Timme Rosenkrantz

Ella Fitzgerald , Dizzy Gillespie , Ray Brown , Milt Jackson, and Timmie Rosenkrantz (front), Downbeat, New York, NY, circa Sept. 1947.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

Timme Rosenkrantz (also Timmie Rosenkrantz , * 6. July 1911 in Copenhagen ; † 11. August 1969 in New York ) was a Danish jazz - producer , writer and radio host , and The Jazz Baron called.

Life

Timme Rosenkrantz came from an old Danish noble family whose ancestry goes back to the 15th century; his father Palle Rosenkrantz (1867–1941) was a crime writer and wrote a book about the Hamlet characters Rosenkranz and Güldenstern. As a teenager, the young Rosenkrantz collected jazz shellac records , studied journalism and in 1933 founded the short-lived jazz magazine Jazzrevy .

He first came to the United States in 1934, where he became the first European journalist to write about the Harlem jazz scene . He later also contributed to the Down Beat , Metronome , Esquire and the British Melody Maker . From then on he lived alternately in Denmark and in New York; while in town befriended jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong , Count Basie , Duke Ellington , Coleman Hawkins , Billie Holiday , Art Tatum and Fats Waller .

He was also an early patron of African American jazz musicians and promoted many concerts and recording sessions; in 1938 he produced a session for Victor Records , in which two 78s emerged, on which Rex Stewart , Don Byas , Russell Procope , Tyree Glenn , Jo Jones and others played as Timmie Rosenkrantz and His Barrelhouse Barons ; It was considered to be Timme Rosenkrantz's merit that he organized the first recordings, on which Byas and Glenn participated and thus promoted their further careers. Metronome and Down Beat praised the recordings made during the Rosenkrantz session as the best of the year.

Rosenkrantz lived with the colored singer and jazz journalist Inez Cavanaugh, whom he met in 1937; Timme Rosenkrantz had published a composition by the Danish pianist Leo Mathisen, "Song of Souvenirs" , which was dedicated to Coleman Hawkins , in the Danish magazine Jazzrevy, which he edited . In New York he brought the composition to WC Handy ; the piece was revised and provided with new lyrics by Maceo Pinkard , but nobody wanted to bring the song out. Rosenkrantz and Inez Cavanaugh rewrote the original melody and also created new lyrics; was it then the song "Is This To Be My souvenir?" , published 1938th Rosenkrantz had further ambitions to publish songs, but it stayed with this one song.

During the Second World War he stayed in the USA and opened a music shop based on his own record collection, in the back room of which he also rehearsed with John Kirby , Stuff Smith and Bill Coleman . The recordings he produced in 1944/45 appeared on his labels Baronet, New York and Embassy . In November 1944, Erroll Garner made private recordings that were later released by Blue Note Records ; these were the first recordings of the pianist, which were recorded while in Rosenkrantz Apartment, u. a. also two vocal numbers in which Garner Inez Cavanaugh accompanied ( "I'm in the Mood for Love" ). He also recorded other musicians such as Stuff Smith and Robert Crum in his living room; for other musicians like Willie The Lion Smith it is doubtful whether they have been informed of the recordings and their release.

During the war he also worked in the Commodore Music Shop , as a loanable dancer in a dance club and, for a short time, as a presenter of the radio show Music is our Business on the broadcaster WNEW; it was there that Rosenkrantz conducted the first interview with the Swedish clarinetist Stan Hasselgård . In June 1945 Rosenkrantz organized a concert in New York's Town Hall , in which musicians such as Gene Krupa , Red Norvo , Teddy Wilson , Billy Taylor , Flip Phillips , Don Byas and Slam Stewart as well as the singer Fran Warren took part. Despite the positive response in the specialist journals, the concert was a financial disaster.

In August 1946 he produced a session for the small label Continental Records (“Bouncy”) with Norvo, Jimmy Jones and other musicians from the Duke Ellington Orchestra . In September 1946 he brought an American jazz band around Don Redman (with Peanuts Hucko , Tyree Glenn and Billy Taylor) to post-war Europe; the musicians stranded on the tour because Rosenkrantz could not finance the return trip. In 1947 he organized the first tour of a bebop band through Europe with Chubby Jackson and his All-Stars, which led to Scandinavia, as well as jam sessions in New York at Cafe Bohemia and the Famous Door with Lennie Tristano and Rex Stewart .

In the late 1940s, Rosenkrantz and Inez Cavanaugh settled in Paris, where they ran the Chez Inez jazz club together . In the 1950s and 1960s he continued to work as a writer, collecting jazz photos and occasionally returning to New York. In 1951 he organized a Sidney Bechet concert in Copenhagen, which - like many of his business ventures - had little financial success.

Until the mid-1960s he was in charge of a jazz program on Danish and Swedish radio. In 1968 he opened the short-lived nightclub Timmes Club in Copenhagen with a performance by pianist Mary Lou Williams ; later Teddy Wilson, Ben Webster and Count Basie also played there ; Teddy Wilson recorded the album An Evening at Timme's Club for Sonet Records in late 1968 , with Inez Cavanaugh singing on most of the tracks.

In 1969 Timme Rosenkrantz traveled again to New York to report on the Newport Jazz Festival for Danish national radio and to book artists for his club's fall season; There he fell ill with cirrhosis of the liver - an alcoholic for years . He died at New York's Columbus Hospital aged 58 after collapsing in his hotel room. Eleven days after his death, a funeral service was held at St Peter's Church on New York's Lexington Avenue . a. the jazz pastor John Gensel , Dan Morgenstern and Stanley Dance spoke; Tyree Glenn played Ellington's Mood Indigo and Satin Doll . The ashes of Rosenkrantz were transferred to Copenhagen, where another memorial service took place in November 1969 with Teddy Wilson, Kenny Drew senior , Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen , Charlie Shavers , Ben Webster and Don Byas; The former Fats Waller trumpeter Herman Autrey , Eddie Barefield and Vic Dickenson played .

In addition to two books about the American jazz scene, Rosenkrantz also wrote three novels, short stories and glosses for magazines, among others. a. for Esquire magazine .

estate

His collection of jazz music in the form of 1679 shellac records, 170 EPs, 1055 LPs, 411 acetate recordings, 923 tapes as well as 103 books and over 2000 jazz photos, which focused on the swing era, is in the University Library of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense . There a selection of 300 of these photos was published in the publication Is This to Be My Souvenir (the title is an allusion to Rosenkrantz's recording session for Victor in 1939 with Don Byas and other musicians).

Discographic notes

• Erroll Garner: Free Piano Improvisations recorded by Baron Timme Rosenkrantz (Overture To Dawn) (Danish Official, Blue Note Records, 1944/45)
• The Stuff Smith & Robert Crum Complete 1944 Rosenkranz Apartment Transcription Duets (ed. AB Fable, 2004).
• Gene Krupa : Timme Rosenkrantz '1945 Concert, Vol. 3
• Rare Takes without the Duke (Raretone, 1944–49) contains the 1946 session with "Bouncy" and "Blues at Dawn"

Works

• Too Bad America Has to Be So Far Away 1938
• Swing Photo Album 1939 Scorpion Press & Dobell's Jazz Record Shop, UK, 1964
• Jump Out of the Window and Turn Right 1954
• Dus med jazz: mine jazz memoir Copenhagen, Chr. Erichsens Forlag, 1964; (English version as) Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron's Memoir, 1934-1969 , Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press 2012; ISBN 978-0-8108-8209-6
• Frank Büchmann-Møller (ed.): Is This To Be My Souvenir? Jazz Photos from the Timme Rosenkrantz Collection 1918-1969 . Odense University Press 2000; ISBN 978-87-7838-465-2

Web links

• Web presence
• Biography at Donald Clarke Music Box
• Mike Matloff, The Jazz Baron (PDF; 502 kB)
• Encyclopedia entry
• Timme Rosenkrantz: Adventures in Jazzland - a Danish Baron's Harlem Memoirs (1934-1969) Spanish

Remarks

1. ↑ Timme Rosenkrantz was able to convince Eli Oberstein of Victor to put together his own band for the label, which recorded four tracks as Timme Rosenkrantz and His Barrelhouse Barons in May 1938; participating musicians were Rex Stewart (co), Billy Kyle (p), the future Ellington posunist Tyree Glenn, Walter Page , Jo Jones and Don Byas; other musicians were Russell Procope and Rudy Powell; Inez Cavanaugh sang on Is This To Be My Souvenir? , for which she and Timme Rosenkrantz wrote the text, as well as " When Day Is Done " ; the other two tracks were the instrumental numbers A Wee Bit Of Swing and The Song Is Ended . See biography at Donald Clarke Music Box
2. ↑ * January 29, 1909 in Chicago; + November 2, 1980 in Long Beach, California.
3. ↑ Together they wrote the liner notes for a greatest hits album by Billie Holiday in the 1950s .
4. ↑ Published 1935/36. After Erik Wiedemann in That's Jazz , Rosenkrantz was the first Danish jazz journalist to report on the US scene. The first Danish jazz magazine was hot (1934/35) with publisher Möller Kristensen.
5. ↑ In his estate there was also the piece "Powers of Attorney" , which was intended for publication and which he received from Sam Wooding in 1934 , as well as a composition by Svend Asmussen from 1938, see biography at Donald Clarke Music Box
6. ↑ Allegedly Rosenkrantz had the nickname "the Robber Baron" because of the illegal productions with which he also broke the recording ban . He was also suspected by Mary Lou Williams of having stolen recordings of her two live concerts in 1945 and 1946, where she performed the Zodiac Suite with orchestra. He later published parts of the work on European labels. See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams . Berkeley, pp. 170-175, and Tammy Lynn Kernodle Soul on Soul: the Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams , p. 124
7. ↑ cf. L. Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 171
8. ↑ The jazz collections at the University Library of Southern Denmark ( Memento of the original from September 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.