Pacific Jazz Records

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Pacific Jazz Records is an American music label that was initially known for jazz recordings and was active under this name or as World Pacific Records in the 1950s and 1960s .

History of the record label

The record label Pacific Jazz was founded in 1952 by Richard Bock (* 1927, † 1988) and the drummer Roy Harte in Los Angeles . It became known for its releases of recordings of cool jazz and especially West Coast jazz . According to Arrigo Polillo , Richard Bock is said to have been so enthusiastic about the performance of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in the summer of 1952 at the jazz club " The Haig " in Los Angeles that he decided to release the band's recordings. This is said to have been the starting signal for founding the label.

The most famous musicians who recorded for Pacific Jazz were Chet Baker , Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond and Gerald Wilson . Recordings by Clifford Brown , Lee Konitz , Buddy Rich , Jimmy Witherspoon , Chico Hamilton , Bud Shank and Les McCann have also appeared here . Under the Pacifica sub-label, founded in 1954, pop and spoken records were released alongside jazz.

In 1957 the label was renamed World Pacific Records and the musical spectrum of the label was expanded to include both rhythm and blues and world music (especially recordings with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha ). The name "Pacific Jazz New Series" was then used for a sub-label; one of the first recordings that appeared there was Gil Evans ' album New Bottle, Old Wine in 1958 , one of the last Jean-Luc Ponty's King Kong: Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa . From 1957 to 1959 George Avakian was a producer on the label. In 1964 the label was sold to Liberty Records , through which it went to Transamerica in 1968 and from then to United Artists , who released reissues in the 1970s, but otherwise produced nothing new under Pacific Jazz . The catalog later became the property of Capitol and the EMI group. It is now part of the Blue Note catalog.

Many of the album cover photos were taken by William Claxton , who published them in his 1955 photo book Jazz West Coast (Hollywood, Linear Productions). Under the same title (label), Jazz West Coast , a series of samplers was brought out by Pacific Jazz / World Pacific in the 1950s .

Web links

literature

  • Bielefeld catalog jazz 1988 & 2001
  • Arrigo Polillo: Jazz . Munich, Piper, 1987 (3rd edition)