Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Tender Ears that Changed the World


Yesterday's viewings of "Atlantic Records: The House that Ahmet Built" and Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" have me again realizing how the enthusiasm for Jazz and other African American based musics by the likes John Hammond, Alfred Lion, Bob Weinstock and Ertegum brothers changed the world. Critics can pontificate and help popularize. But these folks gave the world access to some of the most important and influential artists in the world.

They were fans first and their joy for the music was early and deep. There are stories of them all getting very close and even evangelizing the music early on. Hammond heard Billie Holiday when he was in his teens in 1927, moved to Greenwich when he was 21 and promoted the ground-breaking Spiritual to Swing Concerts at Carnegie Hall in the Decembers of 1938 and 39. German immigrant Alfred Lion, who also caught the jazz bug as a teenager ten years earlier when he was in Berlin and saw Sam Wooding's Orchestra was at one of the Spritual to Swing Concerts. It inspired him to begin a record label, BlueNote Records.

Bob Weinstock was 15 years old when he started a mail order record business out of his house and made his first recordings with Lennie Tristano when he was 20. Soon after he founded Prestige records. Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun fell in love with jazz when they grew up in Turkish embassies around the world and promoted mixed race jazz concerts in Washington DC at the Turkish Embassy, an event that could not have been held in the South otherwise. Ahmet formed Atlantic records in 1947 with a loan from his dentist and Nesuhi produced Atlantic sides by Coltrane, Mingus, Ornette Coleman.

Our world was changed because of adolescent passions for the sounds that were coming out of the likes of Harlem and Kansas City. I guess it is getting close to Christmas so its okay to get a little George Bailey on y'all. No Columbia jazz as we knew it? No BlueNote with Blakey cymbals crashing? No Prestige---imagine a world without the classic sides of Miles and Coltrane? No jazz and blues and Ray Charles on Atlantic? The world would have indeed been duller greyer and not as rich. And I don't know what conclusion I should draw here besides a soulful shoutout: Praise be to the lights inside the messengers who as conduits brought the artists and their works!
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:02 AM
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