The New Jazz Musings

 It's so great I found these words from Stanley Crouch in a 1991 reissue of two recordings from 1969. There isn't much information available, and when Stanley really puts what was happening on the West Coast in perspective it's gold dust. "We are fortunate that Thiele saw his way to make these recordings". Amen "In 1969, when the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet and the Horace Tapscott Quintet made these recordings, Los Angeles was no longer considered much of a jazz town. Even though musicians like Lawrence Brown, Lionel Hampton, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Mingus, Art and Addison Farmer, Teddy Edwards, Frank Morgan, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Gary Peacock, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and others were either born and bred there or put together their music in that land of smog and movie stars, the scene these two bands found themselves in the middle of was essentially quite bleak. Long gone were the good times that rolled along the black community...

Bob Thiele was already an industry veteran when he joined Am-Par/Impulse in 1961. He was mainly an A&R man, but had also been a small record label owner and a jazz magazine publisher. Later on in his Impulse career, towards the end of the 1960s he saw major labels like his own ABC Paramount fundamentally change. Due to the growth of performers who wrote their own music and used independent producers, traditional A&R men like Bob Thiele were becoming obsolete.  Oliver Nelson, Bob Thiele, Ron Carter and Thad Jones at an FD Recording Session (Photo: Chuck Stewart) Whilst at Impulse Thiele had created his own production company called Flying Dutchman, producing Impulse records such as 'Karma' by Pharoah Sanders. When a dispute surfaced with label boss Larry Newton during a recording session with Louis Armstrong, Thiele realised he would have to resign before being pushed from Impulse. He subsequently resigned and created Flying Dutchman Records, developing distribution arra...