing previously independent organizations, such as the American Guild of Musical Artists and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to join the AFM fold. Virtually every professional instru- mentalist, popular and classical, belonged to the AFM, effectively creating a "closed shop" of union members. Bolstered by votes from the national AFM convention in 1941 and i942 authorizing him to take action against unrestricted use of recordings, Petrillo notified the recording companies on 26 June 1942 that their licenses with the union, requiring them to hire only union musicians, would not be renewed. The ban on recording officially went into effect with the expiration of those licenses on I August 1942. For several months, Petrillo refused to negotiate, but by February 1943, he had formu- lated his demands: that the record manufacturers contribute a fixed fee from every recording to a union fund for unemployed musicians.6

Petrillo's action generated a storm of controversy. The crippling of the popular music industry at the onset of a long and arduous war seemed to many to be a cruel blow to public morale, particularly after an earlier Petrillo pledge (in line with other A.F.L. leaders) not to call

Leiter 1953, 67-68; Billboard 54 (20 June 1942): 62. s Leiter 1953, 68-70; down beat 4 (January 1937): i; down beat 4 (August 1937): 2;

Billboard 49 (io July 1937): 7; down beat 5 (September 1938): 3. 6 Leiter 1953, 113-13 i; Billboard 54 (4 July 1942): 2o; Billboard 55 (20 February

1943): 60. As a concession to the war effort, Petrillo did allow recordings called "V-discs" to be made for the exclusive distribution to the armed services.


strikes "for the duration."7 The union, and its president, were vilified in the press; and political pressure was applied, in the form of Senate investigations and an anti-trust suit, to force the union to rescind its order. But Petrillo held firm. Finally one of the three major companies, Decca, agreed to the union's terms in September 1943, and recording on a limited scale resumed. The other two major companies, Columbia and Victor, held out, attempting to bring the weight of the National War Labor Board and of the President himself to resolve the dispute in their favor. But eventually they, too, capitulated, signing an agreement with the union on i i November

i944 (Leiter 1953, 132-41).

The early i940s saw far-reaching developments in the world of jazz. At the onset of the war, American popular music was still dominated by large dance orchestras, or "swing bands." Led by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, among others, these bands provided accessible dance music and Tin Pan Alley popular songs for mass audiences through tightly arranged and rehearsed performances, while still allotting room for improvised solos by virtuoso soloists.

By the end of the war, a new style of "hot jazz" with the disconcerting name "bebop" (the onomatapoeic term is derived from a characteristic two-note rhythmic figure found at the end of many phrases in the style: see Example i)8 had established itself in New York City. By the end of the decade, it was to displace swing as the mainstream jazz style. Bebop differed in many ways from the music of the swing dance bands. It was, first of all, quintessentially a music of small combos (the later full-sized bands of Gillespie and Woody Herman notwithstanding). In place of their full instrumentation, with sections of trumpets, trombones, and saxophones, bebop combos offered a handful of soloists accompanied by a rhythm section (piano, bass and drums). Bebop musicians continued to base their improvisations on the chord progressions of popular song and the blues, but went well beyond the diatonic common practice of the swing era in their use of complex chromatic harmonic substitutions. A more intricate rhythmic sensibility was evident, arising not from the steady quarter-note dance beat but from contrasts and accents unfolding within mercurial streams of eighths and sixteenths. Drummers like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, no longer restricted to providing a steady rhythmic foundation, added a free-floating barrage of cross-

7 down beat 9 (I January 1942): i. 8 For a fuller discussion of the origins of the term "bebop", see Tamony 1959.


Example i Dizzy Gillespie Sextet: "Be-Bop" (Manor 5ooo, 9 January 1945), first chorus, mm. 1-4.

[be-bop]

rhythms, becoming (in Ralph Ellison's memorable phrase) "frozen- faced introverts dedicated to chaos" (Ellison 1966, 201). A new breed of virtuoso, led by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, instrumentalists of breath-taking facility, poured their energy into relatively esoteric musical explorations. All of this is preserved on recordings, such as "Shaw 'Nuff" and "Ko Ko," dating from as early as I945-9

The transition to the new style occurred during the early 1940s- the very years affected by the recording stoppage. Petrillo's ban, in fact, neatly separates two eras in jazz.o10 Before August 1942, the only glimpse we have of the innovations to come from important artists like Parker and Gillespie is their work as featured soloists with swing dance orchestras. Shortly after the full resumption of recording in November i944, we are faced with a small but significant number of recordings by Gillespie and Parker which document bebop as a fully realized-and radically different-style. We know that the intervening years were a time of vigorous experimentation: in jam sessions in the Harlem night clubs Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House.11 But almost none of this music has been preserved on commercial recordings. The recording ban seems to have come at a most inconvenient time-like a curtain that falls, much to our consternation, in the middle of the most interesting part of a play.

Was Petrillo to blame for this lack of documentation? The inference is almost irresistible. Dizzy Gillespie, in his autobiography

9 "Shaw 'Nuff": Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Quintet, Guild 1oo2, x May 1945; "Ko Ko": Charlie Parker's Ree Boppers, Savoy 597, 26 November 1945. Both recordings appear in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, the best-known anthology of jazz recordings.

10 This is underscored by one of the most widely used discographies, Rust I978a, which deliberately ends with the recording ban. "When James Caesar Petrillo's edict ... came into temporary effect from midnight on 31 July 1942, a whole chapter, even a whole volume of recorded history came to an abrupt close. By the end of 1944 . jazz had branched off in a new direction" (i).

" Minton's Playhouse was located at 210 West I 18th Street in New York, Monroe's Uptown House at 198 West 34th Street. These clubs generally hired a skeletal "house band", which would be augmented throughout the night by musicians on all instruments "sitting in" to play. For more information about activity at Monroe's, see Patrick 1983.

BEBOP AND THE RECORDING INDUSTRY 13I

To Be or Not . . . to Bop, has noted with reference to one crucial harmonic innovation, the use of substitute harmonic progressions:

We'd do that kind of thing in 1942 around Minton's a lot. We'd been doing that kind of thing, [pianist Thelonious] Monk and I, but it was never documented . . . There was a recording ban . . . The recording ban lasted three or four years, I think 1942, 1943, and 1944. I was recording again by 1945.

The only reasons some of the new things we were doing musically were never documented is because there were no records made at the time to show what we were doing.12

Musicians are not alone in drawing a causal relationship between the recording ban and the dearth of recorded sources for early bebop. Indeed, it has become something of a clich6, mentioned as a matter of course in standard recountings of the period. The following quota- tions, from recent historical surveys, are typical:

By about 1942, it was clear to musicians that here was something more than mere experimentation. Here was a new kind of music. Unhappily, we cannot pinpoint these developments ... As a result [of the ban], there are few commercial recordings of any of the bop players during the years they were working out their innovations (Collier 1978, 355).

Petrillo's strike ensured that the early efforts of jazz musicians to forge the new sound that would become bebop by the war's end never got recorded (Ward, Stokes, and Tucker 1986, 31-32).

The famous ban on the making of recordings imposed by the musicians' union in 1942 prevented the earliest experiments in [the bebop] style from being either preserved or made known to the public at large (Kingman 1979, 320).

In fact, some recorded documentation of the formative phase of bebop does exist, thanks to Jerry Newman, a jazz enthusiast then studying at Columbia University who had his own portable recording equipment. In the early i940s, Newman made hours of recordings of the jam sessions at Minton's and Monroe's, a few of which have survived and have been made available to the public. These recordings provide the modern researcher with the aural equivalent of candid photographs of bebop in its infancy. From i941 come long

12 Gillespie 1979, 135. Note that Gillespie's statement reflects the common tendency to recall the ban as being longer than it actually was. The ban, in fact, lasted less than two years. Gillespie resumed recording in February 1944.


stretches of jam sessions with glimpses of Dizzy Gillespie wrestling to establish an independent style, and a few isolated examples of the unorthodox harmonic procedures of pianist Thelonious Monk. The

rhythmic unpredictability and ingenuity of guitarist Charlie Christian (who died in early 1942 while still in his twenties) is represented by several splendidly unfettered solos, far longer than the time allotted for him on recordings with the Benny Goodman Sextet.13 A recently unearthed performance tentatively dated in the late summer or early fall of 1942 features Charlie Parker in the earliest recorded version of his favorite showpiece, "Cherokee."14 Similar private recordings by Bob Redcross from 1943 preserve informal improvising by Parker and

Gillespie during early 1943, when both were members of the Earl Hines band.s5

This material, spotty though it may be, seems representative of

activity in the jazz musicians' underground of the early 1940s, and

complements the picture provided by commercial recording. Its very existence requires a reassessment of the impact of the recording ban on the earliest phase of bebop. With the exception of the 1943 Redcross recordings, all of this music dates from the period before the ban went into effect: pace Gillespie, Petrillo is certainly not to blame for its absence from commercial recordings. One must give consideration to other explanations. Perhaps the musicians simply had no intention of having this music recorded. Jam sessions, even those in

night clubs, were essentially private affairs, a kind of informal backstage conservatory for the profession. Musicians were delighted and amused to hear their improvisations played back for them on Newman's equipment, but could scarcely have been pleased with the thought that these sprawling and often uneven performances would ever represent them before the general public. If Newman's recordings were like Polaroid snapshots, commercial recordings were like formal portraits, for which the musicians wanted to look their best.

13 Examples featuring Dizzy Gillespie ("Stardust", "Kerouac") are currently available on Archive of Folk Music FS-219, and in excerpted form on Dizzy Gillespie: The Development of an American Artist, Smithsonian Collection R 004. There are numerous recordings on which Monk plays piano, but only a few solos; among the best is the introduction to "Sweet Lorraine", on Trumpet Battle at Minton's, Xanadu

o107. The Christian solos may also be found on Archive of Folk Music FS-219. For more information on Newman, see Hoefer 1962.

14 The tentative dating is by Dan Morgenstern: liner notes to Charlie Parker: First Recordings, Onyx 221. The performance of "Cherokee" has also been issued on Early Bird, Spotlite 120.

'~ This material was made available for the first time in 1986: Charlie Parker: Birth of the Bebop, Stash ST-26o.


And what of the idea that recording companies would, under normal circumstances, have documented this music? In much of the writing on jazz there is the unspoken assumption that "documentation" is a virtually automatic process-the inevitable result of there being music worth recording. In reality, of course, the major recording companies were run by businessmen, who logically gave prece- dence to the tried and true over innovations by relative unknowns. To be sure, a good deal of jam-session-style small-combo jazz was recorded during the years just before the ban, including several performances with Gillespie and Christian.16 But with few excep- tions, the sessions were led by veteran jazz musicians and swing bandleaders whose name alone could be expected to sell recordings. It was not until 1945, more than a year after recording had resumed, that Gillespie, the best known of the bebop musicians, made small- group recordings under his own name. 17

The recording ban is routinely blamed for more than the scarcity of primary sources for early bebop. It has frequently been suggested that the emergence of the style itself was hindered by the interruption in the normal flow of recordings. According to Frank Tirro, for example, "the transition to bebop . . actually might have taken place more quickly, but a National Federation of Musicians [sic] ban was imposed . . . and a major medium for the transmission of new ideas among the jazz musicians was temporarily denied them" (Tirro 1977, 268). A related, and more common, contention is that the ultimate acceptance of bebop was delayed as a result of musicians being "denied access to their usual audience via the usual channels of record sales" (Kofsky 1970, 29). This disruption in communication, according to Eric Hobsbawm, "held up the evolution of 'modern' jazz, since it deprived the young New York experimenters of the chance of ... winning a wider audience until 1945" (Newton 1960, 190).

That the ban on recordings shielded the public from new developments in music in all areas (alleviated only by live radio broadcasts) is incontrovertible. By the same token, as has often been pointed out, World War II kept many jazz fans (characteristically young men) thousands of miles away from New York night clubs during precisely the same period. But again, the first important bebop recordings by

16 Gillespie appeared with a small group led by Lionel Hampton and was given a solo on "Hot Mallets" (ii September 1939, Victor 26371). Christian recorded frequently with the Benny Goodman Sextet from 1939 until illness cut short his career in mid-1941.

17 Dizzy Gillespie Sextet: "I Can't Get Started"/"Good Bait" (Manor 1042), "Salt Peanuts"/"Be-Bop" (Manor 5000), 9 January 1945.


Gillespie do not appear until early 1945, more than a year after the Decca signing. To be sure, the ban was not completely resolved until the capitulation of Victor and Columbia at the end of

1944. But 1944

was a year of prolific recording activity by other companies, especially in the small-combo jazz field. Only a handful of these recordings suggest or foreshadow the revolution to come. Obviously, other factors than the Petrillo ban must be included in any consideration of the early history of bebop on recordings. The recording ban is, in fact, a watershed event, and it will prove useful to organize the following discussion around it. But the issues raised by the ban lead us to broader questions concerning the relationship between jazz musicians and the recording industry:

i) What factors governed the decisions by recording companies before the ban to record certain musicians and certain types of repertory?

2) How did changes in the recording industry after the ban affect the emergence of bebop?

II

Entertainment was big business during the Swing Era. The economics of scale encouraged the concentration of power in a few large organizations: radio networks, theater chains, publishing houses, and booking agencies. The recording industry was no exception. The Depression had caused sales of records to plunge, forcing consolidation of the many small firms that had thrived in the I920S. When the resurgence of interest in jazz-oriented popular music in the mid-193os brought renewed prosperity, industry giant Victor was joined, first, by a new company, Decca, which revitalized the marketing of recordings by offering the most popular bands on a low-priced label, and, later, in 1938, by the revived Columbia label. These three companies were referred to in the trade press as the "Big Three" or the "majors." Together, they accounted for roughly 85-90% of the total volume of sales.18

The lifeblood of the music industry was popular song. The introduction of new songs into the market was governed by the principle of rapid turnover, with a typical tune expected to remain in

18 down beat 7 (i 5 November 1940): 2. For more detailed information on the operation of the music business during the 193os and 1940s, see Sanjek 1983, passim; Hennessey 1975, 429-467.


circulation no longer than three months. 19 During this time, publishers "plugged" songs vigorously while recording companies and musicians scrambled to produce versions of the most popular songs. The result was a routine for recording which left many musicians relatively little discretion in the choice of repertory:

Records are regularly scheduled for production, with the bandleader and recording executives selecting the tunes. Numbers are picked with the band's style and forte in mind, and waxings are usually made of the songs which will have financial backing for exploitation, as publishers who have an investment in plugging a tune can assure it some popularity through performance on the air, in theaters, and in night clubs (Yohalem 1942, 70).

The jazz-oriented swing bands occupied a somewhat ambiguous position. Music publishers were wary of the style. Arrangements relying heavily upon improvisation and rhythmic variety, in their view, tended to "distort" and otherwise detract attention from the original melody. Complained one publisher, "who can count on them for just one straight melody chorus to plant the refrain with those who might want to buy the song, if they could only tell what the tune was like-what with their way of going haywire after the first eight bars?" A further strike against jazz bands was their reliance on older "standard" songs rather than the latest Tin Pan Alley product.20

The more successful of the swing bands found ways of allowing improvisation and commercial song to coexist. Benny Goodman's improvisation might wander far afield, but the female vocalist inevitably sang the melody "straight."21 Commercial appeal depended

19 Billboard ran a weekly list of "Publishers' plug tunes" with the following preface: "Songs listed are those on which publishers are currently working or on which they plan to work in the near future. This, of course, means publisher will have his contact men make special concentrated effort to have band leaders, singers, disk companies, disk jockeys, program producers, and other users of music use songs beginning on date listed, and extending anywhere from two weeks to three months from that date". Billboard 57 (7 April 1945): 24-

20 Denise Agar, "Swing Dancing," Variety 125 (6 January 1937): 88; Variety 127 (25 August 1937): 44.

21 Vocalist Anita O'Day auditioned for Goodman in 1939. As she recalls in her autobiography, she included some improvisation:

Benny jumped up, obviously annoyed. "What was that? You didn't sing the melody". "I don't sing the melody on songs like this one", I informed him. "Everybody already knows the melody". "In my band, the girl singer sings the melody", he said.

The job eventually went instead to the more pliant Helen Forrest. O'Day 1981, 77.


upon the total package that a band could provide. As Martin Williams reminds us:

The big bands . . . were complex organizations, and for many of them the jazz-oriented instrumental pieces and the improvising soloist were only parts of large repertories-repertories which also provided their following with popular vocals and vocal groups, with the latest hit ballads, [and] with all sorts of dance music (Williams 1983, 3).

Such formulas brought unprecedented prosperity to the leading dance bands of the late 3os and early 40s, but also a certain

homogeneity, which is perhaps the inevitable result of successful mass marketing. Innovation tended to come instead at the margins. The less well-known bands, because they were frozen out of the distribution of the most promising popular songs, were forced to be more "experimental," searching for some defining feature-unusual repertory or arrangement techniques-to attract public attention.

Black bands, for reasons more cultural than musical, also tended to operate at the margins. Systematic discrimination denied black bands access to such important sources of income and prestige as commercially sponsored radio programs and major hotel ballrooms (Kolodin 1941, 79). Nor were they wholly welcome in the mainstream of popular culture. According to prevailing stereotypes, black musicians were primarily dance musicians playing "hot" jazz-based dance styles, or jovial entertainers-not matinee idols crooning the latest romantic ballads. But despite these handicaps, black bands survived and even thrived. Each successful band managed to carve out an individual stylistic niche which was all the more open to innovation for being somewhat removed from the treadmill of current popular song.22 "Hot" dance music, after all, could encompass simple (and highly popular) riff pieces like Erskine Hawkins' "Tuxedo Junction" as well as the bracing, dissonant complexities of Ellington's "Ko Ko."23

The bebop pioneers were black musicians, and usually veteran dance band musicians. They rose through the ranks of local "terri- tory" bands, finally earning positions as employees (or "sidemen") of the "name" bands operating out of New York. As featured soloists or composer/arrangers, they contributed to many of the more intriguing

22 Paul Eduard Miller, "'Money Invested in Swing Music Will Keep It Alive', Says Miller." down beat 7 (I5 April I940): 6, 12.

23 "Tuxedo Junction": Bluebird B-io4o9, i8 July 1939; "Ko Ko": Victor 26577, 6 March 1940. "Tuxedo Junction" was subsequently recorded by a number of bands, including Glenn Miller, whose version sold approximately half a million copies (Yohalem 1942, 70).


experimental recordings of the pre-1942 era. Although Cab Cal- loway's reputation in the I930s rested more on his entertaining vocals than on his instrumental accompaniment, Dizzy Gillespie's original composition "Pickin' the Cabbage" was recorded by Calloway's band in 1940.24 Gillespie's mercurial improvising, clearly foreshadowing the mature bebop style, could be heard on 1942 recordings by Les Hite and Lucky Millinder.25 Cootie Williams, a former trumpet soloist with Duke Ellington who had formed his own band in 1941, used the Kenny Clarke-Thelonious Monk composition "Epistrophy" as his theme music and recorded it in 1942 under the title "Fly Right."26 Such daring instrumental pieces, however unusual, were part of the normal process by which a band sought to distinguish itself in the marketplace, and were handled by the same network that produced and distributed recordings of popular song.

Obviously, more of the work of these musicians in a big-band context would have been recorded after August 1942 had the ban not been in effect, and it is in this sense that the union dispute did have a direct and considerable effect on the preservation of the music. Particularly regrettable is the absence of recordings by the Earl Hines band of 1943, which featured both Parker and Gillespie.27 Hines' band was a top-rank band under contract to Bluebird Records (a subsidiary of Victor). Hines, whose daredevil piano improvisations had revolutionized jazz piano in the late 1920s, continued to encour- age innovation among his musicians. Gillespie was given a free hand in devising several instrumental numbers, including an arrangement of his own composition "A Night in Tunisia" which, according to Gunther Schuller (who heard the band in 1943), highlighted many of the early bebop characteristics: "flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work" (Dance 1977, 290).

24 Vocalion/OKeh 5467, 8 March i940.

25 Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra: "Little John Special", Brunswick 03406, 29 July 1942; Les Hite and his Orchestra: "Jersey Bounce", Hit 7001. The date given in Rust 1978a for the Hite recordings is "c. January, 1942", but Gillespie did not join Hite's band until April: down beat 9 (15 April 1942): 4. Gillespie gives the approximate date "June 1942" (Gillespie 1979, 162).

26 "Fly Right," i April 1942. This recording was released for the first time on LP (CBS C3L-38) long after the recording date.

27 Gillespie probably joined the band during its engagement at Fays' Theater in Philadelphia for the week of 12 November 1942 (Gillespie 1979, 173; Dance 1977, 301). Parker joined in December, switching to tenor saxophone (Hoefer i963a, 25)- Both left the band before Hines' engagement at the Apollo Theater in New York beginning 17 September 1943.


In the absence of the recording stoppage, how much of this unusual repertory would likely have been documented? The last recording session of the Hines orchestra before the ban, on 19 March 1942, provides some basis for speculation. Four pieces, in a mix typical of the period, were recorded during this session. "Second

Balcony Jump," arranged by trombonist Gerald Valentine, was a

typical, riff-based, swing instrumental, played at a medium tempo suitable for dancing. "She'll Always Remember," a sentimental song about the separation of a mother from her soldier son, was sung by the

currently fashionable combination of vocalist supported by vocal trio. The remaining tunes featured vocalist Billy Eckstine: "Skylark," a new romantic ballad by Hoagy Carmichael; and "Stormy Monday Blues," a slow twelve-bar blues with traditional lyrics.28

Jazz-oriented dance numbers were basic fare for the period, and had other recording sessions been scheduled during 1943, several tunes in that broad category would undoubtedly have been chosen. Given his proven track record as an arranger and the enticing novelty of his style, it seems more than likely that at least one of Gillespie's arrangements would have been featured: "A Night in Tunisia," or

perhaps "Down Under" (already recorded by Woody Herman).29 On the other hand, the presence of the blues on the recording date points to commercial exigencies of a different sort, which were to have a profound influence on the emergence of bebop. As early as the 1920s, the strong demand by black audiences for blues recordings had resulted in a special line of recordings known as "race records." Decades later, straight-forward blues numbers were still seen as the key to the lucrative black juke box market, and recording executives and tour promoters expected many black bands to include them in their repertory. For most bands, this was a natural request. Count Basie's style, for example, was deeply rooted in the blues tradition; alongside his stylish, up-dated blues dance pieces like "One O'Clock Jump" were echoes of the older style of blues in the singing of Jimmy Rushing. Basie's success demonstrated the adaptability of the blues idiom to the more modem harmonic language and orchestration of the swing era, and paved the way for the central place of the blues in the even more complex repertory of bebop.

Still, public taste for the blues could act as a conservative force, restricting black musicians to the tried-and-true. Billy Eckstine is a

28 "She'll Always Remember"/"Skylark": Bluebird B-II 512; "Second Balcony Jump"/"Stormy Monday Blues": Bluebird B-I 1567. 29 "Down Under": Decca 18544, 24 July 1942.


case in point. Eckstine's forte as a singer was, in fact, the "straight" romantic ballad (he cites Bing Crosby and Paul Robeson as early influences) (Southern 1979, 188). But he faced an uphill battle trying to convince recording executives to let him present that side of himself to the public. "One time, when we went to record," Earl Hines recalled, "and we had all those beautiful arrangements on ballads for [Eckstine] to sing, the a. and r. [artists and repertory] man said, 'Don't you have any blues?"' (Dance 1977, 241). The result, in that 1940 recording session, was the simple but effective blues head arrangement, "Jelly, Jelly," with the hastily-written lyrics sung by Eckstine. 30 "Jelly, Jelly" became one of the best-selling records for the Hines band, and "Stormy Monday" was an obvious attempt, two years later, to recreate that initial success.

The anomaly of the March 1942 session, in fact, was "Skylark," a new song by Hoagy Carmichael which was precisely the sort of romantic ballad that recording executives tended to steer black singers away from. "Skylark" was recorded only at Hines' insistence. It sold well, presaging Eckstine's later successes as the "sepia Sinatra," and (as he recounts in an interview with Eileen Southern) providing him with something of a personal vindication (Southern 1979, 189):

I think that opened people's eyes a little bit. They then started relaxing about my singing ballads. Up until then, they didn't want black singers to do ballads. [Southern:] What did they want you to do? Blues.

Given these cultural and commercial realities, it seems inevitable that the new bebop idiom would have first been presented to the public on recordings in the guise of the blues. This was, in fact, what happened when Billy Eckstine formed his own dance band a year later. In a recording session for DeLuxe records on 13 April 1944, Eckstine was once again typecast as a blues singer. A review of DeLuxe 2000 ("I Stay in the Mood for You"/"Good Jelly Blues") on its release in June noted: "The sepia entry in the swooning sweepstakes, Eckstein [sic] goes race instead of romantic with two standard blues

30 "Jelly, Jelly": Bluebird B-i 10o65, 2 December 1940. A "head arrangement" is the jazz term for an arrangement created collaboratively by the band, often on the spot. In the case of "Jelly, Jelly," the accompaniment to Eckstine's vocal consisted of simple riff figures, suggested by Hines and Budd Johnson and harmonized by musicians in the reed and brass sections (Dance 1977, 241), augmented by guitar, piano, and clarinet solos. Such an arrangement would usually be memorized rather than written down.

I40 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

back to back."31' Fortunately, only the vocal style of the blues was "standard." The arrangement written for the "DeLuxe All Stars" by Gillespie of "Good Jelly Blues" (See Example 2) featured several bebop characteristics, including the implied double-time feeling un- derneath the placid vocal line, and the use of chromatic passing chords in the blues harmonic progression (m. 4, beat 4; m. 8, beat 3).

Similar circumstances shaped the repertory of the Kansas City band of Jay McShann. During the years that Charlie Parker was featured as a soloist, according to McShann, the band had a "fantastic book ... [but] we never got a chance to record but very little of that stuff because the record companies were in business to sell records" (Gitler 1985, 65). The band was signed by Decca, which saw in the band the opportunity to recreate the success of Count Basie (who had left Decca for Columbia only a few years before). McShann's recordings were catalogued in Decca's "Sepia Series," described in the trade press as a "cross between the race and pop listings."32 On the first recording date (30 April 194i), McShann played what he felt were the band's strongest pieces, including an arrangement by Charlie Parker of his own "Yardbird Suite," a mildly-boppish reworking of "Rosetta." The reaction of recording executive Dave Kapp, according to McShann, was:

"Listen, we've wasted three hours here. You all played a lot of stuff which is good, but I can't sell it . .." So he asks us, "Can you do any blues?" We said, "Yes." We did a blues. "Do a boogie?" We did a boogie. He said, "Do me one more blues, and I'll take one of those other tunes." So we did "Hootie Blues," and then he accepted "Swingmatism." 3

Kapp's instincts proved to be correct. The big commercial success of the session proved to be the hastily-arranged "Confessin' the Blues," which within a year had sold more copies than any other record in the Sepia Series.34 Future recording sessions with Decca heavily featured the plangent blues singing of vocalist Walter Brown, including a "New Confessin' the Blues" later in 1941. Parker's brief solos and obbligatos on a few of these recordings, especially "Hootie Blues," are famous as harbingers of the saxophonist's mature style, and established his credentials as a blues musician long before the actual

31 M.H. Orodenker, "Popular Record Reviews," Billboard 56 (3 June 1944): 19. 32 Billboard 54 (3 January 1942): 14. 3 Gitler 1985, 65-66. The story is corroborated by bassist Gene Ramey: see

Dance 1980, 272-273- 34 Chicago Defender 37 (I4 February 1942): 21.


Example 2

Billy Eckstine with the DeLuxe All-Stars: "Good Jelly Blues" (DeLuxe 2ooo, I 3 April 944), second chorus, mm. 1-8.

Eckstine (vocal) I - . This old world is round but it's croo- ked just the same

I

ow InI ILes I(slightly behind the be-t)

saxophones (doubled below in octaves)

bass

tutti

(slightly behind the beat)

This old world is round but it's croo-ked just the same

saxophones

trumpets

octave below)

etc.

6V -1,7 b.! LI OP


emergence of bebop. But no trace remains of his arrangement of "Yardbird Suite"; the tune itself did not appear on disc until Parker recorded it with a small combo in 1946.35

III

Although bebop could and would be arranged by Gillespie and others for large bands, the new style took its special character from the streamlined and spontaneous format of the jam session, where the normal performing unit was the small combo. During the early I940s, while the beboppers were earning a living with the large dance bands, they were also exploring their own musical ideas in jam sessions. What opportunities existed for jazz musicians to record in this style?

Before 1934, according to Leonard Feather, "hot jazz was recorded either by accident, because it was cheaper, or because the colored market wanted it" (Feather 1944b). In the I920S, a great deal of small-group jazz had been recorded by numerous independent recording companies which competed with the industry giant, Victor, for a share of a somewhat chaotic and loosely-organized market. The Depression brought this, along with all other recording activity, to a virtual standstill. But in the mid-1930s, public interest in swing brought small combos back into favor. Jazz lovers began packing the speakeasies-turned-night-clubs on 52nd Street, and several recordings by 52nd Street combos unexpectedly became hits.36

The "swing" fad of the mid-1930s also created a separate vogue for small groups associated with popular dance bands. Benny Goodman led the way as early as i935, performing and recording with his Trio, featuring Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa, later expanding the group to a Quartet (with Lionel Hampton) and to a Sextet in the 1940s. These "bands within the band" were an integral part of Goodman's overall appeal. Soon, there were numerous all-star groups drawn from the ranks of the major dance orchestras: Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five, Woody Herman's Woodchoppers, Cab Calloway's Cab Jivers, and so

35 "Hootie Blues"/"Confessin' the Blues": Decca 8559, 30 April 1941. "Yardbird Suite": Dial 0oo3, 28 March 1946.

36 The 1935 recording "The Music Goes 'Round and Around" by "Mike Riley, Eddie Farley and Their Onyx Club Boys" (Decca 578, 26 September 1935) sold more than ioo,ooo records, startling the industry with the biggest volume of sales since the 1920s. Similar successes include Wingy Manone's "The Isle of Capri" (Vocalion 2913, 8 March 1935) and Maxine Sullivan's "Loch Lomond" (Vocalion/OKeh 3654, 6 August 1937). Gelatt 1977, 272; Shaw 1971, 70-74, 88, 90.


forth. Such groups were routinely recorded by the labels that had the parent organizations under contract.

By the late 1930s and early 1940os there were a number of artists, such as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, John Kirby, Lionel Hampton, and Fats Waller, who were consistently successful recording with small combos for the major labels and their subsidiaries. 37 Although recordings of small combos could only rarely compete with conventional popular song in sales, recording companies nevertheless found them worth producing. The main reason was the low cost of production. Small combos were usually ad hoc ensembles formed solely for recording purposes, with the musicians willing to work for the union minimum wage. John Hammond describes how the process worked, even in the depths of the Depression:

In order to save money a company like Brunswick allowed Teddy Wilson to record the top tunes of the day with a small pickup band at a sum slightly over union scale. These records more than broke even, and the concern saved thousands of dollars both in arrangements and royalty fees (Hammond 1942).38

A further benefit to the recording companies was that sales of these records were unusually consistent. Most commercial recordings were tied to the fortunes of current popular songs; when a given song faded from favor, so did the recording. Jazz recordings frequently drew upon a relatively small body of "standards," tunes such as "I Got Rhythm" or "Sweet Georgia Brown" which were independent of fashion. Even when small combos recorded new popular songs (as with Teddy Wilson's remarkable series of recordings for Brunswick), the quality of the performance gave it a value to the consumer which far outlasted the song itself. Recording companies could count on being able to keep jazz recordings in their catalogues for years, earning a modest but steady profit from their sales.39

The market for these recordings varied, depending upon the artists. Some, like those of the highly entertaining Fats Waller, were aimed at a broad, racially-mixed audience. Others were sold primarily as "race records," to be purchased by black audiences or heard in juke

37 Billboard 49 (io July 1937): 14; Feather i944b. 38 The royalties referred to are not payments to songwriters, but the payments

which major bandleaders usually received with the sales of each record. In small combo recordings, musicians usually received only the one-time fee for the recording session.

39 Billboard 49 (31 July 1937): I3; Paul Eduard Miller, "Banner Year for Phono Records," down beat 6 (January 1939): i8.


boxes in black establishments. But another audience came to be influential to a degree quite out of proportion with its numbers: the "hot jazz" fans. Since the 1920S, a small but significant number of jazz enthusiasts, largely white, affluent, and articulate, had been deeply committed to the salvaging of earlier styles of jazz from the scrap heap of used and discarded records. Well organized through "hot clubs" which allowed them to pool their information about obscure recordings, they pioneered the science of jazz discography, and, not incidentally, helped sponsor jam sessions which count among the earliest concert performances of jazz.

One entrepreneur tuned into this burgeoning network was Milt Gabler, proprietor of the Commodore Record Shop on 42nd Street. To meet his customers' demand for out-of-print jazz records, Gabler began reissuing rare recordings on the UHCA (United Hot Clubs of America) label, with the cooperation of the companies who owned the masters for the original Paramount, Brunswick, Vocalion, and Gennett recordings (Fox 1986, 78-81). A similar enterprise was started by the Hot Record Society, which in 1937 initiated its series of re-releases on the HRS label with a long-unavailable Bix Beiderbecke session from ten years earlier.40 The records had to be expensive ($i for a ten-inch 78 rpm recording and $1.50 for a twelve-inch recording, well above the $.35 to $.75 for most recordings) to offset the cost of the relatively small pressing. Gradually such companies moved from reissues to new issues. By 1938, Gabler was making his own recordings of hand-picked jazz groups on the Commodore label. In 1939, he was joined by Blue Note Records, the project of Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff (Fox 1986, 81-85, o 101-107; Rust i978b, 41, 165, 297).

The impressive growth of interest in small-combo recordings at the beginning of the 1940s was a tribute to the influence of a jazz audience which, in Paul Eduard Miller's words, was becoming "more alert and aggressive, more conscious of its power to dictate trends, [and] more discriminating in its tastes.'"41 The success of the small companies in reaching this audience encouraged the major labels to continue and expand their own sponsorship of such jazz recordings. Decca, Columbia, and Victor all actively competed for the attention of the jazz fans, releasing '"strictly jazz' records by the carload."42 The releases included new recordings by jazz musicians with little com-

40 "Three Blind Mice": The Chicago Loopers (featuring Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer), Pathe Actuelle 36729, October 1927, reissued as HRS i.

41 Paul Eduard Miller, "The Rhythm Section," Esquire 22 (July 1944): 94- 42 down beat 8 (i February 1941): 14.


mercial following but considerable stature among the jazz community (such as James P. Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon, and Jelly Roll Morton), as well as reissues of classic recordings drawn from their vaults.43 While this material was routinely dismissed within the industry as "grist for the addicts of le jazz hot,"44 jazz recording proved to be a profitable sideline which the companies were only too willing to keep up.

In spite of all this, by the time Petrillo called a ban on recordings, opportunities for jazz musicians to have their music in the small- combo format recorded had declined sharply. One important factor, ironically, was a dramatic increase in sales industry-wide. In 1941, the volume of sales, on the rise continuously since the Depression, had surpassed even the boom years of the late 1920S. By mid-year, companies were struggling to meet the spiralling demand. In Septem- ber, Decca was reported to be a million records behind in the filling of its orders.4s5 All companies were turning over all of their production facilities to runaway hits such as "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," the Glenn Miller version of which sold over a million copies on the Bluebird label in less than six months.46 Under these circumstances, the modest sideline of jazz recordings was an expendable luxury, overlooked in the rush to supply the insatiable juke-box market.

With the onset of World War II, a further complicating factor was the shortage of raw materials for production. Supplies of shellac, a major ingredient in record manufacture produced primarily in Burma, were threatened by Japanese advances in Asia. Since shellac was an essential ingredient for bullet coatings, paint, electric wiring, and other military applications, stringent war-time quotas were imposed upon record manufacturers.47 Thanks in large part to a vigorous campaign to recycle old recordings, these restrictions never proved severe enough to choke off the supply of records. But the scarcity of material further encouraged the recording companies to restrict their output to the biggest commercial sellers. "What is going to suffer," noted a correspondent for down beat, "will be 'prestige' records, collectors' items, repressings, and hot jazz. These take up

43 The majors were able to sell their reissues much more cheaply than the small companies. Gabler cites this as a major consideration in his decision to concentrate on original recordings for the Commodore label (Fox 1986, 80).

44 Daniel Richman, "On the Records," Billboard 52 (3 August 1940): i2. 45 Billboard 53 (13 September 1941): 3; Dave Dexter, Jr., "Waxworks Too Busy to

Send Review Copies of Discs!", down beat 8 ( 5 September 1941): 14. 46 Billboard 54 (I7 January i942): 13. 47 Billboard 54 (18 April 1942): 19.


shellac, sell slowly, and have a low margin of profit. They're out."48 Even such well-established black bandleaders as Duke Ellington and Count Basie saw the supply of their recordings cut in order to keep a handful of recordings by the best-selling white bandleaders (Harry James, Kay Kyser, and Glenn Miller) in the record stores.4

John Hammond, the innovative recording executive who had been a consistent champion of jazz on records since the early i930s, had been hired by Columbia in i939 and supervised its series of reissues. When he left the company at the end of 1941, one of the reasons given in the trade press was that "the rush at the wax foundries has given Hammond very little time to squeeze in his experimental work."s50 In mid-1942, well before Petrillo's intentions had been made public, Hammond called attention to the threat to the recording of jazz represented by current conditions:

Unless record fans rise up in arms immediately, there will not be any more good jazz on discs except by accident. Retrenchment necessitated by the shortage of shellac has already caused recording executives to go conservative in the extreme, which means no more young bands, no more "sleeper tunes," and no initiative or experimentation . . . Reissues and small band dates are out for the duration ... All the companies are devoting themselves to tunes either on or slated for the hit parade (Hammond 1942).

It is apparent, then, that conditions other than the AFM ban would have worked against the commercial recording of an esoteric new musical development such as bebop in the early i940s. What changed several years later to account for the recordings of bebop after 1945? To answer that question, we must return to the recording ban, and in particular, to the unusual circumstances of its partial resolution in 1943.

IV

At the onset of the ban, the recording companies were confident. They had prepared for the stoppage by recording frantically during the period from the announcement of the ban in June to its enforce- ment on I August 1942. The backlog of recordings was designed to last nearly five months, far longer than most thought the union could

48 Mike Levin, "Recording Sliced One-Third," down beat 9 (i May 1942): 1. 49 Billboard 54 (7 November 1942): 25- 50 Billboard 53 (6 December 1941): 9; Hammond 1977, 210o-237.


hold out. Besides, with wartime shortages of material and labor, the recording ban seemed to impose no additional hardship, since production in any case would be severely restricted.51 But as Petrillo's action survived court challenges, the recording companies' position grew increasingly tenuous. By the beginning of the new year, their stock of new popular songs had been exhausted. In the summer, they resorted to the desperate measure of producing recordings using only vocalists (not required to belong to the AFM), or ukeleles, harmoni- cas, and other miscellaneous instruments not included in union agreements. 52

Finally, a crack appeared in the united front of the three major recording companies. Unlike Columbia and Victor, which were associated with the national radio networks CBS and NBC respectively, Decca was exclusively in the business of producing recordings and was most badly hurt by the union action.53 It was hardly a surprise to most industry observers that Decca capitulated early, signing an agreement with the union in September 1943.

But Decca was not the only party interested in an early settlement: there were also a number of small firms, the "independents." To Petrillo, they were insignificant players whose presence, if anything, unnecessarily complicated his struggle against the giants of the industry. During the recording stoppage, Petrillo refused to negotiate with any but the "Big Three," even in the face of ardent pleas by one small company, Musicraft, to sign an agreement. But once Decca had accepted the union's terms, all other companies were free to do likewise, prompting a rush by smaller companies, both established and newly-formed, to begin recording under the union's new system.s54

The boom in new companies was inevitable, given the astronom- ical rise in record sales in the years immediately preceding the ban. Earlier companies had been formed to exploit the increase in demand. In the fall of i939, Eli Oberstein, formerly recording director for

51 Billboard 54 (25 July 1942): 92; down beat io (i March 1943): 2; Leiter 1953, 137-138. One industry insider noted that without the ban, companies would have been forced to use up precious shellac trying to develop new artists in order to keep up with the competition. "As it stands," he concluded, "none of us has to worry about what the other fellow is doing. We simply throw what raw material we get into our sure-fire bestsellers and let it go at that." down beat 9 (1 November 1942): i.

52 Billboard 54 (31 October 1942): 2o; Billboard 55 (16 January 1943): 20; down beat 10 (1 July 1943): i.

53 Billboard 55 (18 September 1943): 12.

s4 Billboard 55 (3 April 1943): 2i; Billboard 55 (29 May 1943): 27-28; Billboard 55 (16 October 1943): 64-


Victor, started his own company, U.S. Record Corporation, with issues on the Royale and Varsity labels. Although the enterprise did not succeed, it pointed the way to the eventual diversification and expansion of the market. Another potential rival to the Big Three- Capitol Records--opened for business in June 1942. It managed to record enough material before the August I deadline to be able to release a number of recordings, many highly successful, during the ban itself.55

The partial settlement of the ban in 1943 offered an unprecedented opportunity for new companies to establish themselves in the marketplace. Consumer demand continued at unprecedentedly high levels: "Anything black and round that gives music if it is needled finds a purchaser," reported Billboard in late 1943.56 The indefatigable Eli Oberstein tried again: his Classic Records, marketing recordings on the Hit label, competed for the mainstream pop market. But the chief beneficiary of the unsettled conditions was Capitol. Led by shrewd and experienced management, including singer/songwriter Johnny Mercer, the upstart firm moved aggressively in the post-ban era to sign up major recording artists. It developed first-rate recording studios in its Los Angeles headquarters, a nationwide distribution system, and financial control over a major pressing plant. Within a few years, it was widely accepted in the trade press as one of the "Big Four. "57

Most of the other entries into the market were far less impressive. In 1940, one publishing executive complained, "anybody with twelve bucks and some spare time wants to go into the recording field."58 Not much had changed four years later. "Apparently all that is required is an office, a phone, and a license," reported Billboard in the face of a mushrooming number of new companies. "The new diskers, for the most part, rent a studio by day, hire talent, cut a master, and send it out of town for pressing" (Marvin 1944, i2).

The marketing strategies of these companies were determinedly eclectic. In the long run, most tried to establish a permanent presence in the more marginal specialty markets: "race" records, country and

55 Rust I978b, 3oo; Billboard 56 (17 June 1944): I2. 56 Billboard 55 (2 October 1943): 1. On the basis of the demand for the new release

of a single record, Billboard estimated that the market in 1945 was ten times greater than in 1940. Billboard Music Year Book, 1945-r946 (New York, 1946), 236.

57 down beat ii (i5 June 1944), 9; Billboard 56 (17 June 1944), I2; Bill Gottlieb, "Indies Losing Out in Wax Race; Big 4 Controls Industry," down beat 14 (7 May 1947): i.

58 Variety 138 (13 February 1940): 32.


folk music (then known as "hillbilly"), Latin-American music, polkas, as well as the informal small-group recordings favored by the jazz aficionados. In the short term, they were willing to take advantage of the reduced competition to make as much money as they could in whatever way they could. Even in the midst of the ban, small companies such as Savoy, Keynote, and Musicraft had been able to penetrate the lucrative juke box market by offering their products at a time when recordings of any type were scarce. Chronic shortages of shellac and manpower continued to curtail production for the duration of the war. But in 1944, with Victor and Columbia still holding out, and with shellac restrictions gradually lifting, virtually anything that the small companies were able to produce could be sold.59

Small-combo jazz, neglected by the majors since before the ban, was an increasingly attractive proposition for many of these small companies. During the war, performance opportunities for jazz groups using a modified jam session format had burgeoned. Restric- tions on gas, tires, and other necessities of transportation concentrated musical activity into major urban areas. Large transient populations, enriched by defense spending, poured into New York looking for entertainment. 52nd Street had always been home to a handful of clubs, like the Onyx, the Famous Door, and the Hickory House, which featured jazz. During the war, still more 52nd Street club owners discovered that small jazz combos were less expensive and attracted more audiences than conventional floor shows.60

A disproportionate number of these small groups were black.61 Wartime transportation difficulties had hit black bands, already faced with obstacles from Jim Crow laws during long tours of the South, particularly hard.62 New York offered a haven of relative racial calm and financial security. "Negro musicians have been deserting large

59 Carlton, Joseph R., "Talent and Tunes on Music Machines," Billboard 55 (2

January 1943): 142; Marvin 1944, 12. 60 Billboard 55 (27 November 1943): 24- 61 According to booking agency records in late 1943, there were three times as

many new black groups being formed as white groups. Billboard 55 (30 October 1943): 22. Of the thirty acts listed as "sure-fire attractions" by Billboard in June 1944, twenty-four were black: Louis Jordan, Pete Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Ben Webster, Al Casey, Oscar Pettiford, Hot Lips Page, Billie Holiday, Maxine Sullivan, Zutty Singleton, Cozy Cole, Earl Hines, Roy Eldridge, Sidney Bechet, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Pearl Bailey, and Nat King Cole. Paul Ross, "Disks a Must for 52nd St. Click," Billboard 56 (24 June 1944): 23-

62 Black bands typically travelled in buses. On 22 June 1942, the Office of Defense Transportation eliminated the use of buses, forcing black bands to travel in segregated Jim Crow railroad cars. DeVeaux 1985, 221-224.


bands to join or organize small units," reported Billboard in late 1943. "Money available in the cocktail field is far more attractive than the salaries paid them by the larger bands on the road."63

While most of the bebop pioneers continued to work as sidemen with the swing bands during the early war years, playing in the Harlem jam sessions only after hours or during periods of slack employment, the improved prospects began luring many of them to join or form small combos on 52nd Street. The migration from the uptown jam sessions to the downtown night clubs began in earnest in late 1942, when Kenny Clarke, the house drummer at Minton's Playhouse, led a sextet at Kelly's Stable, where he remained until his induction in 1943.64 In the fall of I943, the musicians working at Monroe's Uptown House, including drummer Max Roach, pianist Duke Jordan, and trumpeter Vic Coulsen, also moved downtown to Kelly's.65

Finally, in December 1943, Dizzy Gillespie made his debut as bandleader on 52nd Street with a quintet at the Onyx Club co-led by bassist Oscar Pettiford. By January, the personnel of this combo, generally acknowledged to be the first bebop combo, was tenor saxophonist Don Byas, Max Roach, and pianist George Wallington (by the next month, Budd Johnson and Clyde Hart had replaced Byas and Wallington).66 At the Onyx, the circle of musicians around

63 Billboard 55 (30 October 1943): 22.

4 Clarke 1977; Feather 1949, 80. Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie had appeared as early as late 1941 in a small combo led by alto saxophonist Benny Carter at the Famous Door (Berger, Berger, and Patrick 1982, 1:I93-195). Many of the musicians at Minton's and Monroe's also appeared in late 1942 and early 1943 at a series of jam sessions held on Sunday afternoons at Kelly's Stable by Pete Kameron and Monte Kay. Shaw 1971, 204-206.

6s The circle of musicians at Monroe's moved in June, 1943, several blocks away to Murrain's, a new "legitimate" night club owned by Clark Monroe, where they were billed as "Clark Monroe's Funsters." In the early fall, Monroe, seeking an outlet on 52nd Street, arranged to bring the group into Kelly's Stable, where he served as nominal leader. Monroe eventually opened his own club on 52nd Street, the Spotlite. Gaskin 1986; Jimmy Butts, "Harlem Speaks," Jazz Record, no. 9 (June 1943): 5; no. 14 (November 1943): i i.

66 The early history of this combo is somewhat muddied. An initial notice for the band in December listed the personnel as Pettiford, tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and Thelonious Monk. Jimmy Butts, "Harlem Speaks," Jazz Record, no. 15 (Decem- ber 1943): 7; Hoefer i963b, 19. Monk may simply have been sitting in on the night that Butts visited the club. Pianist Billy Taylor, who remembers the group being "pianoless" at first, also sat in with the band before George Wallington joined. Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 367. Charlie Parker was Gillespie's first choice for saxophone, but was apparently unavailable at the time. Young seems to have appeared with the band until he returned to Count Basie during the same month, replacing Don Byas (Gillespie 1979, 202; Porter 1985, 22).


Gillespie developed a coherent repertory of pieces, including such bebop standards as "A Night in Tunisia," "Be-Bop," "Salt Peanuts," and "'Round Midnight," to complement the unusual soloing and drumming styles developed in the uptown jam sessions. "Jamming at Minton's and Monroe's we had our fun," Gillespie remembers, "but with the level of music which we'd developed by 1944, it wasn't very profitable, artistically or commercially. We needed to play to a wider audience and Fifty-second Street seemed ready to pay to hear someone playing something new" (Gitler 1985, 123; Gillespie i979, 187).

Entrepreneurs in the recording industry were encouraged by the lively public interest in jazz. Even during the ban, older recordings continued to be in high demand: record dealers found it worth their while to sort through their scrap piles of shellac for jazz records, which could be resold for high prices.67 By the beginning of 1944, companies already specializing in jazz were free to resume their activities, with an emphasis on the production of new recordings to be sold at premium prices to the jazz aficionado market. Commodore emerged from the recording ban on good financial footing, thanks in part to the steady sales of its recordings.68 Bob Thiele, who had begun a modest program of recording on the Signature jazz label in

i940, kept the label active during the ban by reissuing old recordings and had resumed recording new small combos by the end of 1943.69

67 Billboard 56 (12 February I944): 16. The later stages of the ban, in fact, had encouraged the majors to return to their program of jazz reissues. With nothing new to offer consumers, Victor and Columbia released old performances by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, and others. Decca, under the supervision of Milt Gabler, put out a special series of "Collectors'" recordings on the revived Brunswick label, organized in attractive albums around themes from jazz history: "Boogie Woogie Piano", "Riverboat Jazz: New Orleans to Chicago", "Harlem Jazz 1930", "Ellingtonia", and so forth. With shellac restrictions curtailing production, it made sense to include among the handful of recycled releases jazz recordings which could be marketed at premium prices as "collector's items". The four-record Brunswick album sold for $3.50, far more than the usual price of $.35 or $.50 per disk. Half a million of the Brunswick records were reported sold in July 1943 alone. Decca-Brunswick Popular Record Catalog, 1944 ([no publishing information], 1943); Billboard 55 (11 September 1943): 13; Billboard Music Year Book, 1945-1946 (New York, 1946), 257-58.

68 Commodore's biggest seller in the early i940s was a 1938 recording by Chu Berry and Roy Eldridge: Chu Berry and his "Little Jazz" Ensemble, "Stardust"/"Body and Soul," Commodore 1502, 11 November 1938. Billboard 56 (17 June 1944): 12.

69 H.R.S. Society Rag (August 1940): 20o; down beat 9 (i February 1942): 14; Jazz Record, no. 4 (1 April 1943): 2; down beat io (I December 1943): 9; Fox 1986, 199-202.


Commodore, Blue Note, and Signature were soon joined by others who realized that "hot jazz" was an attractive specialization. Savoy Records was the brainchild of Herman Lubinsky, owner of a prospering record and radio parts store in Newark who had been encouraged to start his own recording company in the early I940os by Eli Oberstein. After the ban, Lubinsky cast his net wide. Initial offerings included wartime novelties (such as Red River Dave's "I'd Like to Give my Dog to Uncle Sam," in which a blind man offers the services of his seeing-eye dog to the war effort, and "Hey, Tojo, Count Yo' Men" by Denny Beckner and his Madcap Merrymakers); black spirituals on the separate King Solomon label; and performances by small jazz combos.70

Jazz proved to be particularly lucrative for Savoy, and during 1944 the company moved aggressively to establish a presence in the market. "To be sure, the motive was to make a profit," Dan Morgenstern has said, "and one would never characterize Lubinsky as a patron of the arts. But he had hip people working for him at the time"-people like arranger Buck Ram, who helped scout out jazz groups for the label to record.71 Most of the recordings were of pick-up groups drawn from the plentiful pool of musicians working in New York. down beat noted that Savoy seemed "determined to wax all of the 52nd Street artists here," and concluded that the label has "waxed far more worthy artists in the past few months than it ever did before the ban or ever will after it's over.'"72

The success of the strategy employed by Savoy and other firms specializing in jazz recordings may be gauged through surveys conducted by Billboard in 1944 and 1945, in which high school students were asked if they recognized the various record labels then crowding the market (see Table

I).73 The most frequently recognized

were, inevitably, the majors and their subsidiary labels, as well as the new challengers, Capitol and Eli Oberstein's Hit. But as early as 1944, jazz labels such as Commodore, Blue Note, and Keynote74

70 Advertisement, Billboard 56 (6 May 1944): i8; Ruppli i980, xv. 71 Dan Morgenstern, liner notes to The Changing Face of Harlem: The Savoy Sessions,

Savoy SJL 2208. 72 down beat ii (15 May 1944): 9; down beat ii (15 October 1944): 5. 73 High school students were chosen because the draft had taken so many

college-age men; a similar survey in 1945 included both college students and servicemen (Billboard 57 [28 July 1945]: i5)-

74 Keynote Records was owned by Eric Bernay, publisher of the Marxist periodical New Masses and owner of The Music Room, a music store on 44th Street. Keynote had been in operation since i940, producing an eclectic assortment of folk music, classical music, and music with a leftist orientation (such as the Soviet Army


TABLE I

Public Recognition of Recording-Label Names

Source: Billboard 56 (17 June i944), 12; Billboard 57 (16 June 1945), 20-surveys of the percentage of high-school students recognizing commercial recording labels in June 1944 and June 1945. An asterisk indicates a company with a concentration on jazz recordings. (Billboard considered such a survey to be 'the almost perfect thermometer on disk acceptance. They can't buy em if they don't know 'em." Billboard 57 [28 July '9451.

June 1944 June 1945

Decca, Victor, Bluebird (Ioo%) Decca, Victor, Columbia (ioo%) Bluebird (99%)

Columbia, OKeh (97%) Capitol (97%) OKeh (96%)

Capitol (89%) Brunswick (86%)

Brunswick (81%) Hit (74%)

Musicraft (52 %) Commodore* (49%)

Savoy* (47%) Majestic (46%) Commodore* (43%) Sonora (42%)

Apollo*, Keynote* (41%)

Blue Note* (38%) Asch* (40%)

Blue Note*, Keynote* (37%) Beacon (36%)

Beacon (34%) Continental (34%) Apollo* (32 % )

Savoy*, Signature* (30%) Continental, Musicraft (29%) Signature* (29%)

showed surprising strength in light of their limited production and distribution. High school students are "real hot record collectors," Billboard noted. "Diskers who have been putting out pops, folk records, and such are aware of this fact, as witness recent hot jazz issues by Savoy and other waxeries." Savoy's further rise in standing

Chorus). In late 1943, Bernay was approached by Javanese jazz critic and impresario Harry Lim. Lim, who had staged several successful series of public jam sessions in New York and Chicago earlier in the i940s, offered to produce and record jazz performances, at his own expense, in exchange for royalty payments from Keynote. His long-standing contacts with the leading jazz musicians of the day enabled him to lure Coleman Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, Earl Hines, and Cozy Cole, among others, to Keynote, making it one of the most prolific recorders of jazz in the post-ban period. The entire jazz output of Keynote in the 1940s is now available in a 22-record set. Bob Porter, liner notes to The Complete Keynote Collection, PolyGram 830- 21-I.


in the 1945 survey was attributed to its marketing of "hot originals, cut-and-let-'em-ride sessions over which the jumpers went nuts."75

The financial formula for success with small-group jazz recordings was essentially the same as before the war: the low cost of production, combined with high sales prices, more than offset the modest volume of sales. Jazz musicians working on 52nd Street were rarely under contract to major recording companies, and could be had for a fraction of the price of the major bandleaders. In a survey of jazz recording in

April i944, Metronome reported: "Many of the men who make these dates are name musicians, big stars maybe; but because they didn't make records for so long and are glad to be back on wax, and making good music in pleasant circumstances, most of them gladly work for [union] scale: $30 per man for three hours, four tunes. And double for the leader. "76

Within a few months, these modest sums had risen sharply, as

competition among labels for the top artists escalated prices. Leaders could command fees of several hundred dollars, and by 1945 Billboard was surprised to note that even sidemen were receiving twice the union scale, a previously unheard-of practice. The reason for this was simple: consumers were buying jazz recordings to hear all of the

performers, not simply the bandleader (unlike most popular recordings, the complete personnel of a jazz record was routinely listed on the label). One reason the small recording companies were able to absorb these extra, one-time expenses was because their contracts generally did not involve performance royalty payments, a standard provision with the name bandleaders on the major labels.77

The high fees and lack of royalties encouraged musicians to record as prolifically as possible. This eventually proved to be something of a headache for the recording companies, who found the market saturated with recordings by a handful of popular jazz musicians. But the companies had no choice but to continue in a hectic attempt to build up a backlog of recordings to assure them of a steady supply of releases. Sessions featuring original compositions (often thinly-veiled reworkings of jazz standards) were particularly valued. Not only was there little chance of the "originals" being duplicated on other labels, but by acting as publishers, recording companies were often able to acquire a percentage of composers' royalties in exchange for an

75 Billboard 56 (17 June 1944): 12; Billboard 57 (16 June 1945): 20.

76 Metronome 61 (April 1944): 18. 77 Billboard 58 (12 January 1946): 14-


advance against future sales.78 Leonard Feather described the more

predatory aspects of this process through a fictional account of "Wrecker Records, Inc.":

You don't read or write music yourself, and you don't want to pay anybody to write music for the session, so when the boys come into the studio they start noodling around with "I Got Rhythm" or "Honeysuckle Rose" and pretty soon they have a brand-new melody based on the same chords, and they decide to call the product "Jumpin' at Wrecker" or "Wreckerlection Stomp." The boys don't realize that in the course of their noodling they have created a new tune of their own, so you put yourself down as a composer without telling them. Next day, you copyright the number, place it with a music publisher, and land yourself a fat advance royalty. Oh yes, it's a nice game, the record business (Feather I945a).

V

It took some time for the new opportunities in recording to affect the fortunes of the young bebop musicians. Small recording companies were more interested at first in competing for the services of better-known veterans of the swing era, such as Coleman Hawkins, who in the thirteen months from December 1943 to the end of 1944 recorded nearly a hundred tunes on twenty-four separate recording sessions for nine different companies, among them Savoy and Key- note.

But the new style of music did not go entirely unnoticed. During Gillespie's stay at the Onyx Club in early 1944, Hawkins was leading a group less than a block away at Kelly's Stable, on the same bill with the group led by Clark Monroe. Hawkins, who had hired Gillespie briefly in September, was impressed enough with Gillespie's music to want to associate himself with the new style. "When he heard the new

78 Sanjek, 31-32. The most ambitious plan was devised in 1944 by BMI, the performing rights organization which had broken the monopoly of ASCAP in a bitter struggle in 1941. As a way of securing new material for its catalogue, BMI struck a deal with a number of small record companies to sponsor jazz recordings. BMI agreed to buy iooo copies of each disk, sending them free of charge to the nearly iooo radio stations licensed with BMI, complete with conveniently packaged biographical information on the musicians for disk jockeys to read over the air. In exchange, the record companies agreed to register all original compositions through their own publishing firms with BMI. Billboard 56 (i July 1944): '4; Billboard 56 (23 September 1944): 25; Wanda Marvin, "License Orgs Say It With Flowers," Billboard 57 (20

January 1945): i2. BMI also moved to set up a few prominent jazz musicians, such as Cozy Cole and Roy Eldridge, with their own publishing companies (Billboard 57 [ 7 March 1945]: 12).


music," said Budd Johnson, the tenor saxophonist with the Onyx Club band, "he liked it. So Hawk said, 'I'm gonna surround myself with some of the cats that are playin' it, and we're gonna make a record date'" (Gitler 1985, 122).

The session, which took place on i6 and 22 February 1944, marked the debut for Apollo Records, operated by the Rainbow Music Shop in Harlem. 79 The twelve-piece band led by Hawkins included not only all of the musicians from the Gillespie combo (Gillespie, Pettiford, Johnson, Byas, Roach, and Hart) but also many of the musicians from the Clark Monroe-led group at Kelly's. Budd Johnson, a veteran arranger for Earl Hines, collaborated with pianist Clyde Hart on the onomatapoetically entitled "Bu-Dee-Daht" and the riff blues "Disorder at the Border," while Gillespie contributed one of his classic early bebop compositions, "Woody'n You."

The Apollo recordings have frequently been referred to (following Leonard Feather's example: 1949, 29) as the first bebop recording session. From the musical side, this does not seem entirely warranted: although there were a number of brilliant bebop solos by Gillespie, the Apollo recordings still featured a large arranged band (with Hawkins' booming tenor the dominant voice) very different in character from either of the small combos at the Onyx or at Kelly's Stable. But the Apollo recordings were significant as a signal of increased involvement by many musicians who had previously been only on the periphery of professional activity. While Gillespie, Budd Johnson, and Clyde Hart were veteran dance band musicians, the others were relative newcomers. Max Roach, for example, was still living with his family in Brooklyn and had joined the union only within the past year. "My first record date . . . was the result of Dizzy introducing me to Hawkins," Roach remembers. "Since he was doing some of the writing for that particular date, he asked Hawk to use me, I imagine ... and that was the beginning of a whole new world for me, musically and also creatively" (Gillespie 1979, 220; Gaskin 1986).

79 "Woody'n You"/"Rainbow Mist", Apollo 751; "Bu-Dee-Daht"/"Yesterdays", Apollo 752; "Disorder at the Border"/"Feeling Zero", Apollo 753. "Rainbow Mist", a new improvisation by Hawkins on the chord progression of "Body and Soul", proved to be a sound investment for the fledgling company. Hawkins' 1939 recording of "Body and Soul", a jazz classic which had sold over ioo,ooo copies on its initial release on the Bluebird label, was out of print by 1944. On its release in April, "Rainbow Mist" found "a ready market of 'Body and Soul'-starved jazz fans". Victor re-released the original to head off the competition, but the Apollo version, which sold for at least $i (as opposed to Bluebird's $. 35), realized a considerable profit for Apollo. Dan Burley, "Back Door Stuff," New York Amsterdam News 35 (29 April 1944): 6B; down beat II (I5 May 1944): 9; Hoefer 1963b, 19.


In the more informal, after-hours setting of Monroe's Uptown House, Roach and others had ample opportunity to experiment with new rhythmic and harmonic ideas, but relatively little incentive to prepare them for presentation to a wider audience. The Apollo recording session was a stimulus for them to develop and codify these ideas. "This was the beginning for this stuff being put down on paper," Budd Johnson has said. "The cats used to just play it and teach each other-you make the riff and I find it. But, see, we started to writing it, and when you start to write it, you got to get the right voicings, and you gotta really know a little something about the harmonic devices" (Gillespie i979, 215).

The band formed by Billy Eckstine in the spring of 1944 proved to be an even more important catalyst. Eckstine had managed to recruit the brightest lights of the Hines band of 1943, including Dizzy Gillespie (who served as music director) and Charlie Parker. At the time of Eckstine's first recording session for DeLuxe on April 13, the hastily-formed band (billed as "the DeLuxe All-Stars") had only a handful of arrangements, including "A Night in Tunisia," the two blues arrangements "Good Jelly Blues" and "I Stay in the Mood for You," and several generously donated by Count Basie. For their first engagement, a dance in Wilmington, Delaware, the band resorted to playing nothing but blues head arrangements, with Gillespie and Parker spontaneously creating riff figures for the brass and reed sections respectively (Malachi 1983). "As we kept doing these one- nighters," Eckstine remembers, "we were constantly writing ... We were constantly just sitting down everywhere we'd go and have a rehearsal and putting things together" (Gitler 1985, i25). Out of this continuous pressure to create and the forced communality of the touring dance band, a coherent repertory developed, which was then disseminated in live performances throughout the South and East. "Every town I'd go into," says Eckstine, "some little young musician who's studying would bring me up an arrangement to play. He is voicing it off of the new voicings, the new thing; nine out of ten of them you couldn't use, but you could see the seeking, trying to [hear] this kind of music" (Gitler 1985, I28).

Relatively little of this is preserved on the recordings for DeLuxe. The Eckstine band remained on the road until a second recording session was arranged for 5 December 1944. Six more tunes were recorded, including two predominantly instrumental numbers, "Blowing the Blues Away" (DeLuxe 200oo1) and "Opus X" (DeLuxe 2002). Even these were produced over the company's objections. Eckstine recalls having to include a short "dumb" blues vocal on


"Blowing the Blues Away" "in order to let the band play ... I just wrote two choruses of the blues, so I can let Gene [Ammons] and Dex[ter Gordon] blow . . . because in those days the philosophy of this small company was, 'Hey, if a man puts a nickel in the jukebox for Billy Eckstine, and he don't hear no singin', he thinks he's got the

wrong record'. Beautiful thinkin'. So I had to do it that way" (Gitler 1985, 129).80

The recordings by Hawkins and Eckstine early in 1944 were of some use in disseminating the new style. Al Haig, later to become one of the best-known bop pianists, was working in Boston in early 1944 and had been impressed by a radio broadcast of Gillespie's group from 52nd Street. "The following day I talked to somebody [in the band he was playing with] who said, 'Sure, I know Dizzy Gillespie. You can

buy his records'-that first record he made with Coleman Hawkins ... When I bought the records I got into the harmonic part of it which was different, and the drummer-all parts of the group sounded different, too ... I started learning those tunes" (Gitler 1985, 143).

But for the most part, recordings played a minor role in the spread of bebop in 1944, simply because they were virtually unobtainable. With restrictions on shellac and manpower shortages at pressing plants, the independent recording companies were unable to produce enough records to meet the growing demand. Most were without the distribution systems to make those few records which were produced available outside of a handful of major metropolitan areas. Still other performances were held indefinitely in reserve, the recording firms lacking the resources to handle more than a few releases at a time.81 The music of the few bebop combos to enter the recording studios toward the end of 1944 was withheld in this fashion. In September, Charlie Parker, who had just left the Eckstine band, made his first small-group recordings for Savoy in a combo led by guitarist Tiny Grimes. Three months later, Savoy recorded a combo featuring Oscar Pettiford, Clyde Hart, and Benny Harris. The important instrumental sides from both sessions ("Red Cross"/"Tiny's Tempo," Savoy 541, 15 September 1944; "Little Benny"/"DeeDee's Dance," Savoy

80 According to pianist John Malachi, "I'll Wait and Pray" (DeLuxe 2003), a ballad featuring Sarah Vaughan, was almost eliminated from the same session because the DeLuxe representatives wanted Eckstine to do yet another blues. Only Vaughan's tearful disappointment (it was to be her first recording), backed by a threatened walkout by the band, allowed it to be recorded (Malachi 1983).

81 Billboard 58 (19 January 1946): 14.


598, 19 December 1944) were not made available to the public until May 1946, nearly two years after the fact.82

The picture began to change dramatically at the beginning of 1945. The catalyst was Dizzy Gillespie, who was determined to launch his own career as a bandleader and knew that recordings were essential to building his reputation. Gillespie left the Eckstine band in December i944, and within several weeks he had recorded for four different companies in widely varying settings, including his first recording session as a bandleader.83 Shortly afterward, he signed an exclusive contract with Guild Records, with recording sessions under his own name ensuing in February. The early Manor and Guild recordings provide Gillespie's first statements of his basic repertory- "Groovin' High," "Salt Peanuts," "Be-Bop," and "Dizzy Atmo- sphere." Successive sessions for Guild united Gillespie and Charlie Parker for the first time on record.

For a small record firm like Guild, bebop was a calculated gamble, designed to distinguish its product in an increasingly crowded field (Variety listed 130 companies by mid-i945).84 Gillespie was an ideal choice-a young musician with a solid track record, an engaging personality, a repertory of unusual original compositions, and a bright future: in February, he was voted "New Star" on trumpet by Esquire's poll of jazz critics.8s As his popularity increased, so did the recording companies' enthusiasm for the style he personified. Guild, not one of the more successful of the small labels (it was to go bankrupt by next year), tried to make the most of its association with Gillespie, printing his picture in a March advertisement with the caption, "New Ace of trumpeters." Later in the year, Guild took out a half-page ad for Gillespie in Billboard. The breathless copy read:

He's the newest excitement in the band business . .. creator of a brand new, excitingly different jazz kick .... that's Dizzy Gillespie, tops of the new trumpeters, and a national jive fad! And of course, he records

82 Billboard 58 (i8 May 1946): 32. 83 Gillespie accompanied vocalist Sarah Vaughan for Continental, 31 December

1944, and blues singer Rubberlegs Williams (under the leadership of Oscar Pettiford) for Manor, 9 January 1945. His debut as recording leader was also for Manor, 9 January 1945. He performed in a small group with swing clarinetist Joe Marsala for Black and White, i2 January 1945. He appeared on Guild as featured soloist and arranger for the dance bands led by Boyd Raeburn (late January 1945) and Georgie Auld (7 February 1945, 28 March 1945). 84 Variety 159 (27 June 1945): 42.

85 Leonard G. Feather, "All-American Jazz Ballot, 1945," Esquire 23 (February 1945): 28.

i 60 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

exclusively for Guild Records .. .86

Throughout the year, Gillespie's star continued to rise. In April, Gillespie and Parker formed a combo at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and the two appeared in a pair of concerts in May and June at Town Hall under the auspices of the New Jazz Foundation. By the time Gillespie's first recordings were released in the summer (releases lagged behind recordings by an average of about six months), the reviewer for down beat was familiar enough with his style to criticize the recordings as not accurate enough.87 For musicians, the record-

ings, increasingly available by the end of the war, provided their first opportunity to study the new style. "The shit Charlie Parker used to do, man, seemed damn near impossible, because it was so different," noted Kermit Scott, who led the house band at Minton's in 1943. "It wasn't until he recorded that you could see what he was doing" (Scott 1983). Similarly, Tony Scott recalls, "When Bird and Diz hit [52nd] Street regularly, everybody was astounded and nobody could get near their way of playing music. Finally Bird and Diz made records, and then guys could imitate it and go from there" (Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 360).

Gillespie spent most of the summer on a tour with his own large band, the "Hepsations of 1945." On his return, he recorded in November under Parker's name for Savoy, which had begun tentatively to explore the new style.88 "I needed a lot of convincing before getting into it," Herman Lubinsky later remembered, "because I didn't think it would be commercial" (Ruppli 98o0, xv). But Lubinsky, upset that the veteran musicians recording for Savoy also recorded prolifically for competing labels, was determined to sign young, relatively untried musicians for exclusive contracts. He hired Teddy Reig as recording supervisor, who introduced him not only to Parker and Gillespie but also to Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and Fats

86 Billboard 57 (3 March 1945): 88; Billboard 57 (3 November 1945): 3'. Internal ellipses in original.

87 "Neither side exhibits Dizzy's horn or style to the best advantage", he wrote of Guild IooI ("Blue 'n Boogie"/"Groovin' High"). Manor 5000 ("Be-Bop"/"Salted Peanuts"), with Don Byas on saxophone instead of Charlie Parker, "will undoubtedly give many listeners the wrong impression as to what Dizzy and Charlie Parker and their crew had been putting down on 52nd Street". down beat 12 (I5 June 1945): 8; (I August 1945): 8.

88 Charlie Parker's Ree Boppers: "Billie's Bounce"/"Now's the Time", Savoy 573; "Ko Ko", Savoy 597, 26 November 1945. Gillespie's exclusive contract with Guild did not prevent him from appearing on this session under the name "Hen Gates."


Navarro. By 1946, Savoy was deeply involved in what Billboard was now referring to as "the 'rebob' [sic] music -'modern jazz'."89

Significantly, it is only at about this time that the term "bebop" or "rebop" begin appearing in advertisements and news reports as a way of describing the new style. Bebop may seem an unlikely label for a serious artistic movement: a "nonsense syllable" which "throws up its hands in clownish self-deprecation before all the complexity of sound and rhythm and self-assertive passion which it pretends to name" (Ellison 1966, 202). Before the music became a commercial commod- ity, perhaps, such a label was not needed. "The music wasn't called bop at Minton's," said Kenny Clarke. "In fact, we had no name for the music. We called ourselves modern" (Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 350). "Nobody considered the music 'bop' until it moved downtown," concurs Max Roach (Gillespie 1979, 209). According to Leonard Feather, the term began to surface late in 1944-90 Certainly it was in existence by the time Gillespie recorded "Be-Bop" for Manor in January 1945 (although, Gillespie notes, the tune "didn't have a name before the record date") (Gillespie 1979, 208).

Toward the end of 1945, with recordings by Gillespie and Parker beginning to have an impact, the terms "bebop" and "rebop" were seized upon as a shorthand for the new style. "Bebop" was a scat syllable, a word which conveyed something of the music's novelty and rhythmic drive. It also proved to be conveniently close in sound to the kind of slapstick pseudo-language loosely based on black slang that was popularized by Slim Gaillard, who shared the bill with Gillespie and Parker at Billy Berg's Los Angeles nightclub in late 1945. By early 1946, when recordings like "Ko Ko" were first made available, the best-selling record in the "race" category was Lionel Hampton's novelty song "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop," and Gaillard, whose music bore little resemblance to that of Gillespie and Parker, was being advertised as "The be-bop bombshell."91

The experience troubled musicians, many of whom would agree with Max Roach that "words mean quite a bit to all of us, [and] what we name our things and what we call our contributions should be up to us so that we can control our own destiny" (Gillespie 1979, 209). "I

89 Billboard 58 (5 January 1946): 19. 90 Feather 1949, 28. Interestingly, Feather himself does not use it in his articles on

Gillespie in 1944 and 1945 (Feather i944a, I945b). Nor does the term seem to occur in the many reviews of recordings and performances during 1944 and 1945, which refer instead to the music as "new jazz", "Dizzy's stuff", or the "Gillespie school".

91 Billboard 58 (9 February 1946): 33; Advertisement, Billboard 58 (i3 April 1946): 25.


was surprised when I came out [of the Army, in 1946] and found they'd given it a tag," said Kenny Clarke. "That label did a lot of harm" (Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 350).92 But the commercialization of bebop did succeed in drawing attention to the new style, contrib- uting to the boom of recording of bebop small combos in the late 1940s.

For most of the independent companies springing up in the late 1940S, the upsurge of interest in modern jazz was an episode of no great moment. Despite vigorous attempts at promotion, bebop remained, like earlier styles of "hot jazz," a relatively esoteric music for

specialized tastes. The future belonged instead to Chess, King, Atlantic, Imperial, and other small firms shrewdly concentrating on the rhythm and blues and country styles which ultimately blossomed into rock'n'roll in the early I950s (Gillett 1970, 1-27, 79-I 3I) But if bebop had only a marginal impact on the recording industry as a whole, the reverse is far from the case. Jazz artists were among the first beneficiaries of the decentralization of the recording business in the wake of the AFM ban, gaining an access to recording studios which would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. Musi- cians often had to deal with sub-standard recording and pressing equipment, unscrupulous company owners, and inadequate systems of distribution; but even on the less reputable labels, they were generally free to select their own personnel with a minimum of interference and encouraged to record a repertory of original compositions. Companies like Savoy, Blue Note, and Dial soon came to be symbols of the new music. Through their recordings, young musicians across the country heard and assimilated bebop, and the vigorous musical activity of the post-war years was preserved for future generations. None of this was the intention of James Petrillo, when he called the recording ban that shattered the monopoly held by the major companies. But it is clear that, far from stifling musical development, the recording ban actually helped to clear the way for the preservation and dissemination of modern jazz.

92 Charlie Parker, in a 1949 interview, shook his head sadly and said: "Some guys said, 'Here's bop.' Wham! They said, 'Here's something we can make money on!' Wham! 'Here's a comedian'. Wham! 'Here's a guy who talks funny talk"'. Michael Levin and John S. Wilson, "No Bop Roots in Jazz: Parker," down beat 16 (9 September 1949): 12. Coleman Hawkins, asked in the same year what he thought of bebop, replied, "What you are talking about is probably a commercial phrase, huh? A phrase that has been used to make something sell?" Mike Nevard, "'Man, I Ain't Never Heard of Bop!' Said Coleman Hawkins," Melody Maker 25 (17 December 1949): 3.


LIST OF WORKS CITED

Berger, Morroe, Edward Berger, and James Patrick. Benny Carter: A Life in American Music. 2 vols., Metuchen, N.J., 1982.

Clarke, Kenny. Interview with Helen Oakley Dance, 30 September 1977, Jazz Oral History Project of the National Endowment for the Arts at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Collier, James Lincoln. The Making ofJazz. Boston, 1978. Dance, Stanley. The World of Earl Hines. New York, 1977.

* The World of Count Basie. New York, 1980. DeVeaux, Scott. "Jazz in Transition: Coleman Hawkins and Howard

McGhee, 1935-1945." Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1985.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York, 1966. Feather, Leonard. "Dizzy is Crazy Like a Fox." Metronome 61 (July 1944): 16,

3 1. (1944a) -. "The Rhythm Section." Esquire 22 (August I944): 90. (1944b) -. "The Rhythm Section." Esquire 24 (September 1945): 82. (1945a) -. "Dizzy-2 Ist Century Gabriel." Esquire 24 (October 1945): 91.

(1945b) -. InsideJazz [original title: Inside Be-bop]. New York, 1949. Reprint.

1977- Fox, Ted. In the Groove: The People Behind the Music. New York, 1986. Gaskin, Leonard. Interview with the author, 14 August 1986. Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph: 1877-1977. 2nd rev. ed. New York,

1977. Gillespie, Dizzy with Al Fraser. To Be or Not ... to Bop. Garden City, New

York, 1979. Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City. New York, 1970. Gitler, Ira. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition inJazz in the 194os.

New York, 1985. Hammond, John, Jr. "John Hammond Says." Music and Rhythm 2 (June

1942): 26. -, with Irving Townsend. John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography.

New York, 1977. Hennessey, Tom. "From Jazz to Swing: Black Jazz Musicians and their

Music, 1917-1935." Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1975. Hinton, Milt. Interview with David Berger, June 1976, Jazz Oral History

Project of the National Endowment for the Arts at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Hoefer, George. "Discs in Orbit." Jazz I (November/December 1962): 31. . "Earl Hines in the I940s." down beat 30 (25 April 1963): 25, 42.

(1963a) . "The First Bop Combo." down beat 30 (20 June 1963): 19, 37.

(1963b) Kingman, Daniel. American Music: A Panorama. New York, 1979. Kofsky, Frank. Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York,

1970. Kolodin, Irving. "The Dance Band Business: A Study in Black and White."

Harper's Magazine 183 (June 1941): 72-82. Leiter, Robert. The Musicians and Petrillo. New York, 1953.


Malachi, John. Interview with Bryant DuPre, May 1983. Jazz Oral History Project of the National Endowment for the Arts at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Marvin, Wanda. "Waxing is Everybody's Biz." Billboard 56 (22 April 1944): 12, 66.

Newton, Francis [pseud. for Eric Hobsbawm]. The Jazz Scene. New York, 1960.

O'Day, Anita, with George Eells. High Times, Hard Times. New York, 1981. Patrick, James. "Al Tinney, Monroe's Uptown House, and the Emergence

of Modern Jazz in Harlem." Annual Review of Jazz Studies 2 (1983): 150-179-

Porter, Lewis. Lester Young. Boston, 1985. Ruppli, Michel, with assistance from Bob Porter. The Savoy Label: A

Discography. Westport, Connecticut, 1980. Rust, Brian. Jazz Records: 1897-1942. 2 vols., New Rochelle, NY, 1978.

(1978a) . The American Record Label Book. New Rochelle, NY, I978.

Reprint. New York, 1984. (1978b) Ryan, John. The Production of Culture in the Music Industry: The ASCAP-BMI

Controversy. Lanham, Maryland, 1985. Sanjek, Russell. From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America's

Popular Music (190oo-1980). I.S.A.M. Monographs, no. 20. Brooklyn, 1983.

Scott, Kermit. Interview with the author, 9 June 1983. Shapiro, Nat, and Nat Hentoff, eds. Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story ofJazz

as Told by the Men Who Made It. New York, 1955. Reprint. New York, 1966.

Shaw, Arnold. 52nd Street: The Street of Jazz [original title: The Street That Never Slept]. New York, 1971. Reprint. New York, 1977.

Southern, Eileen. "Conversation with William Clarence 'Billy' Eckstine." The Black Perspective in Music 7 (Fall 1979): 182-198; 8 (Spring 1980): 54-64.

Tamony, Peter. "Bop: The Word." Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 114-119.

Tirro, Frank. Jazz: A History. New York, 1977. Ward, Ed, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker. Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone

History of Rock and Roll. New York, 1986. Williams, Martin. "Horses in Midstream: Count Basie in the 1950s." Annual

Review ofJazz Studies 2 (1983): I-6. Yohalem, Arthur E. "Poor Man's Orchestra: The Story of the Automatic

Phono." Billboard 54 (3 January 1942): 70-72.

ABSTRACT

The transition between two important stylistic phases of jazz, "swing" and "bebop," occurred during the early 1940s-the very years affected by the ban on recording called by the American Federation of Musicians in 1942. This study examines the relationship between jazz and the recording industry during this period, emphasizing the factors affecting the selection of


repertory for recording. In particular, the rise of numerous independent recording companies in the wake of the settlement of the ban provided an environment conducive to the preservation and dissemination of the new bebop style.

Bebop and the Recording Industry_The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered

Documents

Transcript of Bebop and the Recording Industry_The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered