A couple of weeks ago I did a post highlighting some of the labels I saw popping up in my resource. The exercise proved useful and provided some valuable insight, so I'll be posting about some more tonight. The two I've looked into are Verve and Arhoolie.
Verve Records was founded by jazz enthusiast Norman Granz in 1955 in order to consolidate his previous recording activities (Clef and Norgan Records) and even more importantly to promote the work of artist Ella Fitzgerald whom he managed through most of her career. His first record released on the label in 1956 was a Fitzgerald and did very well considering Fitzgerald's already large audience. Granz helped to change the image of jazz, and Granz made an astute observation when he noticed that box office and record sales seem to go hand in hand. With high profitability and many successful artists, Granz sold the label off to MGM for $2.5 million in 1960. This seems to have been less a move of desperation, and more of a chance to make some serious profit from a successful business, much in the fashion of today's acquisitions (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/27/verve-records-jazz-norman-granz). the label has changed hands more times since then, and is currently in the hands of David Foster. I found a complete listing for all over Verve's vinyl records which could help to further document what content has been digitized and what hasn't, as an expansion on what's to be found in the Folkways collection (http://www.jazzdisco.org/verve-records/). It appears to be a catalog full of useful label information.
Arhoolie Records is a small record company that was formed by Chris Strachwitz in 1960. The first album released under the label was Mance Lipscomb, a Texas folk singer (and one of the new additions to the National Recording Registry, which I posted about last week), and the label was founded as a musical niche for "down home blues," like Lipscomb. In that sense, unlike some of the other labels I've looked at, namely Columbia and Verve, who cater much more so to big name acts, Arhoolie was more of a Folkways style label looking to work with smaller scale artists. Unlike all the other labels I have researched thus far, Arhoolie has never changed hands and is still run by the same man who founded it. It actually recently celebrated its 50th anniversary (http://www.npr.org/2013/03/16/174452880/arhoolie-records-50-years-of-digging-for-down-home-music). The label has maintained its goal of producing American root's music, and as such seems interested in the concept of cultural preservation through music. Strachwitz has continued to produce music because it is what he loves, and his story sounds in some ways similar to that of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways.
Could you please modify the last sentence of your first paragraph? Either there are two labels, or you should mention the third there. Later you mention Columbia. If that's the third then it should also be in the first paragraph.
ReplyDeleteA different thought occurred to me in reading your last paragraph about Arhoolie Records. That is in comparing some of this music, jazz particularly but possibly some folk, to art as in painting. The market sustains many artists and though there are museums too, many great works never make it to museums. There then, "might" be a question of whether with paintings high resolution digital images should be made of them, both for preservation (I don't know anything about the chemistry here, but I believe over time the colors change in a manner similar to how iron rusts) and possibly for distribution to a wider audience. But the paintings are durable in the way that vinyl records are not, and it is unclear to me whether the artists themselves would benefit from the making of the digital copies or not.
If the painting were auctioned at Christies and would go for several million dollars that way, then perhaps copies would have a detrimental effect on value. If the painting would go for only a few thousand dollars at most, then a market for copies might enhance overall value.
The thought about painting suggests the question is not just about preservation but also about access of the public, given preservation.