Norman Granz by Tad Hershorn

Author:Tad Hershorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

13

The Jazz Hurricane

“The chief of our Norman Granz department collapsed in front of the public library just before press time,” Metronome reported in June 1954 in a tongue-in-cheek but accurate allusion to the futility of keeping up with the peripatetic impresario. “Fortunately, however, the guy has a telephone, and a daily call will keep you posted on what part of the world Norman was in as of that hour.” In short succession, the magazine learned Granz was in London “battering” the Musicians Union, flying Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Buddy DeFranco, and Oscar Peterson into New York “from the four corners of the United States” to record with Ray Brown, and pushing forward with his efforts to promote Ella Fitzgerald. “As we said, it’s hard to keep up with the guy. Lots of us have been following him for years and have never been able to see him.”1

Publicist Virginia Wicks remembers all too well the torrent of words that regularly poured forth from the receiver when the “Jazz Hurricane” phoned in from the road with rushed reports and concise instructions. “When he called, it was a roar, and you had to get down every single word,” Wicks recalled affectionately. “He would call from anyplace, overseas, wherever it was, and he had his notes in front of him in a phone booth or a hotel room. He wouldn’t say, ‘Are you busy? Are you talking to someone else? Do you have an appointment you have to go to?’ He never asked a question. He would start just talking. Boy, the people who were in the office with me knew when it was a Norman Granz call. I didn’t have to say a thing because I probably turned white.

“I grabbed a pencil and the nearest piece of paper, and I would start scribbling,” Wicks continued. “He was telling me positive things, like how much money for this and how much money for that, and what date was this, and this man’s name and that man’s name, ‘Don’t even speak to so and so,’ and on and on. He would say all these things in a period of a few sentences, but I had reams of papers and notes to go over and decipher and figure out exactly what he had said, and act on some of it immediately. It would always scare me to death. I said to him once that I didn’t take shorthand, but he just went on. I don’t remember once not knowing the amount of money or how to scale the seats in the theater—rows one to six, rows eight to whatever they were—‘but leave room for,’ and he’d tell me how many seats to reserve for some of the people that he had dealt with. But all of this was positive stuff. ‘All right, goodbye.’ Then he’d be off. When I look back, I don’t know how I did it.”2

According to Bobby Bregman, who did postproduction work for Verve and was the younger brother of the arranger Buddy

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.