A year or so before being appointed Executive Director of our organization, which was then known as the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, I was working with one of my heroes I’ve been lucky to befriend and learn from - the great pianist Ramsey Lewis - on his autobiography, which was unfortunately never published. For nearly six months, we’d spend around 10 hours a week on the phone together. During the calls, I’d listen to Ramsey tell me about his life and get to ask him anything I wanted to; I’d record our calls, transcribe them, and put everything we spoke about into categories that would later become chapters. For a young, curious pianist who idolized Ramsey, it was a dream!
I’ll never forget one day when we were on the phone and his other line rang. “It’s Redd,” he said. Isaac “Redd” Holt was the bassist in Ramsey’s first trio, the one that recorded the iconic hit of 1965, “The In Crowd.”
“Be right back,” he said, putting the phone that we were on down on his table. He picked up the other phone and I was able to hear Ramsey’s enthusiastic greeting to Holt: “Itzak!”
When we got back on our call, I asked him about that. “Oh,” he said, laughing. “Leonard Chess taught me that.”
In 1928, Leonard Chess (born Lejzor Czyz), his brother Phil (born Fiszel Czyz), and their entire family immigrated to the United States from Poland where they settled in the south side of Chicago; most immigrant groups coming to America at that time identified with the WASPs, but the Jews identified with black culture and often lived in black neighborhoods, which were mostly segregated from the white population. After a series of different jobs, they eventually started what would become the legendary record label, Chess Records, in 1950.
I remember thinking back to this conversation as I prepared for my interviews for this professional role. At the time, I was struggling to come up with my own vision for the organization. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ramsey’s conversation with Holt, as well as a few other conversations I’d had with my incredible African-American Jazz mentors (see this one with Les McCann, for example) - in which “the Jewish thing” seemed to bring us closer.
Growing up as a totally obsessed jazz-fan, I was aware of the important relationship between Jews and African Americans in American Music, and also how many Jews on the business side of the music were responsible for turning me on to so many of the great African-American musicians I now idolized.
For example, the mesmerizing way in which the late, great journalist Nat Hentoff wrote about these musicians made me want to listen to everyone he wrote about! It’s thanks to him that I discovered the music of greats like Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I thought back to my high school days where I’d spend entire afternoons browsing the Jazz section of the sadly now-defunct Tower Records. I constantly saw names like Norman Granz, Ira Gitler, Lester Koenig, Alfred Lion, Orrin Keepnews and George Wein on records I was purchasing.
I especially cherished the records with Granz’s name on them. Mostly live recordings from a concert series he ran that toured the entire country from 1944-1983 called “Jazz At The Philharmonic,” these shows featured musicians like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Lester Young, Nat “King” Cole, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many more - all on the same concert! I recognized how rare it was for these concert recordings to exist and often felt like I was listening to a rare treasure. Granz earned a soft spot in my heart, not only for preserving these incredible moments in American music, but also for bringing Oscar Peterson, arguably my favorite pianist, to the United States from Canada for a debut U.S. appearance at Carnegie Hall during a “Jazz At The Philharmonic” concert where, soon after, his career took off. The recordings were produced by Granz and released on a few of his many record labels, Verve, Mercury, Clef and Pablo Records. He named Pablo for his great friend, Pablo Picasso.
I later learned that Granz, who was born in Los Angeles in 1918 to first-generation Jewish-American parents from Moldova, wouldn’t let this touring group perform at any concert hall that was segregated (he’d often remove the “colored” signs himself and cancel the concert if the venue objected), and he’d often pay out-of-pocket for these musicians to be transported by limousine so that they could feel on-par with white, classical musicians, which they were. He once said, “I insisted that my musicians were to be treated with the same respect as Leonard Bernstein or Heifetz because they were just as good, both as men and musicians.”
Oscar Peterson named his son Norman in honor of Granz and once said, “Black musicians couldn't stay in decent hotels until Norman came along.”
There’s a famous story about Granz accompanying Ella Fitzgerald to a cab one night. The cab driver drew a gun and threatened to shoot Granz “if that n***** gets in the taxi.” Granz calmly got into the cab with Ella, and no shots were fired.
Another time, Granz caught a cop in Houston planting drugs on the toilet in Ella’s dressing room. As soon as Granz confronted him, the cop pulled out his gun and said, “I ought to shoot you.” Ella, Granz and a few others were arrested. Granz sued the Houston Police Department, and eventually the case was dropped.
Perhaps more than anyone, Norman Granz is responsible for elevating jazz to the concert stage. As Celine Peterson, daughter of Oscar, told me, “Norman Granz was, simply put, the most important visionary in jazz music in the 20th century. His vision was more than presenting live music – it was presenting music that brought people of every generation, every race and every religion together. He wanted to give musicians the recognition that they deserve in an environment where both the artists and patrons felt safe in their seats. He dedicated his entire life to music, those who create it, and the idea that we should not be divided because of our skin colour. Norman was an often-unacknowledged champion of the Civil Rights Movement who would not let burning crosses or a gun being shoved in his abdomen stop him from demanding that his audiences would not be segregated. We all owe this man a thank-you and the promise that we will not let discrimination win. It is our responsibility to finish what he started.”
And one night, as I wrestled with what my vision for the festival could be, these stories came to a sort of apex in my mind, and finally it hit me: my Jewish pride as a musician comes not from the fact that I happen to have been born Jewish and love music, but rather from knowing how we’ve worked with others to shape and create music that‘s hard to imagine living without.
Jewish music, I realized, is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, and Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw against the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art.
What’s interesting about the above is that none involves Jewish performers or composers, but all are deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. The stories are powerful, inspiring and Jewish, and it’s the story, I’m convinced, that makes the music Jewish. Jewish music is not only music composed by Jews and performed by Jews, but also music that has been influenced and expanded, in part, by Jews to make it uniquely American. These are stories that we can all identify with and celebrate together - for, after all, while this is a Jewish organization, music is for everyone and Neranenah must embrace and reflect that.
So, I presented my vision, got the job, and was on my way. As I prepared to implement my new vision by highlighting the music and the story of a Jewish-owned record label instead of a Jewish-born musician, one day I called Ramsey to ask him more about his experience on Chess Records. He told me two things:
1. Leonard Chess would often bring him “gifts,” a mink coat for Ramsey’s wife, for example. However, Ramsey knew that whatever he was given wasn’t exactly a gift; the cost of whatever that item was was going to come out of something else.
2. Without Chess, we may never have heard of Ramsey. They gave him an opportunity that no one else at the time was giving him. He felt much gratitude for them and gave them credit for the opportunity that gave him his career.
And herein lies the beginnings of the complications with Chess Records - and much of the Jewish involvement in the dawn of the modern American record business.
Leonard and Phil Chess started their record label for one reason: after a series of odd jobs, they opened a music venue on Chicago’s Southside called the Macomba Lounge. And it was here where they began hearing a new kind of music: delta blues.
At the time, there were only a few major record labels, and they were not giving opportunities to African-American artists (at that time, African-American music was called “race music”; it was actually the Jewish Atlantic Records executive, Jerry Wexler, who eventually changed the term to “Rhythm and Blues”). So each night, the Chess Brothers would go to work and see a packed crowd loving the music of these unsigned African-American artists - and they saw a market for this unrecorded music. As Ben Sidran wrote in There Was A Fire: Jews, Music & The American Dream, “Over and again throughout the twentieth century we find examples of Jewish entrepreneurs hanging out at black bars and record shops to find out what music was being requested, and then going out and manufacturing it.”
When the Chess Brothers started out on this journey, they, like the artists they were recording, were broke. They would literally travel the country and sell records from their car trunk! Echoing what Jerry Wexler wrote, “As a Jew, I didn’t think I identified with the underclass. I was the underclass.”
The Chess Brothers often get a terrible rap these days. True, they did often pay advances instead of royalties, and when they did pay royalties, the rates were well below what many other major labels at the time were paying their artists, and yes - Leonard Chess sometimes credited popular disc jockey Alan Freed as co-writer on songs of Chess-artists (without their permission) that Freed didn’t co-write.
As Ben Sidran wrote, “when the dust cleared, it seemed the Jews usually wound up holding the assets and the blacks were left holding the keys to a lot of Cadillacs. Hy Weiss himself said, “The Negro is responsible for a lotta white folk making a lotta money.”
And when discussing the label these days, this is often where the story ends.
However, Sidran continues: “But of course the white folks had invested all the money, at a time when there were virtually no returns; it was still a business, and if it had been a WASP business, people would still have had a lot of trouble getting paid. So, when Jewish record execs are criticized for not paying royalties to black artists—giving them advances instead—it should be recognized that they normally didn’t pay royalties to anybody, black or white, Jewish or gentile (it was a very democratic system this way).”
Rich Cohen shared interesting insights in his book, “The Record Men:”
To hear Marshall and Leonard and Phil tell it, the artists got quite a lot. For starters, it was only guys like Leonard who would record guys like Muddy and Wolf. And so they are now defamed for being the only white Americans willing to get into that particular game. And yes, Sinatra got a better deal, but a hit by Sinatra meant two million copies, whereas a hit by Little Walter meant thirty thousand copies. Leonard could not pay as well because Leonard’s artists did not sell nearly as many records. In the world of independents, all the margins were small. A single mistake could wreck a company. And since only one out of every six or seven releases made any noise, the hits had to pay for the duds. Sonny Boy Williamson might bitch if Leonard did not pay promptly when a record hit, but he never said a word when Leonard spent twenty grand on a Sonny Boy record that tanked. As for the matter of royalties, yes, money was deducted, which might, to an artist with a hit, make it seem like he wasn’t getting paid, but maybe he should’ve thought of that when he demanded cash to pay a gambling debt or buy a car. “They came in whenever they had a problem,” Phil Chess is quoted as saying in Spinning Blues into Gold. “If one had his wife having a baby in one hospital and his old lady in another, he would come to us to pay for the old lady so the wife wouldn’t find out. That was an advance on royalties. But he would forget.” In 1970, when Muddy, who never thought to buy insurance, wrecked his Cadillac and spent over two months in the hospital, Leonard paid the bill. When Muddy got loaded on whiskey in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was arrested for driving drunk, Leonard paid the ticket. If such payoffs had been considered gifts, Chess would have gone out of business in the early fifties.
What about Leonard sometimes crediting Alan Freed as the co-writer on a song he didn’t write? Obviously, the actual writer might take offense, but to Leonard it was smart business: give the most popular disc-jockey in the country a monetary interest in a record, he’ll play it more often, and everyone will make more money, including the artist.
Despite the explanation of people like Sidran and Cohen, it’s important to point out - and to complicate things even further - that Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters sued Chess for non-payment of royalties - and won.
I remember once telling this story to a group of mostly African-Americans. One older man could sense how uncomfortable - almost apologetic - I was speaking about the questionable business decisions of these Jewish record executives and interrupted me to make me feel more comfortable. “Listen,” he told me. “We all understand that it was a business.”
Or, as Ben Sidran once shared with me, “We never used to know if the check was going to come at all. Now the twelve-cent check comes on a regular basis!”
This is an incredibly complicated story that only gets more confusing and layered with each passing year as times continue to change. I’m not here to defend the Chess Brothers, but rather to provide as much context and background as possible into this important story of the shaping of modern music. We can argue about the business decisions of these executives all day long, but hopefully we can all agree that these labels have preserved and documented so much music that changed our world and would be incredibly hard to imagine music as we know it without.
Join us on Saturday, April 23rd, as we present "ATL Collective Relives The Sounds of Chess Records," at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center at 8PM.
And just a few days later, on Thursday, April 28th, we will be paying tribute to Norman Granz with the iconic jazz trio of Benny Green, John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton at the Woodruff Arts Center's Rich Auditorium at 7:30PM. Tickets are available now.