© -Jazz
Times; Tad Hershorn, University of California
“Any book on my life would
start with my basic philosophy of fighting racial prejudice. I loved jazz, and
jazz was my way of doing that,” Norman Granz told Tad Hershorn during the final
interviews given for this book. Granz, who died in 2001, was iconoclastic,
independent, immensely influential, often thoroughly unpleasant—and one of
jazz’s true giants. Granz played an essential part in bringing jazz to
audiences around the world, defying racial and social prejudice as he did so,
and demanding that African-American performers be treated equally everywhere
they toured. In this definitive biography, Hershorn recounts Granz’s story:
creator of the legendary jam session concerts known as Jazz at the
Philharmonic; founder of the Verve record label; pioneer of live recordings and
worldwide jazz concert tours; manager and recording producer for numerous
stars, including Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.
Excerpted with
permission from Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice by Tad Hershorn, an archivist at the Institute of Jazz Studies Rutgers University University of California Press
The following
excerpt appeared in 08/15/11 edition of the Jazz Times. For more
information about subscribing to the magazine go here. For information on ordering a copy of the book directly from
the University of California Press
Norman Granz, the
impresario who made his name at the helm of Jazz at the Philharmonic, was
hardly impressed when he first heard Ella Fitzgerald with the Ink
Spots in his hometown of Los Angeles
This excerpt from
Tad Hershorn’s soon-to-be-published Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for
Justice (University of California Press) explores the
complex history and sometimes mysterious nature of that legendary partnership.
*****
Jazz at the
Philharmonic’s 1953 tour of Japan Tokyo Osaka
“I’d been thinking
for years about taking over Ella’s personal management. … Ella was afraid. She
thought I was too much of a blow-top,” Granz reflected. “So I told her it was a
matter of pride with me, that she still hadn’t been recognized—economically, at
least—as the greatest singer of our time. I asked her to give me a year’s
trial, no commission, but she wound up insisting on paying the commission. We
had no contract. Mutual love and respect was all the contract we needed.” In
2001, he added, “I didn’t claim to be the only manager. I never had a
contract with Ella or Oscar [Peterson] or Basie or Duke. I told Ella, if you
want the luxury of saying, ‘Norman, I quit,’ you’re off. Go for yourself, but I
want the luxury of quitting you, too. So we had a nice relationship. Ella
lasted for maybe 40 or 45 years, Oscar well over 50.” After she agreed to go
with Granz, he satisfied an IRS debt that Gale had allowed to pile up and that the government was
pressing to settle. The changing of the guard was at hand.
Together, they
worked to polish her talent and enhance her reputation. Granz had plans to
widen her scope musically and upgrade the venues in which she appeared, as well
as to get her higher pay that would leave what Granz called “52nd Street New York Basin Street East
Granz translated
that acclaim to book the singer into more prestigious clubs and hotel showrooms
that had previously been closed both to black artists and to jazz in general.
Granz and Fitzgerald were not alone in thinking that her talent deserved a
higher profile. In early 1955, Marilyn Monroe lent her prestige to help broker
Fitzgerald’s first appearance at the Mocambo on Los Angeles Hollywood
Word of
Fitzgerald’s drawing power at the Mocambo spread across the industry, and
within a month Granz had booked her for three weeks at the Venetian Room of the
Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco Las Vegas
Granz’s campaign
for Fitzgerald’s recording contract became more aggressive as the deadline to
re-sign with Decca Records approached and her apparent frustrations with her
longtime label surfaced. Nat Hentoff conducted a particularly revealing
interview published in February 1955, when one can almost hear Granz’s
prompting behind her unusually frank and public airing of what she considered
missed opportunities with Decca. Granz finally had the opportunity to pry
Fitzgerald away 10 months later and swooped in like a hawk. In June 1955
Universal had begun prerecording the soundtrack of The Benny Goodman Story starring
Steve Allen as Goodman. Many of the musicians from the clarinetist’s former
bands played themselves, along with a handful of contemporary musicians. Decca
did not know or did not think it mattered until late in the game that Gene
Krupa, Teddy Wilson and Stan Getz were all under exclusive contract to Granz.
Although Lionel Hampton recorded extensively for Granz, he was not similarly
bound contractually. When
Decca finally came
to Granz seeking a release for the musicians, he expressed his willingness to
negotiate. Ever the wily bargainer, he knew he held all the cards. “I proposed
that if they wanted the soundtrack badly enough, in return I wanted a release
of Ella from her Decca contract. It was that simple.” The label finally ceded
Fitzgerald in the first week of January 1956, barely a month before the film’s
release on Feb. 2. Granz, anticipating Ella Fitzgerald’s arrival, announced the
formation of Verve Records almost as soon as she departed Decca.
Thus began the
second and greatest of the three major phases of her recording career, the last
being the Pablo years in the 1970s and 1980s. Granz insisted that her leaving
Decca and the establishment of Verve were unrelated. His plan, he said, had
been to merge Clef, Norgran and Down Home into a broader-based entity that
would include popular music as well as jazz. Rather than being created merely
as a vehicle for Fitzgerald, Verve was his solution to another longstanding
problem: the hemorrhaging of money from his jazz labels, whose finances had up
until then depended exclusively on the tours. Granz said the wider focus of
Verve allowed him to design a more effective network of disc-jockey promotion
and other activities more associated with pop music.
“Granz will have
no connection with Verve except for owning it,” DownBeat reported.
“All central operations will be handled by 24-year-old arranger-conductor Buddy
Bregman.” The two had met in November 1955 on the tennis courts at Rosemary
Clooney and José Ferrer’s home in Los Angeles 451 North Canon Drive Beverly Hills Norman
Granz had wanted
Fitzgerald to do a Cole Porter album for many years and had unsuccessfully
appealed to Decca to undertake such a work. “They rejected it on the grounds
that Ella wasn’t that kind of singer,” Granz said in 1990. “I could understand
it from their point of view, because they had one thing in mind and that was
finding hit singles. I was interested in how I could enhance Ella’s position,
to make her a singer with more than just a cult following amongst jazz fans. …
So I proposed to Ella that the first Verve album would not be a jazz project,
but rather a songbook of the works of Cole Porter. I envisaged her doing a lot
of composers. The trick was to change the backing enough so that, here and
there, there would be signs of jazz.”
Granz prepared for
the Porter recording with the same methodical zeal that he had shown in
producing such pioneering deluxe album projects as The Jazz
Scene (1950) and The Astaire Story (1953).
He instructed his
main assistant, Mary Jane Outwater—“secretary” would be too narrow a term to
describe the role Granz entrusted her with—to track down two copies of every
Cole Porter song in publication and then winnow them down to about 50 songs for
Fitzgerald to consider. His first choice to arrange the 32-song two-LP set was
Nelson Riddle, the former Tommy Dorsey trombonist and arranger who had made his
mark in the early 1950s when Nat Cole selected him to oversee his Capitol vocal
sessions. Frank Sinatra credited Riddle for virtually reviving his career on
the same label. However, Riddle’s manager, Carlos Gastel, was not keen on
loaning him out. Finally Granz chose to “take a chance on Bregman. He knew all
of the songs and had an affinity for the material.”
Fitzgerald,
Bregman and Granz soon got down to work. Bregman’s varied arrangements, played
by top-drawer Los Angeles
Though Granz and
Cole Porter had been friends through Fred Astaire since around the time
of The Astaire Story, Granz chose not to involve him in the process, as
Porter was notoriously picky about how singers recorded his work. Instead, once
the recordings were done, he took a stack of the acetates with him to New York
Ella Fitzgerald
Sings the Cole Porter Songbook took off beyond Granz and Fitzgerald’s
wildest expectations, both commercially and artistically, becoming one of the
top-selling jazz records of all time. Sales boosted the fortunes of the young
Verve and laid the groundwork for the remainder of its signature series in the
years to come. When sales hit 100,000 in the first month, the album went to No.
15 on the Billboard charts, and two weeks after its release it was ranked
second in a DownBeat poll of bestselling jazz albums. “It was the
11th biggest LP of the year. That was insane for me. Verve put me in the
commercial market for the first time,” Granz said of the best selling album of
his career.
On Aug.
15, 1956 , a
spectacular concert at the Hollywood Bowl featured Louis Armstrong and his
All-Stars and Art Tatum alongside Fitzgerald, the Oscar Peterson Trio and a
JATP ensemble filled out by Roy Eldridge, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips, Illinois
Jacquet and Buddy Rich. The album, Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl, became
effectively the 1956 volume of the JATP recordings. Granz later received a
letter from the Hollywood Bowl telling him that the concert had been the best
attended jazz event in the history of the outdoor facility—ironic given that 11
years earlier the Bowl’s management told Granz that they did not want to host
any event with the word “jazz” in its title.
Fitzgerald and
Armstrong went into the studio with the Oscar Peterson Trio and Buddy Rich the
day after the Bowl concert to record the first of three albums that not only
sold well but are thought to be among the finest of Granz’s career. Armstrong
was unusually hard to corral given his seemingly nonstop touring schedule, and
often his trumpet playing was barely up to par when Granz had the chance to
record him: To compensate, Armstrong sang more. His manager Joe Glaser didn’t
make it any easier by approving dates for Armstrong at the last minute, leaving
Granz with only a day or two at most to prepare, as was the case with all three
of the Ella and Louis records from 1956 and 1957. Granz later said that
Armstrong, unlike Fitzgerald, with her perfect diction and loyalty to the music
as written, “never deferred to the material. He did what he did, and that was
the thing I was trying to capture. You could hear his breathing or sighing or,
instead of the word, he’d come out with a sound. But to me, that’s its
quality.” The contrast between their styles was pure magic. Fitzgerald deferred
to Armstrong to make the final choices on the songs and keys. Photographs taken
during the sessions show Armstrong and Fitzgerald, dressed in casual summer
clothes, thoroughly enjoying one another.
Shortly
afterwards, on Aug. 21, 1956, Granz, Bregman and Fitzgerald returned to Capitol
Studios to get started on the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songbook and
thereby capitalize on the momentum provided by the Porter release. Ella
Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook followed the pattern set by
the Porter, with big band, band with strings and small-group arrangements.
Though the content of the Songbook albums was pretty much set by Granz in
consultation with Fitzgerald, there was still give-and-take in the studio when
the singer occasionally resisted her manager’s wishes. For example, during the
recording of Rodgers and Hart, she refused to sing “Miss,” as in “Have You
Met Miss Jones?” Granz recalled, “It was not a woman’s lyric. So she changed it
to ‘Have you met Sir Jones?’ I was very unhappy about that, but we
were in the midst of recording and Ella was very firm. I had to think of the
whole project, and I didn’t think it warranted a stand on principle. I could have
eliminated the song, and I considered that. But since it was such a good song
and Buddy’s arrangement was good, I gave in.”
The benefits of
Granz’s management, which, like Fitzgerald’s singing, found distinctive ways of
melding jazz and pop, can be seen in an infatuated review in the Hollywood
Reporter of her October 1956 Mocambo appearance. “The contagion grew to
such proportions that they wouldn’t let the gal go after 13 songs and 50
minutes. It was a beg-off. … Miss Fitzgerald, spurred on by such idolatrous
acclaim (heralded, of course by her smash LP album of Cole Porter songs), has
never been in finer form,” the reviewer noted.
“Ella was easy,”
Granz said late in life. “All Ella needed was a good manager, which I was for
her compared to what she’d had—and the record company, that was total. Decca
did good things for her and Milt Gabler was a good producer, but she was one of
many artists at Decca. When I formed Verve, she became the artist and
she had the advantage not only of someone to manage her, but also presenting
her concerts. I was unique among managers, in that I owned the record company
and I was also an impresario.” But Fitzgerald told her old friend Leonard
Feather that she and Granz had had many confrontations over the years and that she
had never been just putty in his hands. Rather, the two of them combined
formidable qualities in making their partnership successful. “Granz has an
irascible side; Ella says she has learned to live with it,” Feather said. As
Fitzgerald explained, “The idea was, get him to do the talking for me and I’d
do the singing. I needed that. Sometimes we’d argue and wouldn’t speak for
weeks on end, and he’d give me messages through a third party, but now I accept
him as he is, or I may just speak my mind. We’re all like a big family now.”
The exact nature
of Fitzgerald and Granz’s relationship has long been a subject of fascination,
with some believing that Granz exercised a disproportionate and domineering
influence over the singer’s affairs. Others who knew her better paint a more
complex picture of someone for whom work—and lots of it—was her life. Granz’s
focus on Fitzgerald’s career demonstrated the attention to detail he had so
fully mastered over the years. Pianist Paul Smith said Granz selected about 99 percent
of the music Fitzgerald sang and recorded in the ensuing decades. He also
handled the messy duty of hiring and firing musicians, always acting in concert
with Fitzgerald’s wishes. “At the very beginning, I turned Ella’s career around
by merely dictating different approaches—work at the Fairmont Hotel, not the
331 Club. But that was an economic decision,” Granz said. “When I first broke
the Fairmont San Francisco
Given her
insecurities despite her renown, she needed some coaxing to come out of her shell
to help Granz promote her career. For example, Virginia Wicks, both a personal
friend and her publicist during this period, said Fitzgerald feared interviews
partly because of her general shyness around other people. “She knew there were
many intelligent people coming to interview her,” Wicks said. “She didn’t think
she had the vocabulary or knowledge to deal with them. You almost had to trick
her into an interview. It was very important to Norman
Some have charged
Granz with overworking Fitzgerald in the giddy years when she began to roam the
upper echelons of the entertainment world. But those who knew Fitzgerald better
describe someone for whom singing was her life. Her pianist Paul Smith first
toured with Fitzgerald in 1960, spending six months in South America and Europe ; in 1962, he was on the road with the
singer for 46 weeks. “She was fun. How could you not have fun playing with
her?” he said. “As far as the amount of work, Norman Norman
Smith acknowledged
that sometimes Fitzgerald got extra nervous when she knew Granz was coming in
to hear a show and that sometimes Granz imposed his views on her repertoire in
ways she didn’t like. For instance, Granz “disliked anything Stephen Sondheim
ever wrote” and made sure Fitzgerald didn’t perform it. “Benny Carter wrote a
beautiful arrangement of ‘Send in the Clowns,’” Smith remembered. “Norman
Granz was also
irritated, according to Smith, by the idea of Fitzgerald recording with her
Verve label-mate Mel Tormé, who was Fitzgerald’s friend and was, like her, a
master of scat singing as well as a gifted songwriter, arranger and all-around
musician. The mentions of Granz in Tormé’s later memoirs are not entirely
complimentary. After a concert tour with Fitzgerald to Australia Norman
“None of that
bothered me,” he said. “I had a job to do and I did it.”
Granz explained
his relationship to Fitzgerald and how he saw his role in a 1987 interview with
the record producer and broadcaster Elliot Meadow. “If I’m standing next to
Ella Fitzgerald and people want her autograph, and someone in the line says, ‘I
don’t know who that tall old man is standing next to Ella, but I think I’ll get
his autograph, too. Who knows who he is?’ That’s all right,” Granz said. “My
ego’s just as large as any performer’s, because I know my function. … Don’t
worry. I know what my contribution was just as much as I know Ella’s
contribution.”
Granz’s interest
in seeing that Fitzgerald’s artistry and dignity were protected did cross over
into her personal life. When Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles Hepburn Avenue West Side . But as Granz later recalled, “Finally,
when she really made big money, I suggested she move to Beverly Hills
“There was a kind
of naiveté about her,” Paul Smith said. “She was like a little girl. If she was
unhappy she’d pout like an 8-year-old, which, in a way, she was. I always
thought of her as a lady who never quite grew up. She always had that little
girl quality about her. Her feelings could be hurt very easily. Ella was a very
tender lady. She loved kids. She was kind of like a kid herself, inside. She
never had a romantic life. Ella was a lonely lady and every once in a while one
of those guys would come by and they’d have a live-in relationship for a short
while. … Ella’s naiveté permeated her relations with men.”
One of her
romances that ended up causing friction with Granz involved a Norwegian man
whom she had met while touring Scandinavia with JATP. In July 1957, Reuters reported that she had married Thor
Einar Larsen and was staying for the time being in a suburb of Oslo Copenhagen United States Europe , which she didn’t very often do, and said,
‘I’m in love.’ I think there came a point where Norman Norman Norman Sweden United States
Phoebe Jacobs met
Fitzgerald during the singer’s Decca period in the early 1950s and got to know
her better over the next three decades at her uncle Ralph Watkins’ Basin Street East New York Norman
Jacobs, now
president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, continued, “I don’t
know whether Norman and Ella were a good pairing. It was truly a professional
relationship. They didn’t socialize. Norman
Fitzgerald said as
much in a brief undated telegram that caught up with Granz in Paris
