© Copyright ® Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.
"During the last half-century, New York's preeminence in the jazz world has faced a serious challenge only once. For a brief period following World War II, California captured the imagination of jazz fans around the world. 'West Coast Jazz' suddenly became a catchword, a fad, a new thing. Jazz writers even wrote
about a battle of West Coast versus East Coast, as though an actual war was taking place."
—TED GIOIA, AUTHOR OF WEST COAST JAZZ
One of the more arresting aspects of Pacific Jazz Records, A History of the Label and Its Artists, 1952-1965 [McFarland 2026] is the unique backstory about how the book came to be in the first place.
Jim Harrod is a close friend so I’ve heard the story of its origins over numerous get-togethers. But each time I reflect on how a young man in Sheridan, Wyoming came of age in the Jazz World by listening to recordings of Jazz artists issued by a then still somewhat obscure record company based in Los Angeles, it never fails to cause me to shake my head in amazement.
Here’s how Jim describes this journey in his Preface which also provides an overview of how the process of writing the book evolved.
“My interest in jazz blossomed in the mid-1950s when I was exposed to the music through a friend in high school, Jon Brooder, and a radio program, Willie's Waxworks, on the local AM radio station, KWYO. Willie's Waxworks was hosted by Bill Emery, who managed one of the record shops in town at Mossholder's Furniture. Jon had accompanied Bill on a visit to the West Coast in 1955 when Bill visited friends in Los Angeles that he had established during his time in the city in the early 1950s when he met Ray Avery, Woody Woodward, and Danny Alguire.
Woody invited Bill and Jon to attend several recording sessions at Pacific Jazz during their visit and Dick Bock gave Jon an armful of the latest Pacific Jazz releases to take home. Bill's visit in 1951 coincided with the emergence of Pacific Jazz and Contemporary Records. Bill's selection of jazz records at Mossholder's favored the West Coast labels he knew intimately through contacts with Dick Bock at Pacific Jazz and Les Koenig at Contemporary. My initial jazz library was built around releases from these companies.
Bill and I maintained a friendship that included seeing one another when he visited California to see his Los Angeles jazz friends. My visits to my hometown in later years always included a visit with Bill, and during a visit in 1994 I suggested that we should consider writing a history of the Pacific Jazz label. We began working on compiling a complete list of every release on the label including later releases on World Pacific. List members at the organissimo online jazz forum suggested that I compile an online resource containing all of the labels issued by Bock's Pacific Jazz and World Pacific companies.
Initial planning included a discography. Additional research revealed that myriad inconsistencies rendered a definitive discography impossible, so that task is left to the professional jazz discographers to tackle. Hopefully they will find this history that includes details of every AFM contract on file at AFM Local No. 47 of assistance in that task.
Writing the history was delayed as the background of co-founder Roy Harte was scant. This obstacle was overcome when Roy's son, Rex Harte, shared details of Roy's musician logbooks that he maintained meticulously during his big band years in the swing era. Roy's logs provide intimate details of the time Roy spent with Muggsy Spanier, Bobby Sherwood, George Paxton, Johnny Richards, Billie Rogers, Boyd Raeburn, Jerry Wald, Lucky Millinder, Ike Carpenter, and others.
The inconsistencies that discouraged the inclusion of a discography also presented a challenge regarding how to present an orderly history of the label. The opening chapters offer biographies of the people and places that figure prominently in the evolution of Pacific Jazz and World Pacific. The yearly activity of the labels presented a similar challenge. Recording sessions for specific releases were often weeks or months apart. When a finished album reached the marketplace its review was often months later. An album released in 1956 might not receive a review in the music press until 1957. The history unfolds in the following chronological fashion.
The yearly activity chapters begin with the earliest recording session date. If additional recording sessions were needed to complete an album, reviews of the album follow the last session date. Noteworthy news concerning the label is inserted in the narrative according to the date it was published in the music media. Each chapter ends with a listing of the albums released that year including various numerical series, speed formats, and matrix numbers.
Matrix numbers are listed as they present the best evidence regarding when planned releases entered the production schedule at Pacific Jazz.”
Jim’s Pacific Jazz history, which celebrates the accomplishments of it principals, Dick Bock and Roy Harte, becomes a welcome addition to the books that have been written in recent years about the pioneering entrepreneurs who managed independent record labels that documented the halcyon days of modern Jazz following the close of World War II among them: Tad Hershorn, Norman Granz, The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice, Richard Cook, Blue Note Records which celebrates the work of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff and Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built which fetes Creed Taylor’s productions.
As an aspiring Jazz drummer in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, I looked forward to the next Pacific Jazz release because the music on them celebrated the Jazz heroes that I’d heard performing in the local Jazz clubs, concert halls and festivals. I usually found out about them by reading Downbeat, Metronome, the Jazz Review and many other, sadly, short-lived magazines devoted to Jazz.
Radio airplay was also a source of information about forthcoming albums, especially after the development of KNOB- FM in the greater Los Angeles area which was hailed as the “world’s first all Jazz radio station.”
Finding Pacific Jazz albums in record stores was another matter because unlike the “big guys” - Columbia, RCA and Capitol - independent labels such as Pacific Jazz, Nocturne and Contemporary Record had limited budgets for marketing and distribution.
Thank goodness for the "I can order it for you and it should be here in a few days” mantra of the locally owned record store which enabled me to acquire some of the Pacific Jazz recordings detailed in Jim’s book.
This is how I “met” the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet featuring Chet Baker on trumpet, the early editions of Shorty Rogers and His Giants and the wonderful recordings that trumpet Clifford Brown made with Zoot Sims with music arranged by Jack Montrose and a host of other marvelous recordings made by a number of Jazz artists that were “before my time.”
Later, after I became active in the music, many of the Los Angeles based Jazz players that I enjoyed would be featured on Pacific Jazz recordings including the Jazz Crusaders, Joe Pass and Les McCann and the Gerald Wilson Orchestra.
Due to an accident of geography, I had the advantage of being able to acquire and listen to the many fine recordings issued on Pacific Jazz. In a way, perusing Pacific Jazz Records, A History of the Label and Its Artists, 1952-1965 becomes an exercise in visiting old friends.
But for those of you with limited exposure to the West Coast Jazz scene from 1945-1965, Jim’s book will help open a whole new world for you as it provides a road map to use and discover many new listening experiences involving artists primarily based in southern California during this period.
For as annotated on the book’s back cover:
“From its modest beginning in the back of a drum shop, Pacific Jazz became one of the most respected and successful independent jazz record labels in America, starting with a single 78 rpm release in 1952 that introduced the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Its exponential growth during the 1950s launched the jazz careers of Mulligan, Chet Baker, Chico Hamilton, and Bud Shank. With expansion in the mid '50s and a name change to World Pacific, the catalog included folk, comedy, pop, vocal, Latin, and world music genres featuring artists such as Kimio Eto and Ravi Shankar. Jazz releases continued to introduce major artists in the 1960s including the Jazz Crusaders, Les McCann, Curtis Amy, Paul Bryant, Clare Fischer, Joe Pass, Gerald Wilson, and Carmell Jones. Dick Bock sold Pacific Jazz to Liberty Records in the spring of 1965, ending its 13-year run as an independent jazz label. This history covers in depth all 13 years of the transformative record label's independence.”
Jim writes the way he talks in an easy to understand almost off-handed manner which makes his book a pleasure to read. While important technical information is included, Jim’s narrative brings to life the artists and the music they made.
Using a chronological approach, the book focuses on key albums that were issued during each year of the label’s thirteen-year existence.
For example, this annotation about Clifford Brown’s sole excursion on Pacific Jazz which was made even more unique because of it emphasis on arrangements, something that often distinguished the West Coast based Jazz musicians from their East Coast brethren who often favored the more informal blowing sessions:
“The Thursday evening, August 12, 1954, Clifford Brown session was scheduled from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. at Capitol Recording Studios on Melrose Avenue. The AFM contract listed Clifford Brown, trumpet; Russell Freeman, piano; Joe Mondragon, bass; Robert Gordon, baritone saxophone; Sheldon Manne, drums; Stu Williamson, valve-trombone; Jack "Zoot" Sims, tenor saxophone. The contract also credited Maury Dell as copyist and Clifford Brown as arranger although Bock's liner notes credit Jack Montrose as sole arranger on the Clifford Brown ensemble sessions. The second Clifford Brown session occurred on Wednesday, September 8,1954, at Capitol Recording Studio "A" from 4:30 to 8:00 p.m. Carson Smith replaced Joe Mondragon on bass and the AFM contract noted Jack Montrose, arranger, plus Maury Dell and Joe Estren as copyists.
The Clifford Brown ensemble sessions endured an extended period of gestation, unusual for Dick Bock as albums normally reached the retail market within a month or two after taping.
Will Thornbury asked Dick Bock about the Clifford Brown sessions thirty years after they were recorded. "The thing that I didn't want to do was to record Clifford in the same context that he had been recorded, and the same context he was always recorded in and a lot of people including Max Roach hated me for doing this because it was not what they wanted to do and it wasn't the setting that they had conceived that was Clifford's normal setting. The chance to record Clifford was a great one, and I thought let's try to do something different, and see what happens, put him in another context. It is one of the few albums that is unique from the rest of his albums. I don't think it is any better than the albums that Clifford recorded with Max Roach, in fact their albums are in some ways superior performances because they're more integrated, they're tightly knit, they're really well rehearsed because that's the way they play on the job. I think it was successful, a good counterpart to Clifford, he wrote for the session and played beautifully on it."
Or the following description of The Mastersounds, a quartet with the same instrumentation as The Modern Jazz Quartet, but with a looser, more swinging feeling which made their music somewhat more accessible than that of the more classically constructed approach of the MJQ. The fact that The Mastersounds drew their music from the popular Broadway shows during the 1950s such as The King and I, Kismet and The Flower Drum Song may also have contributed to their recordings being among the label’s best-sellers. The following extract also shows Jim’s efforts to locate and include album reviews from the major music magazines including Downbeat, Metronome and The Billboard.
“AFM contracts for the Mastersounds first two albums on World Pacific are not in the files at Local No. 47 in Los Angeles. The mention in The Billboard that Bock had two packages already in the works indicates that the sessions may have been recorded independently by the Mastersounds in San Francisco where they burst onto the local jazz scene at Dave Glickman's Jazz Showcase. Ads in the San Francisco Examiner for the jazz club carried a byline, "Pacific Jazz New ' Stars of '57" indicating that Bock had signed the quartet prior to the August 9, 1957, date of the newspaper. Jepsen dates the session for Jazz Showcase Introducing.... The Mastersounds, PJM-403, to September 12, 1957, and The King and I—A Modern Jazz Interpretation by the Mastersounds, PJM-405, to September 19, 1957, both in Los Angeles.47 Don Gold extended a three-star cautious review of PJM-403 in Down Beat. "It may be trifle too early to determine the full value of the group, flaws and virtues are apparent, additional time together may benefit."48 Metronome's review of PJM-403 was less critical. "A capable, well-rehearsed group, playing some imaginative arrangements of both standards and originals, they swing."49 The King and I—A Modern Jazz Interpretation by the Mastersounds, PJM-405, was reviewed in The Billboard under their "Sound" section, not the "Jazz Albums" area. "The unusual sounds produced by The Mastersounds only reflect their good taste and top musicianship in this collection of tunes from The King and I."
Jazz is a reflection of the times in which it is created and this was no less the case during the period that Pacific Jazz was in existence.
Jim offers commentary on some of these socio-cultural influences then in vogue in southern California such as the coffee houses that spawned the Jazz and Poetry movement and the music associated with it which found its way onto a number of Pacific Jazz recordings.
The surfing craze, the advent of interest in folk music and the forerunners of bossa nova, soul and funk and one world, international music were chronicled on Pacific Jazz recordings well before they later reached national prominence.
Pacific Jazz was also involved in some of the earliest efforts to create a larger listening audience for Jazz with its involvement in the Jazz International’s education efforts.
Much of the music described and discussed in Pacific Jazz Records, A History of the Label and Its Artists, 1952-1965 reflects the spirit of exploration, joy of discovery and sense of entrepreneurial adventure that dominated California culture during these years.
This risk-taking even extended to some of the recording techniques employed by Dick Bock and his associates at Pacific Jazz:
“Jack Tracy gave Cy Touff, His Octet & Quintet, PJ-1211, four stars in Down Beat. "This is high caliber fare, and achieves a compulsive swing and joy which is practically guaranteed to make you pat a hole in the floor." John Tynan wrote an extended article for Down Beat about the recording session at the Forum Theater and Bock's decision to use the theater to record. The musicians were set up on stage in front of a large curtain. The only lighting was supplied by overhead stage lights, and Bock had solved the chilly temperature problem encountered with the Jack Sheldon session.
The musician's sound projected out into the theater seating area and provided perfect acoustical balance. "Reverberations are completely lacking ... rather the music fills the theater and filters back to the performers, making for an extremely true sound."
The reader can also get a sense of these “Wild Wild West” qualities through the book's many photos, album covers [especially those associated with William, Claxton] and posters.
Jim’s book is a professional achievement written by someone passionate enough to turn his personal interest into a well-researched, well-written behind-the-scenes look at what went into making this music happen.
The work is an invaluable addition to the canon of books on the subject of Jazz in California from 1945 to 1965 along with Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Jazz in California 1945 - 1960, Robert Gordon’s, Jazz West Coast and my own self-published trilogy, West Coast Jazz - A Reader, Vols. 1, 2, and 3.
The photo that adorns the cover of the book shows Bobby Troop, the host of the Stars of Jazz TV Program, interviewing Dick Bock. We’ve come full circle here as Jim is also the author of Stars of Jazz: A Complete History of the Innovative Television Series, 1956-1958 which McFarland published in 2020!
For order information go here.
[Winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalist Association Special Citation for Historic Writings, Steven Cerra is a professional Jazz drummer and the author of anthologies on Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Shelly Manne, Jazz West Coast Readers Vols. 1-3, Profiles in Jazz, Vol.1, Jazz Drummers A Reader Vols. 1-2, Jazz Saxophonists A Reader, Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Piano A Reader, Vols. 1, 2 & 3 and Jazz Trumpet A Reader Vols. 1 and 2. He also hosts the jazzprofiles.blogspot and cerra.substack blogs.]
