The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve 1944-1949
Norman Grantz, the founder of Verve Records, understood this in the early 40s, when he brought jazz from smoky clubs first into the Philharmonic and then into other traditional concert halls around the globe. The series initially infuriated critics, who thought the music and its enthusiastic audiences vulgar, but it thrived in the U.S. until 1957 and into the 1960s in Europe. By invading rooms ostensibly meant for more refined behavior–and for white audiences–Grantz and the racially diverse musicians of the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series helped change not only the course of jazz history, popularizing staged jams and concert recordings, but also American history. Now many of these remarkable performances have been documented on a ten-CD set, The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve 1944-1949.
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Whether the critics who hated “Jazz at the Philharmonic” were bothered by its politics or its music is hard to discern from their published responses. The Los Angeles Times’s music critic simply refused to come to the first show, and a 1946 concert in Chicago seems to have infuriated critic D. Leon Wolff for every reason except the political one. In his review, “Everything Bad in Jazz Found Here,” which is reproduced in the box set’s booklet, he called Jacquet “the lousiest tenor in the country making over $50 a week” and claimed that the concert “showed what happened when all the cheap and banal tricks of trivial, facile musicians are paraded for the lowest class of swing enthusiast.” Turning full force on the audience, he then wrote, “Every hydrocephalic and congenital idiot in Chicago was on hand.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): album covers; Norman Grantz, circa 1947 photo/ Dion Mili-Life Magazine copyright Time, Inc; misc. photo by Bill Milne.
