Jazz Notes

For various reasons, this morning I've been listening to the music of saxophonist Eddie Harris, and in the process learned something new about The Beatles that I never knew before.

Up above's a video of Harris in 1969 playing his composition Cold Duck Time with Les McCann (piano) and Benny Bailey (trumpet). It's great that this video even exists, and that we can see the musicians' interactions with one other, like Bailey's at 2:10 when Harris nails his line. Also, check out the expressions on Harris and McCann's faces at around 4:10 after Bailey just absolutely tore up a killer trumpet solo. You also get to watch Ella Fitzgerald finding a seat in the audience.

Listening to Eddie Harris requires some discretion. He was an exciting and innovative performer, probably most famous as the composer of Freedom Jazz Dance, now a standard that's been recorded by many musicians, most notably Miles Davis. Harris.was also one of the first, if not the first, jazz musicians to electrify the saxophone. Titles of albums from the late 1960s, like Plug Me In and High Voltage, reflected his embrace of electronics. But sometime in the 1970s, be began incorporating large elements of funk and jazz fusion into his music, often with unfortunate results that today sound very dated and trendy. Worse, he also started incorporating comedy into his songs, both in the titles and in lyrics, and even released an album of just spoken-word, stand-up comedy.

A man's got to make a living, and in their time those funk and comedy records sold fairly well (for jazz albums, if you can call them that), but I find little enjoyment in listening to them today. But when successfully avoided, they take nothing away from his far better jazz, soul-jazz, and R&B records.   

Harris' first album, Exodus to Jazz, was released in 1961 on the Vee Jay label, and he went on to record a half-dozen albums in total for Vee Jay between 1961 and 1964. But Spotify is streaming a compilation album titled Presenting Eddie Harris, dated 1961 but containing later songs (like the performance of Cold Duck Time shown up above) and other songs recorded as late as 1976, long after he left Vee Jay for Atlantic Records. 

My initial clue that the album wasn't from 1961 was that it includes a song titled 1974 Blues, which seems unlikely to have been recorded in 1961 or earlier. But as it turns out, I was only partially correct - the song is not from '61, but actually was recorded in 1968.

I tried to find some information online about Presenting Eddie Harris but didn't come up with much. Neither Wikipedia, All Music, Discogs, nor Rate Your Music list the album in Harris' discography.  MusicBrainz.com does list the album and has detailed notes on personnel and recording dates for most tracks (which is how I found out that 1974 Blues was recorded in 1968), yet still claims the album was released on March 11, 1961.

But I also saw on MusicBrainz that the compilation was released on the Universal Digital Enterprises label. Which in itself is another give-away - I sincerely doubt any music label was calling itself "digital" anything in 1961, much less the 1970s. Also, I see on the Qobuz streaming site that Universal Digital has released hundreds of albums, many with the "Presenting. . ." title and with dates purportedly as early as the 1930s. 

My guess is that Universal Digital's business model is releasing digital versions of earlier, out-of-print albums for streaming services, which got me to wondering if Presenting Eddie Harris wasn't a repackaging of some earlier compilation. But I can find nothing earlier in Harris' discography of nearly the length of Presenting (42 tracks). Plus listening to the compilation is a slightly schizophrenic effort - the track listing jumps back and forward in time, lurching wildly between styles. One track might be a very traditional jazz set from the early '60s, followed by a wah-wah soaked session from the mid-'70s with crooning background singers and disco percussion, and then a soul-jazz  track from a time in-between the other two.  Who came up with this track order?       

I may never know. Vee Jay Records, Harris' early label, has been liquidated and went through several reorganizations. Some, like VJ International, operated mainly just to lease the Vee-Jay masters to other companies. In 1990, Chameleon Music Group began reissuing Vee-Jay material on CD until Chameleon became inactive in 1995. An agreement was cut in 1998 with Rhino Records for North American licensing of the Vee Jay catalog, which is currently owned by the Concord Music Group, which also owns Fantasy Records.

I may never know the providence of Presenting Eddie Harris and can live with that ambiguity in my life. But I promised you something about The Beatles, and in my research I learned that Vee Jay Records was founded in 1953 in Gary, Indiana by Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken (who used their first initials for the label’s name). The first song they ever recorded (Baby It's You by Gary's own The Spaniels) made it to the top ten of the U.S. R&B charts, and within a short time, Vee Jay was the most successful black-owned record company in the USA. In addition to doo-wop bands like The Spaniels and jazz artists like Eddie Harris, Vee Jay also released records by blues artists (John Lee Hooker) and rock bands like The Four Seasons.

Vee Jay was also the first American company to sign The Beatles. They released Please Please Me, backed with Tell Me Why, in 1963. In one month alone in early 1964, Vee Jay sold 2.6 million Beatles singles. Vee Jay also released the first Beatles album (Introducing . . . The Beatles) in early 1964, ten days before Capitol Records released Meet the Beatles. Capitol filed lawsuits against Vee Jay and cease-and-desist orders to stop the releases, as they felt that their subsequent deal with Beatles' management gave them exclusive rights. The cost of defending the lawsuits, in addition to poor financial management, wiped out Vee Jay’s money and credit, and put the company out of business.

So I realized that this has nothing to do with Eddie Harris, but today I learned that the Beatles, once the most successful band in the world (prior to Michael Jackson, prior to Taylor Swift), originally had their music released by a black-owned record label from Gary, Indiana. Cool.