Interview by Shaun Dale

A lot of good things have come out of Joel Dorn's move from 32 Records to his new label, Label M, last year. Most of them are the CDs they've been releasing, but from my selfish perspective, the best thing of all is that the move gave me the perfect pretext to spend time in another Cosmik Conversation with a man whose career in music genuinely deserves the accolade "legendary." He'd probably deny that. That's one of the things I like about him.

There's only a couple things in life as good as listening to the music Joel Dorn has made available over the years. One of them is talking to the man himself, and another is reading what he has to say. So, here's Joel, coming at you...

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Cosmik: The last time we talked it was a different label and a whole set of different things to talk about. When we got the news that you were leaving 32, I wondered what would happen there, but most of all what you'd be doing next, because I knew you were taking some people with you...

Dorn: Well, listen, this year it's 40 years in the music business, and I've had to pack up my tent and roll to new pastures often. The thing at 32 was over. Everybody thought I owned 32, but I had partners. There was a Wall Street firm, there was a bank, and there was an attorney, and I was partners with them. We had a real disagreement about the future of the company. What I had envisioned when I went into business with them was that we would establish a record label, which to the best of my ability I did.

At a certain point, they borrowed a ton of money and went into the Internet business, so I said I'm not interested in the Internet business and they said that's the future of this company, so I said via con dios. I was gone, like that day. I set up a new situation for myself, called up the guys and said "wanna have some fun again?" Everybody said yeah, and that's the story in a nutshell.

I'm a record guy. I'm not a business guy in the traditional sense. Any kind of business that I do is so that I can make records. I don't give a fuck about the Internet. I don't even know how to get on the Internet, so why would I want to be in the Internet business? Anytime I need something from the Internet I ask one of the kids to help me. I legitimately don't have a computer, don't know how to do it. I'm into music. That's what I do.

So that's the 32 story. Recently the lender, the people my partners borrowed money from, forclosed on 32, so they're having real problems. It's sad, man, because we all had our hearts and souls in that company. But at the same time, I've walked away from a lot of things in my life, regrouped and set it up again, and now all of us are having as much fun with Label M as we did with 32.

Cosmik: Well that's good. There was some fine music from 32, and still is. Todd Barkan has done some good things at the label.

Dorn: Right, well, I really lost track of it when I left, because we were here setting up and everything. The most fun I ever have in the music business is the zero to sixty part, setting up and taking off. I like finding new people and making their first album, or albums, you know, going from zero to sixty. That's the fun for me, the same as it was at 32.

At 32 we started with absolutely nothing and built it into a great little independent. Here, we started with a concept, and now it's starting to develop. It usually takes me 18 to 24 months to get up to speed and we're in business now for six months. We started releasing stuff at the end of September. We've got about 25 albums out and so far so good. It's our usual combination of stuff. There will be differences here, obviously. This time, we don't have a Muse catalog to draw upon, so I'm using all the live stuff I've been stashing away for years. We're starting to put a new generation of compilations together, the Heavy Flute and Have You Had Your Vitamin B-3 Today. We have another half dozen compilations coming before the end of the year that I think are different and fresh and fun to listen to. And we're continuing to reissue things that I like, or that me and the guys like.

Cosmik: Well, I had my vitamin B-3 this morning. That's a nice compilation.

Dorn: As long as I've been doing this, the one thing... let me give you an example. I haven't been in the studio much in the last 10-12 years. Every once in a while I go in, but there's not that much I want to record, and I recorded so many things that I really loved in the 60s and 70s and 80s. By the time I was 30, and this sounds like I'm bragging, but I'm not, I'd recorded Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Rhassan Roland, Yusef Lateef, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Fathead [Newman], Hank Crawford, Roberta Flack, Bette Midler... you know what I mean? In order for me to go in, it has to be talent on that level and there's not a lot of talent.

But I found this terrific young girl named Jane Monheit, a singer, so that was fun. I went in, we did an album, we've probably sold 100,000 albums so far, but that's not the important thing. I had fun. I got all the old guys together: Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Fathead, Hank, Bucky Pizzarelli. We did the album, she's a terrific singer, it was great to work with the guys again and it's selling. I've made a record for my label with Leon Parker. I think he's a very talented, original, exciting artist. So we're going to put that on Label M, Jane Moneheit's on Encoded, but both projects were fun. Both artists were talented.

So the fun of starting over again is getting ready to climb the mountain; it's wild. And I've got all these great young guys with me, they've got all the energy and it's like playing for the old Boston Celtics. Sometimes I'm Red Auerbach, but sometimes I'm Bill Russell for a little while. And I enjoy it.

We have artists we never had on 32. We have Paul Desmond and the MJQ, and these new compilations that I've wanted to do for a long time. Like, that organ/tenor thing? That's really some of the cream of the Blue Note and Prestige catalogs. I'm a big fan of organ/tenor music. We put the Heavy Flute compilation together and it's our best selling record. I have Stan Getz on this label. I never had Getz before. I've got Freddy Hubbard, Jimmy Heath. We're really having a good time. I think as you watch us over the next year or so, you'll see us really spread the base of the label. We're making a deal for the archives of Russian radio, so we'll have classical music. We're getting ready to put out a blues and R&B line with the music from Blue Stage. Felix Hernandez, a friend of mine, produced that show for years on NPR. We just had our first releases putting out some of the classic African music of the 50s and 60s, and some new African artists.

Cosmik: That's the Indigedisc imprint?

[Pictured: Indigedisc release - Apala Messenger, by Haruna Ishola and his Apala Group.]

Dorn: Yeah, Indigedisc. So it's going to differ from 32 in a lot of ways. I'm kind of rambling, trying to think of how to describe where we're headed. You know, whenever I have a label, there'll always be jazz. I love jazz. But this time next year you're going to hear a lot of music that you're going to be surprised it's us putting it out, but it's going to be us putting it out.

Cosmik: I'm not sure you can surprise me. Looking at what you've done over time, you've never limited yourself to anything but good stuff, wherever it came from.

Dorn: Well, I've tried to. It's interesting to work with Leon Redbone one week, and then Don McLean the next week, and then Rhassan the next week, and then Asleep At The Wheel the next week. And then maybe the Neville Brothers and Bette Midler and Roberta Flack and Jimmy Scott. It keeps me fresh, certainly, and I'm always amazed at people who just like one kind of music. It's so much bigger than that.

Cosmik: I agree. I grew up in a house where Mom kept hard core country on the kitchen radio until my Dad got home. She'd turn it off so he could play blues and jazz records all night, downstairs my older brother was playing early rock and roll and I came of age just in time for the great folk music scare of the sixties, which was my first stuff.

[Pictured: Joel Dorn "back in the days..."]

Dorn: Sounds like a good house to me. That's wild, man. That's the way to grow up. In our house, my mother liked popular music, Al Jolson and Frank Sinatra and later Tony Bennett and Pattie Page, that kind of stuff. My father liked classical music. I was a rock n' roll degenerate. I got tossed out of tenth grade because I pasted a picture of Little Richard on my notebook, and the teacher went nuts! "Get that animal off that...!" Fuck you, mister, ya know. And then got into jazz, and then blues and country and R&B and pop and made all kinds of records. It's a big buffet if you want to keep going back. They always say jazz producer, and I've produced my share of jazz and I love it, so I don't bristle at all at being called a jazz producer, but I've tried to do as much good music as I can.

Cosmik: You mentioned that this is your 40th year in music, and you're heavily associated with jazz. We just had Ken Burns' Jazz take over PBS for a few weeks, and he totally discounted the last 40 years of jazz...

Dorn: Yeah.

Cosmik: It's not hard for me to judge who was important in the last 40 years. I've certainly got my opinion...

Dorn: But I don't think that show was made for you and me. I think that show was made for the people who don't know about jazz, like his Civil War documentary was made for people who don't know about the Civil War and his baseball documentary was made for people who don't know about baseball. I don't know that much about the Civil War. I'm a sports fan, so I know about baseball, and I know about jazz, obviously. I know a lot of jazz people are beefing about Jazz, about the viewpoint. To me, I really enjoyed the series up to the end of Charlie Parker. After that, I just didn't agree with the viewpoint, but I think the documentary did more good for jazz than probably anything I can remember in recent history on a national basis, or certainly for jazz to have a national forum. It's a viewpoint that reflects the people that Ken Burns brought into it. Certainly in terms of the modern era, that's not my viewpoint, but I have my viewpoint, and you have yours. I hope it brings people to jazz.

Cosmik: Well, the last episode of the series pissed me off, to be frank. I just got angry watching it.

Dorn: Well, I knew about it. I'd spoken to the Burns people earlier, I'd bumped into some of them and I said I sure hoped they'd include something by Rhassan, because he's my special little charge, and they said he wasn't included in it. Then I spoke to different people and they said there's an hour or two hours devoted to the music from 1960 to the present and the viewpoint is that the results of that time have yet to be determined. That's not really the truth, but it's the truth according to some people and, well, there's an awful lot of Wynton Marsalis in there.

Cosmik: Yeah, the viewpoint seemed to be that the results are in and the only thing that mattered is Wynton.

Dorn: So you had Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens for your go-to people, and they're certainly people who can be included in the history of jazz as spokepersons, but certainly not the only ones.

[Pictured: Jackie McLean]

I'll tell you who I enjoyed the most, especially when it related to Bird on out, was Jackie McLean. First of all, he spoke beautifully. Second of all, he was there! Like when Wynton Marsalis would say here's the kind of guy Charlie Parker was, here's the kind of person Duke Ellington was, he never met, well, I know he didn't meet Bird. I don't think he ever hung out with Duke. So it was certainly not a first person experience. Jackie McLean told you about his experiences with Bird. Also, he's a real player. He told you about hanging out with the Prez at the Alvin Hotel. And he was a junkie and he cleaned himself up and he knew about those years and that music from both sides of the net. I wish there had been more Jackie McLean's in there. And they picked people to focus in on. I don't know if I would have focused in on Dexter. I mean, Dexter was a major player and part of it, but I don't know if Dexter was more important than Cannonball or Horace.

Cosmik: There are a limited number of guys from that era still around, and it would have been nice to have seen more of them documented.

Dorn: Once again, when I talk to my jazz friends and they bitch and moan about what Ken Burns did, there are going to be more people who come to jazz as a consequence of it than there ever were. I already know what I think about jazz, so I don't need a documentary, and neither do you, but I hope it brings people. It certainly has spurred a certain type of record sales.

Cosmik: Well, sure. The last episode did piss me off, but if people go in and flip through the jazz racks who never got close to the jazz racks in their lives, and never dreamed they would that's a good thing.

Dorn: It is a good thing, and if that's the net result, then any differences me or you or anyone else I know who really knows about jazz, especially in the modern era may, well, it ain't gonna hurt us. It's gonna help us.

Cosmik: Back to the label, you've mentioned that you're a sports fan, and I know that's where 32 got its name...

Dorn: Right, my favorite sports number. I know the next question coming...

Cosmik: Yeah, well, Label M is named for your three favorite Jews...

Dorn: Right!

Cosmik: Albert Einstein, Lenny Bruce and Meyer Lansky. What happened to Sandy Koufax is what I want to know?

Dorn: Well, we took care of Sandy Koufax with 32. What we tried to do is come up with an anagram with their initials and it didn't work. Then we're sitting there one day and Michael Weiner, who runs the label for me, said wait a minute, the word label and the isolated letter m. Label M. What better name for a record label than Label M? And people ask what does the M stand for? It stands for nothing, we had a left over letter. And people laugh, but when we first went into business it made good press when, so I enjoyed it. I like to come up with names that are interesting, and I think we've done that over the years.

Cosmik: And Meyer Lansky gives it a certain edge there...

Dorn: I think. (chuckles)

Cosmik: Among the first releases I saw were some of the Left Bank things, but you've been trying to get Left Bank forever, since the Night Records days.

Dorn: Exactly. What happened was I heard about them in '86 and a friend of mine, Bernie Drayton, and I went down to Baltimore to talk to them. You know how you hear these jazz rumors? Well, most are just rumors, but we actually contacted the people from the Left Bank. I knew about their Sunday afternoon concerts. When I was a disc jockey in Philly, guys would, say, be playing DC and they'd be coming in to play Philly and they'd always talk about stopping off, say Saturday night they were playing DC and then they would go to do Baltimore and do a Sunday afternoon concert for the Left Bank. And guys always said it was a great crowd, you could play what you wanted, they were sophisticated listeners but they came to have a good time. Then they'd come up an play the Showboat in Philly, maybe go up to New York, go up to Boston. It was on the route.

So I knew about the Left Bank concerts. When I started hearing stories about they had all been taped, I looked into that. That was '86. That summer Bernie and I went down to talk to them, but they were very reluctant. Very reluctant to even really talk to us. They were nervous because, you know, they had recorded the things for their archive and they weren't for commercial release and not all the guys knew about it so they were afraid of people coming after them and they didn't understand all the legalities and rights and stuff like that. So I stayed in touch with them. I wanted to do stuff with them for Night, because I knew that would be a great vehicle for that. But that only lasted four albums. We were with Virgin Records and they were sold and I was told, hey, we're not interested in jazz, talk to you later. Fine, I'll talk to you later and we just split. I didn't have a chance to really follow out that live thought that I had.

At 32 I still couldn't get anything going with them, and when I left 32 I thought whoa, I gotta come up with a new idea quick. And boom. Almost simultaneously, thinking about what I was gonna do next, I heard again, this time someone contacted Kevin (Calabro, from the Label M promotions department) here on the Internet and said I understand Left Bank is looking to do something with their tapes. I went right back down there and we started again. It took awhile, but it was 15 years later and they were much more open to at least listening to proposals now, because they had this aging archive, and a lot of people had approached, but nobody had ever come through with what they said they'd come through with. But the people that they spoke to really didn't know how to go about it. It was like, you've got all these tapes, but do you know how to clear the rights, do you know how to treat the tapes, do you know how to market the stuff? And we know how to do that, me and the guys.

So we struck a deal with them, and we have five albums, six next week with the Freddie Hubbard record, and so far, so good. The reception at press, radio and retail has been good and its getting better, and now that we have six volumes of the Left Bank story out, people are starting to get a sense of the documentary we're making, about those musicians in those years. I think it's pretty good music and I think it's a great document of the music that was being played in the clubs and the people who were listening to it. On the Freddie Hubbard/Jimmy Heath record, you're never going to hear a better jazz record that shows you the relationship between the right audience and the right musicians on the right day. I think it's stunning.

Cosmik: That's an exciting source. I can only imagine what's in your personal tape collection...

Dorn: I've got stuff.

Cosmik: I bet. Another archive you've gotten into is that bag of tapes under Ray Bryant's cupboard...

Dorn: And we're getting ready to make the second one. Here's the thing. A lot of musicians, when they do a concert or play a club for a week, the sound guy comes up and says, hey, I recorded your set on Tuesday, or I just recorded the concert, here's a cassette. So they take it home, maybe listen to it, maybe not. Ray just tossed them in a trash bag and put it in the dining room cabinet. So I had recorded Ray at Atlantic. We made a great album together at Montreux in '72, called Alone At Montreux. It kind of got him off on the whole thing that he really specializes in now, which are the solo piano gigs, and he does them all over the world and he's brilliant at it.

So I called him up one day and said I know you have a lot of albums out in Japan that were never released here. Let me listen to them, I want to put them out. So we're old friends, both from Philly, he brought them by one day and I listened to them. They were good, but they weren't the Ray Bryant that I know. I asked him if he had anything else and he said, well, I've got all these cassettes in a bag that soundmen give me, but there can't be anything there. I said let me decide, give me the tapes, but he was reluctant. So I said if you won't give them to me, listen to them, see if there's anything there. That was on a Thursday. Friday night he called me at home, about midnight, and said you won't believe what's here! I said what've you got? He said I've got about 150 cassettes, but I just found some great stuff. I said let me hear and he said let me listen. I'll bring in the ones I like. He came in with 40 tapes two weeks later. The only reason I put out Somewhere In France is that it's one of the first ones I picked up.

Cosmik: Well, it's one of the true gems of the label so far. I just love that recording.

Dorn: And let me tell you, when I say that was a $1.98 cassette, it was a $1.98 cassette. We barely had to do anything in the studio to do any kind of sound repair. It came pretty complete. And how about the way that audience was recorded.

Cosmik: Exactly. When you talk about the right audience, right artist, right time, wherever that was, whenever that was, it was the right combination.

Dorn: And we've got a Buddy Rich - there was an alto player in his band named Alan Govan and in '77 and '78, when they were on the road, he taped every concert. When I say he taped every concert, he taped every concert on a cassette player. I think he had one mic on the right and one on the left. That was a hard one, the sound was rough on that. But if you want to hear Buddy Rich, and what it is that people who dig Buddy Rich really dig, wait 'til you hear this record. The sound on it is not quite as good as the sound on the Ray Bryant, but we worked on it and got it up to B+. But if you like Buddy Rich, you're in for a hell of a shot here.

Now I'm going to go back in the studio in a couple of weeks, I've been jammed getting these reissues ready, and I've got the new Ray Parker record and new Jane Monheit record, so I've been in the real studio for awhile. But I'm going to go back in and start digging out more Left Bank stuff. Then I've got a guy named John Tivet and he's a blues and R&B freak, and a record producer, and he really knows it. He's working on a bunch of stuff for us now. So we'll have some really good blues and really good R&B. So we're working. I just lose track of time. It's getting to be spring now, and I get outside sometimes and see that time is creeping by, but I measure it in terms of record releases.

Cosmik: Well, those are the pluses and minuses of doing something that you love.

Dorn: I have no sense of time the way humans do. You know, get up, go to work, work five days, go home, play golf on the weekends, go to the movies. I just work. I really enjoy it, and the volume of work is so overwhelming in order to make the release commitments I've committed to. It's not a normal life, but it's fun and it's really rewarding. To sit back and to see that in the last six months we've put together a label that has 25 releases, with Jimmy Scott and Mingus and the MJQ, Joe Williams and Sonny Stitt and Stan Getz, Alan, Zoot and Hank Crawford and Fathead and Les and Eddy and Rhassan and all the guys. It's just a great feeling. My life may be out of balance, my life is out of balance, but it's a great way to be out of balance.

Cosmik: At 32 you had a big investment in a catalog that had to get out. At Label M, without the catalog, you're going wider. Looking at the B-3 album, there's Blue Note and Prestige and RCA, Columbia, A&M. Those labels didn't show up on 32, and there's so much in their catalogs they'll never get around to doing.

Dorn: The major labels, they want their signature material. I'm not going to call up Universal and say can I have John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman? That's their stuff. But I will call up and say can I have Ben Webster's Someone To Watch Over Me? I've been doing this so long that I have my own favorites inside the catalogs of so many people. Guys like Ralph Cappel at Fantasy and Bruce Lombola at Blue Note, they've been so nice to me. They don't have to give us this stuff. But I think they relate to what we're doing. It's an honest effort here. They do it because they're gentlemen. They certainly don't do it because my compilation is going to make their catalog quadruple in sales. They're good guys, and they see what we're doing and they buy into it on a creative level. And it's fun.

Cosmik: And of course, you have good relations with the people at Rhino...

Dorn: Yeah, because of the old Atlantic stuff. I probably produced 125 albums for Atlantic in the ten years I was there.

Cosmik: Well, I have to tell you. My kids went to a high school whose mascot is the Highlanders, and they have a pipe band my oldest son was in. So when the Rufus Harley comp came across my desk, well, as someone who lived with a kid who was learning to play the bagpipes, I wasn't sure about the bagpipes as a jazz vehicle, and Rufus Harley had never come across my radar before. But that album is a trip.

Dorn: Listen to the cut on there, "Feelin' Good." He's playing his ass off on there.

Cosmik: He is. It was interesting reading how he ties his music to Rhassan, who used multiple horns to get a drone, and he uses the pipes for the same effect. I'm surprised someone else isn't out there working on that.

Dorn: I'm always drawn to the different. The unusual, the original, the bizarre, maybe. When I was a kid and heard him in Philly, I was on the radio, and he called me up one night and said "I just made a little record, I'd like to bring it by." It was a single. I put it on and it was wild. Bagpipe Blues was the name of it. So I recorded him, and surprisingly the record did pretty well. In many ways it's the record that got me my job at Atlantic, because it broke wide open in Detroit. I think it sold 5,000 albums in Detroit, and I think that's what showed Neshui that maybe I had an eye for talent or whatever it was. I'd made a few records for them before, and some good ones, Hubert Laws, people like that, but the Rufus Harley one was the one where he called me to New York and said how'd you like to work for us. Well, I wanted to work for Atlantic since I was 14. I'd been writing them since I heard my first Ray Charles record, sending them ideas and begging them for a job. When he said come up here, I said, Oh baby, I'm getting ready to play for the '55 Dodgers. It was great.

I had a ten year run there, and I can't even tell ya'. The label evolved and changed. I was only interested in the Atlantic I knew, not the one that became a multi-national corporation, so I split when that feeling wasn't there anymore, but I'm glad I had my time there.

Cosmik: That happened to a lot of labels. I just finished reading Jac Holzman's book about Elektra, and the same thing happened as it moved from an indie to a major. He left when it wasn't fun anymore, when you couldn't go in and do what you did just because you enjoyed it.

Dorn: I only know how to do it that way. Emotionally, I think I stopped growing in 10th grade, 11th grade. I can't understand what's wrong with having fun, where you make a living from doing something that's having fun. I think the world would be a better place if more people could do that. I left Atlantic in '74. I'd won the Grammy for record of the year two years in a row. But Atlantic was part of Warner Communications by then, and that old feeling where we all just hung around and made music, you know, you could walk down that hallway and see anybody from Aretha to Led Zeppelin. I'd make a record with Bette Midler in the morning and Yusef at night. That changed. Then we moved to Rockefeller Center and I said fuck this, I'm outta here.

There's nothing wrong, I mean, I'm glad Atlantic Records grew into what it did and the owners all became multi-millionaires and it's a giant company today. But it was some kind of thing to come in there each morning and work twenty hours making music you dug. It wasn't just me. All of us that worked there, we were all doing it. You'd have the Allman Brothers there, the Rascals, Aretha. It was wild. It was just some kinda scene. And foolishly, I thought it was going to continue forever. I was just a kid, I didn't know. But one night I was hanging out with George Harrison and Lamont Dozier, just goofing off, and Harrison said, "You worked at Atlantic in the golden days, and you worked at Motown. Did you think it was ever going to end?" And I said, "Did you think the Beatles were?" I figured when I was 70 I'd still be making records with Fathead, that we'd be making his 60th album. I didn't know. It was never like that again.

But 32 and Label M, minus the regular bullshit you run into running a business, I put a team together of guys that I dug, that dug what I do, we all dug each other, we all enjoy coming to work and we just have fun.

Cosmik: And it shows it what ultimately comes out, too.

[Pictured L/R: Kevin Calabro, Joel Dorn, James "Blood" Ulmer & Michael Weiner.]

Dorn: I hope so. I hope it translates. One of the things that I think made 32 successful was, in terms of how it looked, how it read, how it sounded, I wanted it to be like when I was a kid, I mean a kid like 12 or 13, and I'd go to the record store and get a new Little Richard record or Frankie Lymon record, and then later on something by Horace or Cannonball or Mahalia Jackson or Ray Charles. I wanted the records to make people feel the way I used to feel, so I tried to make them be that way. I think we did, sometimes. I hope we did, for sure.

Cosmik: I think you still do. Another one you pulled out from the Atlantic days that's another gem is the Jimmy Scott album.

Dorn: Tell me about that! Listen, I recorded Jimmy in 1969. When I was a disc jockey, he did an album for Ray Charles' label called Falling In Love Is Wonderful. In the six years I was on the air, I never had a response to a record like that. We had a phone in the studio and people could call us up while we were on the air. No record elicited a response like that Jimmy Scott record elicited. I'm talking about records, everything from The Girl From Ipanema to Modern Sounds In Country & Western. That Jimmy Scott made people crazy. I got to Atlantic and had a few hits under my belt. I signed Jimmy. The album for Ray Charles' label had been taken off the market, because Jimmy was still under contract, said Savoy, to Savoy and the courts held it up. I was under the impression, and so were Atlantic's lawyers, that Jimmy was free and clear of Savoy, so I went and made an album with him. Out of the woodwork comes Savoy and boom! The album's taken off the market in like three weeks after it's released.

I went in, and I'd just had a big hit with Roberta Flack so I could have recorded Hitler at that point, if I'd wanted. I went in and did another album with him that never even got out to be taken off the market. 15, 16 years later, I took the best tracks from The Source and the best tracks from the unreleased record and put it out on Rhino. It's called Lost And Found. Fantastic record, not because I produced it, it's a fantastic record because it's Jimmy Scott at the height of his powers. And then, we get these lists from Rhino all the time about what Atlantic's made available for licensing. When I saw The Source, I grabbed it so quick you can't imagine. I called them back at the speed of light and said gimme that Jimmy Scott, jack. And people love it, because Jimmy is popular now, but this is Jimmy at the height of his powers. When you hear Jimmy sing Day By Day, you're hearing Jimmy Scott with his fastball. It's a crime that the only examples of Jimmy Scott in his prime are the one Ray Charles album, which still isn't on the market, I'm trying to get it but they won't license it to me, and the two records I made.

Cosmik: Well, it's a great album, but I'm wondering if you've heard from the estate of Herman Lubinsky yet about the defamation suit... (Dorn's notes for The Source describe the late Savoy Records owner as "...a hemorrhoid of a human being and a close personal friend of the Devil...)

Dorn: Fuck him. Listen man, if I start playing safe, then I'm going to lose whatever edge it is I give to the labels.

Cosmik: Well, when I started reading those notes, I said to myself that's why I like Joel Dorn's records (both laugh).

Dorn: 'Cause I'm a big mouth.

Cosmik: Because there's not going to be any bullshit in the tracks and there's not going to be any bullshit in the notes. It's going to be the best stuff you can do.

Dorn: I think people like that. We're living in a corporately correct time, but I think that most people have that bad kid gene in them, so I try to play to that one. Not always the bad kid gene, but the regular guy kind of gene. I used to hang out in clubs. Clubs weren't filled with critics and acedemicians. Clubs were filled with people. You go in there on Friday or Saturday night, when Cannonball had a hit, and there was a line around the block. People came in to drink and have a good time, and that's the way it worked.

I remember the critics used to put down the organ groups like McDuff or Stanley and Shirley or Jimmy Smith, people like that. You go in there when Groove Holmes or Sonny Stitt and Don Patterson were in town and try not to have a good time. That was party music. One of the things that the Ken Burns thing brought out was that jazz was popular music in its infancy and through the swing era. It was dance music. It was great that you had the solos and stuff like that, but you went to dance to Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman. It was fun music. It got a little more serious later on, but the serious part of jazz is not what brings people to jazz. The magic of jazz is what brings people to jazz, and one of those things is the fact that you still can, from time to time, pat your feet to it.

Cosmik: Of course, Burns showed Albert Murray insisting that if you can't dance to it it's not jazz, which I don't agree with, but certainly some jazz is, or should be, music you can dance to. It's the acid jazz scene, which started in dance clubs, that brought the organ groups back. But back to sources for the new label, I understand you may be working with Sue Mingus again.

Dorn: I was on the phone with her this morning. We're gonna do more.

Cosmik: Great, because the last time we talked you said it was a one off and it wasn't going to happen at 32 anymore.

Dorn: It wasn't, but we're talking again.

Cosmik: Well, that's good, because there's a lot of stuff there, and it would be nice to see those guys get paid for records that are already selling all over the world.

Dorn: Absolutely. Of all the people who watch the legacies of the giants, Sue Mingus is the best. She's like a squad of Navy SEALs coming in at night. She don't let anybody fuck with Mingus' music. I like working with her. She's tough, but she's real.

Cosmik: Well, that's probably the most exciting thing I see in the move to Label M, that expanded reach into new catalogs and all the relationships that you've developed over a career, it's really bringing some exciting music to light.

Dorn: That's all we're trying to do. We're not trying to get into the Sorbonne, we're trying to make music people like. The whole trick here is to give people the best music you can, in the best looking, most fun package, at the best price.

Cosmik: The price point is up a bit from 32, but still a bit below the market.

Dorn: Of course. At 32, because we owned the Muse catalog, I could sell them at $8.98. We didn't make a lot of money on each unit, but the gamble was that we'd come up with something that sold a lot of units and that's how we would win. Out of nowhere, we had that Jazz For... series, probably sold a million albums. I was more surprised than anybody. It's like anything else, you gotta stay with it. If you know what you're doing, and you believe in it, and you're really willing to, to use an old fashioned expression , put your shoulder to the wheel, you're going to land on your feet.

But here it costs us a little more to get in the game. Still, our regular records are live, unreleased records and they're $13.98. Our compilations are $11.98. I can't make it any cheaper than that and stay in business. We're right at the edge.

Cosmik: Well, you totally changed jazz marketing with the Jazz For... series. Not only did you sell a million records, but everybody with a jazz catalog is selling a million copies of a Jazz Is, Jazz Was or Jazz something series.

Dorn: That's great, man. It got a lot of records out by a lot of people who never would have seen the light of day. Here's what happened that I dug. We didn't do it with bullshit jazz or copout jazz. There was real jazz in that. The theory was there is a record by Woody Shaw, or Hank Jones, or Houston Person or Sonny Stitt or whoever, that is real jazz, but if a person who is not into real jazz hears it, they can like it.

There is a lot of accessible jazz in real jazz. You don't have to go to copout, commercial, bullshit junk. So that's the way it worked. And it worked that way. That first record proved that. There's no shuck and jive in that. We've got people like Wallace Roney and Lockjaw and people like that. I heard all kinds of lame lines like, you know, they were cheap. They were cheap because we wanted people to be able to buy them. They weren't cheap, but they were priced so people could experiment. Someone could say I'm not into jazz, but I like that cover. Let me see what that's about. Or we're having a barbecue this weekend, that's Jazz For When Your Friends Are Over, or whatever. And it worked.

[Pictured Sonny Stitt.]

Listen, man, one time, at 32, we sent the Sonny Stitt estate, his wife, Pam, we sent her a check for 18 grand. You know how good that felt? Because I knew he was under appreciated, so we put his records out and we put him on every single one of the Jazz For's. 18 grand. That was great. That blew me away.

Cosmik: Has to be one of the real joys of the business.

Dorn: Absolutely. And please, I'm not trying to pass myself off as a great philanthropist or humanitarian. I'm in business. But I'm in business doing what I want to do, so that's practically the reward, and if I can make a living on top of it, that's a boot, you know. There still are ways to have fun in this Fritz Lange kind of world. There really are. That's amazing to me. It keeps me from growing up, which is real important.

Cosmik: I've got to tell you, my editor brought me in as a jazz guy, and he'd listen to things, but he had a certain temperament, and he'd reach a limit pretty quickly, but he heard the 32 stuff by Eric Kloss and it turned him on. Now I can hardly get any of the outside stuff, because he keeps it.

Dorn: Really? So much of it has to do with exposure. Years ago, the argument used to be how do you get people into jazz? Do you play them Ramsey Lewis or do you play them Monk? And I always said, play them both. Because there are people who came to jazz because of Trane, and there are people who came because of Fathead. It just depends.

Cosmik: And there are people who stay because of both.

Dorn: Exactly. It's a great music, but it's one that people are confused about. I always think of the way people think of jazz and classical music, you know, kind of the same way. They say I don't know, it's too complicated for me or I don't get it or it's too this or too that. It's not music for everybody, but more people would dig it if more people were exposed to it.

I'm not a crusader for jazz. My goal in life is not to bring more people to jazz. I like it. I put jazz records out. There's a certain core group of people who like it, and if they like them, fine, and if it expands the borders that's a bonus. But I'm not out here waving a flag about how do we get more people to come to jazz. Who knows? If I knew, I'd do it.

[At this point, the conversation was briefly interrupted. When we resumed, I took another shot at Ken Burns...]

Dorn: You're hung up on that, but let me tell you something. That's a reflection of one group of guys sitting in a room saying here's how we're going to do it. If I'd have done it, it would have been different. But I've heard people complain about the Ken Burns thing, that there was too much Louis Armstrong in it...

Cosmik: Well, that can't be true.

Dorn: ...and they lionize Louis Armstrong. That's bullshit, because, if you want to talk about baseball, there's only one guy you have to talk about. Babe Ruth. Never was, never will be another Babe Ruth. If you want to talk about jazz, there's only one guy you have to talk about. Louis Armstrong. Do you realize Louis Armstrong had a million selling record ten years after he was dead? For six decades he was Louis Armstrong. Pretty impressive shit, man.

Everybody's going to have an opinion about everything, but there are people out there who didn't know about Louis Armstrong beyond, oh yeah, he's the guy who played the trumpet.

Cosmik: Or people who didn't know he was a jazz player because all they remembered was "Hello Dolly."

Dorn: Yeah, it's nice for people to know that Louis Armstrong changed popular music, which then changed the way the world listens to music. Up to Louis Armstrong, there wasn't an indigenous American music that was popular. There was blues and gospel and country music and all of that stuff, but we didn't have what the European cultures had.

Cosmik: And there isn't anybody who sings any kind of music, or plays any kind or music, who isn't affected by what Louis Armstrong did.

Dorn: Right. So that's fine. It's just that when you got to the other part, it was obvious who was driving the bus, and it wasn't us. At the end of it, we're all going to be better off at the end of that thing than we were before it happened.

Cosmik: A last point. You've said that you can't make a bad record sell. When I look at the pop charts, I'm not sure I always agree with that.

Dorn: They're not bad records, man. It's not our music, this ain't our time. Pop music is a young man's game. I had my run. I had my share of hit records in the late '60s, early '70s. It changes. You can still get one, but it's by mistake now. I couldn't make a Britney Spears record. I don't know how to do it. That doesn't mean they're bad. Anytime you hit 20 million people, whether it's ten year old kids or penguins at the South Pole, anytime you strike a chord and people respond to it, there's something there. It just might not be your something. My grandfather went nuts when I played Little Richard records in the house. He wanted to listen to Al Jolson.

Cosmik: One of our writers got roped into taking his daughter to see one of the boy bands [The Backstreet Boys], and he wrote it up and said, you know, these guys are pros. They did a hell of a show.

Dorn: You listen to those records, and those records are razor sharp. The songs are catchy. You might not relate to the lyrics, because you're not 15. But they sing in perfect harmony. People think it's hip to put that shit down. It ain't hip to put it down. How can you put it down. They're cute little songs, they do little paint by numbers dance routines, the kids love them, it serves the kids. You don't think those same people that are 15 now are going to be listening to N'Sync when they're 35, but that's where they are now. When you see those little girls stand and cry when the Back Street Boys go into some number, that's what they're doing now, that's what they're thinking about. You think if we have somebody get up and sing Lush Life to twenty thousand 13 year old girls they're gonna like it?

Cosmik: Well, they should! (mutual laughter)

There were a couple more stories, but we're saving them for future features. Meanwhile, start stocking up on those Label M releases, folks. You won't be disappointed.

Thanks to Kevin Calabro at Label M for his yeoman service and incredible patience in helping make this interview happen.

Be sure to visit the Label M website at www.labelm.com to keep up to date on all the news and new releases. Cosmik Debris will tell you a lot, of course, but it's also good to get some info straight from the source, y'know?

And by the way, a special thanks to Joel Dorn for a great conversation.

Interview (C) 2001 - Shaun Dale