Debut Records - Part 2

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“The new phase of independent labels, in which for the first time the musicians themselves took a major role in ownership and management, seems to have gathered momentum at the turn of the decade (of the short lived 1940s companies, only Mezz Mezzrow's King Jazz and bassist Al Hall's Wax labels came into this category). With the major companies' interest in jazz at a new low after the second A.F.M. strike, first Dave Brubeck had helped start the Fantasy label in 1950, then in 1951 Dizzy Gillespie (Dee Gee) and Lennie Tristano (Jazz Records) had created their own outlets, as did Woody Herman (Mars) around the same time that Debut was founded. Also, despite still being contracted to Columbia, Duke Ellington had in 1950 formed the Mercer label to record small-group tracks which would not tempt the major companies, and he it was too who a decade earlier had set the precedent of an independent publishing company (Tempo Music) for his less commercial compositions.”

- Brian Preistley, Mingus: A Critical Biography [1982]

MIND OVER MATTER

Cognizant of the studies going on at Duke University on the subject of the mind, Charles Mingus is making some strides toward expressing these developments through music. He has written two instrumentals, Extrasensory Perception and Precognition and recorded them with a five piece group including Lee Konitz, pianist Phyllis Pinkerton, cellist George Koutzen, drummer Al Levitt and himself on bass. This first record session was primarily an experiment for Charlie, since the cellist, who is with the NBC Symphony, is strictly a classical musician. Since it has always been a contention of Mingus's that music can be written so that it swings, this was an attempt at proving the point. Charles has formed a record company, Debut Records, with Bill Brandt, and they hope to issue these and more and better sides in the future. The company is dedicated, as Mingus says, to the proposition that "jazz can be played just from being read, and also that Charlie Parker was a new beginning in Jazz and not a suspended ending for everyone else to go on copying from."

- Bill Coss, Metronome. [This brief profile of Debut was the first to run in the Jazz press and appeared mere months after the label had been launched in 1952.]

As I commented in Part 1, much of the Jazz research that I undertake focuses on searching out aspects of the music about which I was unaware back-in-the-day when I was first becoming familiar with and playing the music.

A case in point is Debut Records which like so many other small record companies had ceased to operate before I developed an awareness of what a rich source these short-lived “boutique” labels were for important recorded Jazz, especially in terms of the work of underrepresented artists.

So when I came across a 12-CD boxed set entitled Charles Mingus - The Complete Debut Recordings [Debut 12DCD-4402], I knew I best acquire it.

Here’s more from the detailed booklet that accompanies the set to serve as Part 2 of this series on Debut.

As you read Ed’s remarks, it is important to keep in mind the context in which they were formed. Self-produced recordings are quite common today, as are boutique record labels that focus on artist preferences.

This was not the case in 1990 when Ed wrote his narrative and it was certainly even more of a rarity in the 1950s when Debut came into existence.

Also of significance is that the Charles Mingus of the period of Debut Records’ existence - 1952-1958 - was not the MINGUS as he would come to be known in the annals of Jazz history. Ironically, this march to fame would begin after Debut was no more and Charles had entered into recording contracts with Atlantic, Columbia and Impulse! Records from 1958 onward.

Producer’s Notes - Ed Michel

“As you listen, I'd like to ask you to consider three questions that occur to me in looking at the body of music represented by Mingus's Debut recordings. The questions grow out of the fact that Charles Mingus, in addition to his other major roles in the music, was a man who operated a (largely jazz) record company. This was only one of the ways he showed how major players both created and fit into the definition of the music. Through his recordings and performances with his fellow experimenting composer/players, he had a major hand in either changing or modifying that musical definition.

The first question is: what does it mean for a musician to "run" a record company? I'm not thinking of the general issue of workers' control of the means of production. Rather, I'm looking at the old saw "Who pays the piper calls the tune" and asking you to reflect on how that affects "the piper."

Traditionally, when an artist records for a record company, it's the company who decides—  if only by its selection of artists — what kind of material is recorded. Even under the most enlightened direction, record companies want to make records people will buy. Jazz (and any other "single-category") record companies have relatively few illusions about a mass popular audience, but no company sets out to make records no one will buy; nor do jazz musicians try to record music that will be ignored. Creators are always interested in an audience; ones who work the edges of possibility know they are unlikely to reach a huge "pop" audience with new experimental works, but they do anticipate that some audience exists which will respond positively, hopefully enthusiastically. And no artist can avoid the expectation, or hope, that as time passes the audience will grow in sophistication, so that more and more people will be drawn to his work.

The history of most recorded jazz indicates that when a recording is first released, it often sells an alarmingly small number of copies. If the artist is right about the relevance of his art to the audience of the future, and if the record company perseveres in its dedication to the artist and his work, the volume of sales can expand into the future as a cone from its tip. Certainly there are more interested consumers for Mr. Mingus's recordings today than there were when the first Debut records appeared in music stores. But for most artists, especially the edge-dancers, there comes a time when the record company will begin to exert pressure as to the kind of recordings they would prefer. An artist-operated record company means the piper is reaching into his own pocket, so that he may control who calls the tune, without the pressure to think "commercially."

What interests me is that Debut was just that sort of record company — owned by musicians. Piper gets to call his own damn tunes. Now Debut makes a colossal case study of what goes on with lots of independent record companies in terms of problems and procedures, but we'll let that be somebody else's sitcom. I'd like those listener/ readers still with me to think about any musicians they might know in their own neighborhood who have gone to the trouble to make their own recordings and the problems and procedures they've had to deal with in getting those recordings (1) made, (2) released, (3) sold, and, certainly (4) paid for — and then consider the problems facing Mr. Mingus and Company. And all this at a time when the record business was undergoing the tremendous change-over from single 78 RPM discs to long-playing records, during the still-relatively-new free flowering of independent distribution, which made it possible for record companies other than the already established "majors" (Columbia, RCA, Decca, and newer but already strong Capitol and Mercury) to actually get records into retail sales outlets.

Let's just consider the part about getting them made. Specialist independent recording studios were pretty rare. Up to this point one either went to a radio station equipped to make "transcription recordings" or found some way to use one of the big companies' studios (hard to do, if you weren't signed to that label's artist roster). And forget about recording engineers — much less producers — who specialized in jazz recording. Time pressure was always on, because studio time costs money (that hasn't changed a bit!), and for Debut studio costs, like everything else, were paid out of the artist's pocket. Check the spoken material that precedes the Paul Bley Trio version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," which is clearly the recording engineer pushing the trio to finish the session within the time they booked, while the pianist runs down changes for the rhythm section before kicking off the tune. Believe me, that's such a typical situation that it really belongs in the middle of a set like this.

Another point to think about in a company run by musicians is that, typically, things are often not quite as, er, businesslike as they might be in a multinational corporate office. And Mingus could generate his own particular kind of chaos, which could account for further irregularities. So my second question is how this particular piper's personality affects the music we wind up hearing. No particular care was taken to ensure careful storage of the master tapes, nor were neatly annotated tape or session logs maintained. (Listeners who have seen the uncomfortably intimate film showing Mr. Mingus being evicted from his New York loft may understand why some master tapes simply don't seem to exist anymore, and why it can't be determined with any particular certainty who played on some dates, or where or when they were recorded. In some cases, we had to go back to really thrashed copies of original 78s to recover material; in others, original tapes exist, but from recording on they were badly cared for — both clumsily edited and stored under poor conditions, which accounts for the somewhat dubious sound quality on some of this material. Where dates or personnel differ from those one finds in the most helpful extant discographies, this information is usually drawn from tape box notations, which in themselves can be misleading (engineers running a session and trying to get the sound right often don't have enough time to know for sure what today's date or the tune's real name are; and the after-the-fact producer can't be sure whether those box notations were actually made on the session.)

Now all by itself "Mingus and Chaos" is a subject worthy of a broad and extensive examination. Suffice it to say that Mr. Mingus had no small reputation as a "difficult" artist, aggressive — not to say violent — personality, demanding leader, vociferous sideman. But considered in terms of the criteria by which we judge composers (I am thinking here of such well-documented composer eccentrics as Gesualdo, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Borodin, and Monk, all of whom managed to keep their balance as composers, and often performers), he does not stand out as a particularly obstreperous example of the genre, and was certainly no more demanding of his players and technicians than his music warrants.

Mingus's temperament notwithstanding, there is no doubt about the way his fellow players valued him. Even at this relatively early stage of his career he is to be found here in the company of giants like Bird, Diz, Bud, Max, Miles, Pettiford, and J.J.; their no-less-influential playing associates, men like Hank Jones, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Kai Winding, Bennie Green, Ernie Royal, Kenny Clarke, Walter Bishop, Eddie Bert; the cream of the emergent players, Willie Dennis, Art Taylor, Paul Bley, Thad and Elvin Jones, Frank Wess, Willie Jones, Joe Maini, Bill Triglia; as well as the men who would remain longtime Mingus associates, Mal Waldron, Jimmy Knepper, Dannie Richmond, Clarence Shaw, and Shafi Hadi. It would be well to keep in mind that at the time these selections were made, Mingus had not yet recorded most of the work that would solidify his reputation as something other than a stupendously gifted bassist. 

Although he was already associated with the idea — and name — Jazz Workshop, his status as a major jazz composer had not yet been established, nor had his position as a key leader. Later Jazz Workshops which would feature names like Dolphy and Booker Little, Bill Evans, Rahsaan (who would still be Roland Kirk while with Mingus), John Handy, and Jackie McLean, to say nothing of George Adams, Don Pullen, and myriad others, still lay in the future, as did the release of his cornerstone recordings for Victor, Atlantic, Candid, Impulse, and Columbia. At the point of the Debut recordings, Mingus was regarded mainly as a fearsomely talented bassist and journeyman composer-leader, often grouped with such fellow experimenters in Jazz Workshop situations as Teo Macero and Teddy Charles.

The third question I'd like you to reflect on has to do with the way changes in technology make it possible for us to take a more comprehensive overview of the careers of seminal players/composers. The appearance of the Compact Disc and the digital audio technology which has made it possible means that record company catalogs must be transferred from analog tape (or disc, in the surprisingly many cases of selections which never made it from 78 RPM onto tape or to long-playing disc) to some digital storage medium; it also has led to the manufacture and release of large packaged sets of the works of major artists (this "major" designation is determined on the basis of popular/commercial success at least as often as on aesthetic grounds) signed to the respective labels. We're at a really interesting point in jazz history (which, of course, makes it just like all the rest of the points). As a great deal of important music is made available in complete form (as individual record companies define that word) it becomes possible to listen to major individuals, of whom Mingus is certainly one, with a much broader view of the way they fit into their time than was possible when the music initially became available.

First of all, recordings don't come out in the order in which they're recorded — for a variety of reasons, record companies frequently bypass all or part of record dates, even exceptional record dates, in order to put out more recent sessions, so selections which may prove to be of substantial importance in the development of an artist's career may not appear until years after they are recorded, certainly a confusing state of affairs. Second, important tracks made early on in an artist's recording history are often made for record companies which lack broad national distribution — after all, the artist is still more or less an unknown, and the companies who make it their business to take chances on the unknowns tend not be the majors. This means that it may take a substantial amount of time for these recordings to become known to anyone other than specialist collectors/enthusiasts. Beyond this, there is a distinct benefit in being able to take advantage of the historical perspective the passage of time provides when viewing the full length of a significant player's career. A sense of where the Great Works appear in the course of such a career makes it a far different matter to look at the developmental works which precede what otherwise seem to be spontaneous breakthroughs.

Charles Mingus's recordings for Debut make an exemplary case in point. In this set we have a number of previously unissued tracks, both alternate takes and selections issued here for the first time (pushing that a bit further, there are also completely unissued sessions). Debut, moreover, was sort of the small label's small label — outside of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles (and maybe Detroit and Philly), hardly anybody had access to Debut "product" (a loathsome term record business functionaries employ the way people in the garment industry use "goods"), and to keep up you'd have had to be a fairly alert patron of a specialist jazz shop to know when a new Debut release would come in and be no slouch at picking same up at once — with little independent labels, it could be a frighteningly long time before follow-up shipments would appear. And even when the Debut catalog found a home in the Fantasy family, there was only a sporadic program of reissues available, with much of the catalog remaining invisible.

Still, Mr. Mingus, a piper who appears to have had a clear connection with the audience of the future, managed to call tunes that would speak clearly to us, at the moment some 35 years post-recording. As if jazz listeners needed any more reminders about how long the music continues to resonate.”

—Ed Michel