Stay Tuned By Stan Cornyn: Nesuhi’s Jazz Saved

Every Tuesday and Thursday, former Warner Bros. Records executive and industry insider Stan Cornyn ruminates on the past, present, and future of the music business.

I woke up this morning. (I always try to start these essays with something positive.)

Overnight, I’d been thinking about what to write, and I liked my dream. It was about Nesuhi Ertegun (Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun’s brother), who’d joined Atlantic in New York in the 1955.

As a teen, I had met Nesuhi in midtown Los Angeles, where he ran his and his wife Marili’s own record store: The Jazzman Record Shop, at 1221 Vine St. Hollywood 38, California. It was devoted to jazz records, mostly if not all of its stock.

I loved to go through his shop’s record bins, flip, flip. Through this store, I discovered oddities (to me, at least) like V-Discs, which were 12” singles issued by the government during World War II, and had existed no where else. And I could buy (perhaps illegally) jazz V-Discs at Nesuhi’s store for maybe a dollar.

Nesuhi was nice to me. He’d been a jazz fan for years in Los Angeles, even teaching jazz at UCLA on the side. He’d started his own jazz label, called Crescent. He’d married jazzy girls, like Marili in 1943. He and I both could recite the names of the every musician in Stan Kenton’s band.

Decades later, when I’d grown up within Warner Bros. Records and Nesuhi was doing jazz and other stuff with Atlantic, we met again, and often. I learned about his post-L.A. life. Atlantic then running WCI Records’ international.

I asked about his Crescent label’s masters. He told me he’d transferred them to Atlantic’s Atco label, and saved them that way.

“Good,” I thought, but never thought much more about it until last night, when it slid into my brain and dozed me happily.

“Saved they were,” making them still available, too (I hoped).

“Yes.”

All Those Artists

Awake now, I decided to post a blog about “still available.” Here’s why.

Over the decades, I’ve searched for certain records that were no longer for sale. Not in stores. Not even on iTunes and those other internet vehicles. I got to know some places that saved copies of them, and harbored these goners: places like –

• The Library of Congress

• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

• Record Academy

• Warner Music Archive (and presumably similar troves for Columbia, EMI, RCA, Universal, et al labels)

I’d even visited the Library of Congress in Washington to listen to one record I couldn’t find and wanted to hear. Awkward though, since I’m a Californian, but that was their deal: I had to sit in a booth to play it; only at the Library of Congress, I couldn’t hear it any other way. Couldn’t get a copy. Or get it sent to me. I guess they were obeying some laws, but egad for all that.

So at least “PRESERVATION” was somewhat afoot. Like libraries, where you can’t check out books. One step forward. But under a mile.

Not like ‘HAVING YOUR OWN COPY.” At these Preservation places, their just having one was like radio play: you’re at the mercy of the station, whenever/if they play it. But it’s not whenever you want to hear it yourself.

What to do about “whenever I want to hear it”?

Nesuhi’s Jazz Recordings

Let’s get back to Nesuhi, whose final wife (Selma) I’d taken to dinner twice before she married him.

I knew that Nesuhi had recorded a huge bunch of jazz stars – a major list, recorded for jazz fans with older ears (1955-1976). Including:

Art Pepper, Shelly Manne, Pete Rugolo, Tiny Grimes, Big Joe Turner, Erroll Garner, James Moody, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Mabel Mercer, Sylvia Syms, Billy Taylor, Mary Lou Williams, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, Earl Fatha Hines, Barney Bigard, Pee Wee Russell, Al Hibbler, Meade Lux Lewis, Bobby Short, Chris Conner, LaVern Baker, Hank Crawford, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Fathead Newman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Milt Jackson, Johnny Hodges...

and others.

Nesuhi died in 1989. Over the years after, his longtime colleague at Atlantic Records, engineer Joel Dorn, assembled a memorial, a five-CD set (issued in December, 2008) called Hommage à Nesuhi. List price: $149.98 in an edition limited to 3,000 copies. Well, a shade better than having to fly back to the Library of Congress, and you got to have it on your home shelf. Lots of notes in it. Huggable.

(The set was the last project that Joel Dorn ever worked on. He died in 2007, the day after he finished editing the album’s notes.)

Hommage got issued via the mini-label “Rhino Handmade,” and the existence of Rhino makes sense, because the front-line labels, including Atlantic, find it convenient to move their “cutouts” over to a savior-de-jazz, like Rhino.

In 2009, Atlantic’s 62nd anniversary, Rhino then offered Hommage in digital download formats. And if I have any luck, you’ll be able (at the finish of this oration) to click on any of the tunes, and get them downloaded to you for under a buck each.

Better than having to fly in to Washington to hear them.

However, I May Not Sleep Well Tonight

Having exuded (pleasure) over locating all those jazz artists on the Nesuhi tribute, and hearing them in my home, I felt maybe I should push forward to locating the only album I ever produced ever. (I have only average ears.) It had been cut out by Warner Bros. Records 49 years ago.

Love to get a copy to hear, no matter where and how, I decided.

Me, an album producer? Well, around 1964 at Warner Bros. Records, I was respected for my typewriting. But when I asked if I could record an album by this neat-sounding North Beach (‘Frisco) duo that I’d heard at a small club there, Warner’s big guys simply asked me “how much?” and when I answered the cost of one night “live” in a cheap club, they brushed it off with a “why not” look on their faces. I got a “go”!

I brought the duo down to Burbank and arranged a date for one live session at Pasadena’s Ice House (no fee). The main artist was Walt Brown, with a Bill Collins on the other guitar. We recorded it and WB #1568 came out in 1964.

It got no airplay. It came out in December’s album release that also included such other Warner discoveries as Jay and the Hawks, The Premiers, and the soundtrack to Sex and the Single Girl.

So, back waking up this morning, I thought about after assembling my Hommage-a-Nesuhi-appreciation, “How About an ‘Hommage & Stan”? I mean, wouldn’t you, if you were in my slippers? And it was findable-possible?

So I looked for The Walt Brown Show on Google and, wow! Wow! there it was, listed on Amazon.com! Showed its cover!

Click to “see more,” and you bet I did. Ohhh, nuts. In little six-point type, Mr. Amazon had printed “Currently unavailable” and “Be the first to review this item.” I guess, like it indicates, one used copy had once been sold for $1.99. But maybe on eBay, too.

The right price, but now, gone poof.

And no place else was “The Walt Brown Show” found.

OK, Folks, What Next?

I have held back from calling Mr. Rhino about rescuing this one album I produced out from their Warner archives, since Mr. Rhino has been suite as Chopin to me.

But how ‘bout those other guys I mentioned (like Library of Congress, and Record Academy, and Walt Brown Hall of Fame)? Shouldn’t their vaults of cutouts go on-line to get $,99 a track for downloads?

So tomorrow, I’ll be waking up, looking for a downloader for my only album child. A little like Nesuhi got. (I’m not yet in panic, since this year it’s only the 49th anniversary since Walt Brown was issued.)

Anyway, here’s my plea:

ALL those off-market oldies could and should be as downloadable as is Nesuhi on Amazon and iTunes, maybe elsewhere. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Please.

- Stay Tuned