Legend had power to colour outside black and white lines

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Norman Granz, with Ella Fitzgerald.

Norman Granz cut a wide swath through the jazz world, as a concert promoter, record producer, label owner and musicians' manager.

If you've ever enjoyed Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Joe Pass, Charlie Parker and many others, Granz deserves a great deal of credit for that.

Verve, just one of the labels he started, became a recording powerhouse.

But, as author Tad Hershorn relates in his new biography, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press, $35), Granz fought to ensure the African-American musicians he represented were accorded their civil rights -- such as access to hotels and restaurants when on the road -- when such a stand was not only unusual but dangerous.

Granz insisted on the musicians get the same accommodations as whites in the South and that the concerts, part of his touring Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP), be open to all. If the local hotel or promoter refused, Granz cancelled the shows rather than subject his band members to racism.

Granz wasn't a saint, Hershorn says, and he had detractors within the jazz world. His often prickly personality rubbed many people the wrong way.

But he was a huge jazz fan who turned his love of the music into a lifelong career that took him around the world, let him meet and befriend so many of the greatest jazz players, and made him a wealthy man.

The Granz jazz dynasty was born in the summer of 1944 when he presented his first JATP concert, a labour of love that evolved into a legendary touring jam session that featured an array of great musicians and that built the careers of others. That includes Canada's Oscar Peterson, who Granz met in Montreal and arranged to be in the audience of a New York JATP concert to be called upon as an apparently impromptu guest.

He managed successful musicians like Peterson and Fitzgerald without the need for written contracts. He helped Billie Holiday and Lester Young on the downward side of their careers by giving them performance and recording work. He was responsible for the comprehensive Art Tatum recordings, the series of Songbook recordings that helped define Fitzgerald's career and recorded scores of jazz greats such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins and Pass.

He came under fire for his JATP formula of jam sessions by the stars interspersed with ballads and/or a set by Ella. Detractors said his penchant for blues-based jams did little to advance the art of jazz.

Granz, for his part, knew what he and his audiences liked and he toured JATP through the United States, Canada and to Europe and Japan after its beginnings in Los Angeles.

There is a Winnipeg connection of sorts to the Granz saga. In high school, Granz befriended Aaron Greenstein who, as Archie Green, was a major figure among labour, cultural and social activists and spearheaded legislation to create the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The former Winnipegger's friendship helped stir Granz's intellectualism and interest in radical thinking in high school and the early years at UCLA. They remained friends throughout their lives.

Whether you liked JATP and its all-star cutting contest, or felt it held back the jazz genre, whether you found Granz to be objectionable, you have to accept that he built great labels like Verve, Clef, Norgran and Pablo (named after his friend Picasso) and recorded some definitive music, whatever your jazz politics.

And at a time when African-American performers were cheated and mistreated by unscrupulous white managers and promoters, Granz did the right thing to protect his musical clients/friends, to see they received respectful treatment.

I've listened to a lot of good music thanks to Granz, and his jazz and civil rights ledgers have more entries in the assets columns than not.

Granz didn't really care what his detractors thought. His record (and records) told the story. Hershorn's retelling celebrates his undeniable accomplishments.

chris.smith@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 23, 2012 D4