Courtesy of Joel Dorn







Label M

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH JOEL DORN

March 12, 2001


This is what's become of my life. Every night, I go to bed praying I become Joel Dorn and every morning, I wake up to find, disappointedly, that I am not. Damn, Xmas wishes never come true. But my one candle wish is that someday I will be able to lead a life worth words, one that has brought documentations to voices such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Stitt, and Leon Parker. I could be so lucky. To our readers, I give you an encore conversation with just that man, who has done the things, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: What happened at 32 Jazz?

JOEL DORN: I was partners with a lawyer, a Wall Street firm, and a bank and they borrowed a ton of money to go into the internet business against my wishes and I'm not interested in being in the internet business, so I just left the day it happened and now, the company is in foreclosure. The lender foreclosed and listen, Fred, I walked away from Atlantic Records, a marriage, fourteen chicks, you know what I mean? It's not hard for me to walk away from shit if it's not right.


FJ: But Joel, you spent a shitload of time and effort in giving 32 a brand name.

JOEL DORN: I spent a shitload of time and effort in a lot of places. When something ain't right, you've just got to, like in the cowboy movies, got to mosey on. You can't stay there. You can't make a river flow upstream when it is flowing downstream. And it wasn't me, Fred. It was me and a bunch of really dedicated people. They're all with me now at Label M. You think it's me because you see my name on the back of the record or the articles are about me or you interview me, but that ain't the way it works. This is a team. We model ourselves after the Boston Celtics. Sometimes I'm "Red" Auerbach. Sometimes I'm Bill Russell, but I got all kinds of people that are point guards, forwards, and I got backup centers. We modeled ourselves after "Red" Auerbach's Celtics. It's a team. We've got Kevin and Steve and Alex and Michael and when he can make it, my son, Adam and that's it. It's a team effort. We busted our asses to make that thing something and when it wasn't right, I told the guys, "Daddy's leaving, but you'll get a call soon," and that was that.


FJ: Take me through the initial development of Label M.

JOEL DORN: Well, I didn't have a label and my work wasn't done. There is lots of things that I wanted to do. I have been stashing live tapes for the last fifteen years and I wanted to do a live tape thing. I also wanted to expand whatever company we were doing beyond just reissues and compilations. I didn't want to make those same compilations anymore. How many times can you do Jazz for This and Jazz for That? So we have a whole new run of compilations coming. We have reissues, but they're slightly different than before. And the live stuff, the Left Bank stuff, is really and other things, like we have the Left Bank thing, but we have that Buddy Rich record, which is from one of the guys in the band had a stash of tapes he made when he was on the road with Buddy. Ray Bryant had a trash bag full of cassettes guys had given him, soundmen had given him from gigs that he had played all over the world. We're starting an R&B line and a blues line soon of live things. We're going to get into classical music. We have an African line coming out. So there is lots of things that I wanted to do and when I saw the curtain going down at 32, I just said, "Adios."


FJ: How did you know 32 would fold?

JOEL DORN: Well, 32 wasn't on the way down. The business decision meant that it would be. Listen, Fred, in the least egocentric way, 32 was an expression of the kind of records that I wanted to put out with the kind of covers and liner notes and pictures that I wanted to surround the music and the kind of marketing that I probably couldn't have done at any other company except one that I owned by myself. And when I saw that the focus of the company had changed, it's no hard feeling. It's just, if you are out in the wilderness and you look one way and there's a beautiful horizon full of butterflies and rainbows and you look the other way and there's bears and wolves coming, which way do you go? You head for the butterflies and rainbows. So I looked over my shoulders and I saw nothing but doom and gloom on the rear horizon and I just said that my work here was done. I'll talk to you later.


FJ: How did you hook up with the Left Bank?

JOEL DORN: In the mid-Eighties, a friend of mine, he told me that he had heard that the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore, which was famous for its Sunday afternoon concerts, had taped all of them. So we checked it out and we found out that they had. So I think it was in the summer of '86, we jumped on a Metroliner, went down to Baltimore, met with the society and had absolutely no luck at all convincing them that we were the guys to put out their live tapes and do the clearances and clean up the sound and market and promote it properly. They were very apprehensive. They knew that they had done these things, basically, without the artist's permission and they were afraid that the artists or their estates or the Marines or somebody would come after them. And then, they were nervous that if they were going to do it at all, doing it with a guy like me, who is basically a wildcat or a small time operator. They were waiting for Sony to come in or MCA or a giant company. And I told them that a big company is not going to do this. They're too big to do a project that small. It takes too much time. They would much rather make one David Sanborn record or one Joshua Redman record. It takes a week to make it, top to bottom, put it out and you're in business. Here, you've got to go through tapes, call four hundred lawyers, three thousand widows, two hundred artists that are thirty years older. The whole thing was too much. They weren't ready. And then right after I left 32, there was a notice on the internet that I think Kevin picked up that the Left Bank Jazz Society was entertaining offers. I had been in touch with them off and on really to no avail. But the Left Bank Jazz Society was looking to see if there was somebody interested in possibly purchasing their collection and releasing it. So I just went back down again and this time, especially with the success of the things that I had done on Rhino and at 32, this time it worked.


FJ: Did you buy the tapes out and outright?

JOEL DORN: Well, it's an interesting deal. We bought an exclusive right to mine the collection for five years. So we paid them in advance against royalties for that five year window and then we have the right to perpetuity to whatever it is we clear and release. After five years, if they want, they can do whatever they want with the remaining tapes. So it's a good deal for them and it's a good deal for us.


FJ: So what have you released thus far?

JOEL DORN: We have Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Cedar Walton, Al and Zoot, Jimmy Heath and Freddie Hubbard, and we've got a Freddie Hubbard coming.


FJ: That's just the tip of the iceberg.

JOEL DORN: Oh, yeah, I've got to go back into the studio. Listen, Fred, those, first of all, when you listen to a collection of tapes that are not professionally recorded, if, if ten percent of those are releasable, it is a miracle. If I get fifteen or twenty albums out of the three hundred and fifty tapes, I'll consider this a major success. And the other thing is, these tapes are so fragile and so delicate, I can't listen to them at home. I have to listen to them in a studio with very, very particular equipment. I've listened to about a hundred of them so far.


FJ: You still have the bulk of them to go through.

JOEL DORN: Well, yeah, but certain of them, I am never going to listen to like local acts from Baltimore that they recorded in the beginning, people you know you can't clear.


FJ: Who are you confident you can clear?

JOEL DORN: I want to get back in and listen to Blue Mitchell and Lee Morgan and there's some Roy Brooks stuff, quite a few. I can't think right now. I will tell you, Fred, that there were phenomenal performances by both Yusef Lateef and Horace Silver, but I couldn't do anything with the sound and that was really disappointing because, well, Yusef's a guy that I have practically a forty year relationship with. I made a lot of records with him when I was at Atlantic and we're still friends and Horace is an old friend. But sometimes you can save the tapes and sometimes you can't.


FJ: Revitalizing the Atlantic catalog has been mutually profitable for both of you. The titles you reissued through 32 were solid recordings, what is your reissue plans for Label M?

JOEL DORN: Well, it depends. For instance, I didn't have any access to any stuff by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Now, I do. I didn't have any access to stuff by Mingus. Now, I do. There were certain albums that they weren't going to let go, like I just licensed Uptown Conversations by Ron Carter and the Illinois Jacquet big band album (Jacquet's Got It!). There's some R&B things that I wanted to get into. There was a group I recorded years ago called Black Heat. I loved their music. There is also, we just licensed the Donny Hathaway Live album and I had worked with he and Roberta Flack on the Roberta Flack/Donny Hathaway record (Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway). So there are other things. I've got two more MJQ things coming. I now have access to Rhino's material on a much better compilation basis. I've done some compilations for Rhino. In return, they have allowed me broader access to the material in general. So it is not so much, I might have misstated that it is not so much that it's different. Also, when I was a 32, one of my concerns was to get all of my guys back in retail, so we took care of Rahsaan. We took care of Yusef. We took care of "Fathead." We took care of Hank. We took care of Mose. We took care of Les. We took care of Eddie.


FJ: Outside of Hank Crawford, who has had a long term contract with the Fantasy labels, Rahsaan, Yusef, Les McCann and Eddie Harris had maybe one record between them.

JOEL DORN: I had a personal attachment to those guys. A lot of those records I produced, but it is not because I produced them. The fact that I produced the record is not the gage I use for whether I want to reissue it. It is the quality judged very objectively even though I'm involved personally. It is the quality of the record and also, Fred, Atlantic was the last label to get active in the CD world of the major labels and so when I did that whole thing at Rhino, I don't know if you know, but when I was at Rhino in the late Eighties and early Nineties, we put out fourteen box sets, forty or fifty reissues, and lots of compilations and we finally got Atlantic up to speed with the CD world, five years after the fact.


FJ: The Modern Jazz Quartet album that you have just reissued on Label M is the long deleted European Concert, considered a classic amongst MJQ fans.

JOEL DORN: That might be one of the two or three best records the Modern Jazz Quartet ever made. So we got that out. That's important. That Mingus Oh Yeah has been an import. Listen, Fred. I grew up at Atlantic. I was Nesuhi's protégé. I know what he thought, how he did it. That's the way I learned how to do it. So that shit should be out there the right way, not just licensed helter-skelter to anybody who will give you a couple of bucks up front. I was talking to John Lewis a couple of weeks ago and I was telling him that I said, "I got the rights to some of the things," and he said, "Great." And his line was great. He said, "I wonder if people know how much love and care and hard work went into making those records." I said, "I'm sure some people do, but new people don't. But they will when I'm done with it." So I want certain stuff out there. In my mind, I'm still at Atlantic spiritually, but the Atlantic that I'm at died thirty years ago, Nesuhi's Atlantic and I want to keep that shit alive.


FJ: I hear that about you from artists, your profound love and respect for the music.

JOEL DORN: I love the music. I love it. And I love what I love. Listen, there are other cats that take care of other musicians that take care of other labels like Cuscuna does for Blue Note. That's his passion. My passion is Atlantic. But listen, there is a lot of shit that I would like to get my hands on that I can't.


FJ: Such as?

JOEL DORN: I don't even want to mention it because I don't want to show anybody my cards, but there is other stuff that I'm working on. If I can crack some of these other labels. I'll tell you what, Fred, two people have been so nice to me in terms of licensing me stuff, not albums because that's not what they do, but Bruce Lundvall at Blue Note and Ralph Kaffel at Fantasy have been gracious beyond your wildest dreams in allowing me access to the material. I never ask anybody for signature music. I always ask for things that I like, for things that I think are great, but I don't go in and say, "Give me Song For My Father by Horace or something by Trane." I ask for stuff that I like. Things that I remember from my disc jockey days or the things that I like personally that I think other people will like. There's a couple of musical generations that haven't heard a lot of this music from the Sixties and Seventies and little by little, I'm putting as much of it out as I can. But you have to put it out in doses, large enough to make an impact, but small enough so you can properly market them. We actually market our stuff.


FJ: You also just released an album by bagpiper Rufus Harley.

JOEL DORN: Old friend and I got my job at Atlantic because of the success of that first Rufus Harley record. He is the only jazz bagpipe player in the world and he's a sweet guy and an old friend and he waited patiently. I told him, "Give me time until I get into position and I'll put your stuff out," and we put it out and a lot of kids like it. It's an odd, in the best sense of the term, music. It's different, but he swings his ass off on the bagpipes. He deserves to have his music out. It ain't going to sell a million, but he deserves to have his music out.


FJ: Like Rahsaan, people's initially were unimpressed and thought it to be gimmickry.

JOEL DORN: Half of the music I made, people thought was a gimmick. They thought Rahsaan was a gimmick. They thought that I ruined Yusef. They thought that the things we did with Les were gimmicks. They hated it when I put "Fathead" with strings, all that stuff. But yeah, for somebody who can't see outside the white line, is jazz on a bagpipe a gimmick? It could be, but not the way I look at it. Take a listen to what he does with "Feeling Good." He's swinging his ass off and that band is right there with him. They are just chunking along with him.


FJ: Your release schedule for the year 2001?

JOEL DORN: We've got twenty-five things out. By the end of this calendar year, we'll probably be pushing forty or fifty. I need about fifty to seventy-five records before people think we're for real again. We build up some kind of critical mass, but we're getting there and the response and the sales are building exactly the way we want. We ain't looking for million sellers. We'd like to take one if we can get one. We're looking for real, solid, steady, over the long haul kind of sales and acceptance.


FJ: This is coming from a person who has had a million seller with the Jazz For series.

JOEL DORN: Well, the six albums together sold close to a million. In jazz terms, that is like Michael Jackson's Thriller. But let me tell you something, Fred. I pitched that idea to every label that I worked for before I started 32. I kept saying that I wanted to do thematic jazz compilations. I got the same answer from everybody, "Jazz doesn't sell compilations. It is a no man's land in jazz. It is pointless to put marketing dollars into something like that. You can only sell a couple of thousand." So I stopped pitching it after a while and when I got to 32, I said that I could try this compilation stuff. Even more ironic than that is that that wasn't even the series that I thought could sell. We had done a deal with Elle Magazine that we made for the "Elle woman," whoever that is. We made a series called Music for a Rainy Afternoon with the Elle logo on it. It had the same cover, but Music rather than Jazz, which we got six free months of advertising in Elle and we paid for the manufacturing and put the record together. They gave us the 800 number and the full page ads for six months. I don't think we sold a thousand copies of that record. Now, we got back and my partner and the sales manager at that time wanted to put the record out and I didn't want to put it out because first of all, it didn't mean anything in Elle. What's it going to mean in retail? And secondly, I didn't want to call it Music for a Rainy Afternoon because they were afraid of the word jazz at Elle. I'm going to call it Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon. I wanted to lose that Elle logo that was on the original record we made. When they agreed to that, I agreed to put it out. We sent our regular samples out to our promotions people in the field and a woman who is our distributors rep in the Northwest, listened to the record, liked it, gave it to a record store in Portland and asked for a listening post. The store had bought twenty-five copies of the record and sold all twenty-five of them to mostly white women in a mall situation who don't even know anything about jazz in a day and a half. The second that happened, we knew we had a hit because it's not supposed to do that. The cover, the title delivered on the promise. The album delivered on the promise of the title. The cover drew women to the listening post. When they heard it, they liked what they heard and it wasn't cop out or bullshit jazz. It was Ron Carter and Houston Person and Charles Brown and Sonny Stitt and Woody Shaw and Hank Jones.


FJ: It just had really hot women on the covers.

JOEL DORN: Yeah, but those attractive women were not like from Penthouse. They were done by a guy from Elle Magazine and I specifically picked fashion shots, not sexy shots. They're sensual, but they are designed to appeal to women. Men can like it, but if you have a Penthouse or Playboy kind of shot, that is not going to draw women. If you have a great fashion shot, it will draw women and men. We didn't want to turn women off by saying, "Here, look how sexy this is." It's not made to be sexy. It's made to draw you in by beautiful women are a great draw.


FJ: You are a genius.

JOEL DORN: Well, you go into any newsstand and 98% of the magazines out there have beautiful women on them whether it's Playboy or Cosmopolitan. There was a real plan there. And once we saw how it worked, we jumped right on it. If we did anything brilliantly, it was that we followed the initial very well and we chased it by throwing advertising dollars into those listening stations.


FJ: Apart from the hot chicks series, do listening posts on a retail level even make a difference in jazz?

JOEL DORN: Where you have something that works in a listening post. Listen, if you go get, like we have this Mingus album out, Mingus Oh Yeah. It ain't going to work in a listening post. But we have a Paul Desmond album called Let Me Tell You About Desmond, that could work in a listening post. We have some of our new compilations. They possibly could work in a listening post and so we are going to spend the dollars and find out. We're going to put our Rufus Harley record in a listening post. We have to make some kind of judgment somewhere along the way about where you're going to roll the dice and where you're not. Just jamming dollars behind something is not a guarantee that it's going to sell. You have to put the right dollars behind the right records and we think we know what they are. We're not always going to be right, but we will be righter than we are wrong.


FJ: So the year 2001 is pretty much in the can.

JOEL DORN: We've got this year pretty well sauced out. You're always thinking on your feet and you're always adjusting to the defense, but we've got an eighty percent clear picture of where we're headed. We'll make adjustments along the way.


FJ: Your son, Adam, also known to us familiar in the techno world as Mochean Worker, you must be proud.

JOEL DORN: Oh (pause), listen, I am proud because he's a good guy, but I'm happy for him and his success.


FJ: Is he still lending a hand at Label M?

JOEL DORN: Less and less because now he is doing movie scores and TV shows and commercials. His career just skyrocketed in the last six, eight months. I just got off the phone with him. He just came in and he's starting a new film. He's starting a new series of remixes. So I kept him as long as I could, but his career is his career. There is a couple of isolated things. We have an album called Head Jazz that the two of us have been working on for the last six or eight months. There is a reissue of this R&B group that I made records with in the Seventies called Black Heat, that's coming out. He and I did the Al and Zoot together, I think, but we have less and less time to work together. It's a shame on the one hand because the only two people that I will work with. One is Adam and the other is Hal and both of them are too busy to work. Hal is putting together a Mingus bootleg compilation for us, but he is so busy. He just did the Finding Forrester film. Now he's doing another record with Lou Reed. Adam is jammed. I just spoke to him this morning. He just got back in town. So it is precious, the records we make together because we all love each other and we are all having a lot of fun.


FJ: So you're flying solo again.

JOEL DORN: Yeah, I'm pretty much flying solo all the time. Although Adam helps me when he can.


FJ: Have you had your Vitamin B fix today?

JOEL DORN: Oh, are you kidding? Pretty much always, Fred. I just finished making the new Leon Parker record. I actually went into the studio and made two records this year.

Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and went five hole on Hasek. Email him.