Suzanne Cloud, a Jazz Musician and part of the Philadelphia cooperative jazz label, Encounter Records, responds to the Pariah’s diatribe, "Record Company Weasels."

"To lament the consolidation of what The Nation calls 'The National Entertainment State' is really crying after the damage has been done. The 'major' record labels are only one part of the problem. We have the added conditions of lessened airplay due to the commercial takeover of 'smooth jazz' and public radio's (the stations that still carry music instead of the cheaper to produce news and talk format) reliance on market survey material such as the Modal Jazz Research report that screens out music that might be 'offensive' to the suburban audiences listening. Also, the sorry state of the lack of venues which encourage musical experimentation in every jazz community in the country."

"The tunnel vision that exists in the critical community is another factor in that critics focus almost exclusively on New York City and leave the rest of country languishing. Case in Point: When The Nation devoted a whole issue to the music business ["Who Owns the Music?"]. Gene Santoro, instead of writing about the above topics, wrote a snippy little column about the personal animosities between Michael Dorf and George Wein...a great waste of editorial space that only served to puff up Santoro's inflated ego and his 'insider status.'"

"The musicians have to take the music back as smaller indies are doing in communities all around the country. We have to reconfigure the power structure by going grassroots which means that jazz musicians, on the local level, have to get involved in education, production of their own work via cooperatives, and creating jazz venues in alternative scenes (remember the old county fairs? Playing them was good enough for Lester Young back in the day) that usually feature other types of music. Another good thing would be to lobby the FCC, as a collective unit, to make format changes in public radio subject to community control instead of being left up to the "owners" whim. Our public airwaves were supposed to be for alternative voices that aren't available on commercial radio...that mission has been totally lost over the last ten years." "We have a lot of work to do and crying about the hellions in the music industry won't help. They need us more than they think."

Commentary on The Diatribe Record Company Weasels by Ed Michel

This week, the first in a series of extended commentaries on my Diatribe, "Record Company Weasels," by Ed Michel, who has been producing jazz and blues recordings since 1957.

For starters, I think it's a misleading oversimplification to suggest that all (jazz) record company functionaries are frustrated musicians. It's hard to imagine that anyone silly enough to go into the record business--silly, anyway, if they stay in the business once they get a sense of what it's about--would do so unless they really had strong feelings about the music. And, given those feelings, you'd have to assume that at they very least they'd to play. (If you'd dismiss every rocker who has spent some time playing air guitar, you'd be dealing with a pretty empty leftover set.)

Some of the people in the business carried it far enough to become players--hardly ever great ones--before they shifted over to the other side.

I was a working professional musician in 1957 when I started out at Pacific Jazz. But I'd already learned that I wasn't ever going to be able to spend my life playing the kind of music would choose. But I was lucky enough to be able to involve myself with that music, and with players sufficiently deep to call their own tunes. In this context, please consider the frightfully true words of the late DJ Will Thornbury, "If you want to play jazz, you have to be awfully good just to be allowed to play for nothing." Now, in relatively involuntary semi-retirement, I'm once again a busy musician. But I never felt, working as a producer, that I wanted to tell my musical superiors what to do. More about the producer's role down the line.

Most of the guys who started their own companies tended to get into the business because they were already selling records, and felt that there were records that they could sell that weren't being made by existing labels--a couple of good examples here are Milt Gabler (Commodore), Ross Russell (Dial) and Bob Weinstock (New Jazz, Prestige). Then there were straight-ahead fans, who also felt that nobody was making records the way they could, like Alfred Lyon and Frank Wolf (Blue Note), Bob Thiele (Signature), Les Koenig (Contemporary), or Albert Marx (Discovery).

Then there were guys who worked for these people, who figured they could do just as good a job--Nesuhi Ertegun (Ahmet's older brother) began working for Les Koenig at Contemporary/Good Time Jazz (as well as running the Jazz Man record shop) before getting Atlantic together, and Dick Bock worked for Albert Marx (and was doing publicity for The Haig, the LA jazz club where the Gerry Mulligan Quartet got its start) before he began Pacific Jazz. Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews ran Record Changer, a fan's magazine, then decided they'd bootleg major-label productions of 78's that had never been reissued onto early long-playing discs, but before they really got started were hired by RCA to put together its reissue Label X, until they decided to go ahead with Riverside.

All fans. All in it for love, in hopes that they'd make a buck. So far no frustrated musicians. But take a look at that list--all those original labels belong to somebody else. Why? Because, at the independent level, it's tremendously difficult to keep a record company making enough money to support itself. And sooner or later, especially if a small label were to get a hit, it would be in the situation of having to pay for pressings, jackets, shipping, (and, if wise, publicity and promotion), and overhead while waiting--and waiting--and waiting--for the distributors to pay.

Eventually the manufacturing costs get too far ahead of the actual receipts ("receivables" look good on the books, but actual money in hand is needed to pay those bills), and somebody's going to insist on being paid or they'll shut you down.

Or if there's no runaway hit running up the costs, just look at the picture from a regular-operations point of view. You're a little record company, distributing through independents, who always owe you right up to the maximum credit line you'll extend. You're being practical, and spending $15,000 to ship a CD (I'm using extraordinarily positive/hopeful figures throughout; they're based on a certain degree of experience, but should all be taken with a considerable number of grains of salt), having paid the musicians, recording costs, any mastering and production costs, and even shipping. You ship out all 3000 copies you produced. Since you're retailing for $15, your distributors owe you $22,500, and you've made a $7500 profit.

Only problems are: 1)what about your overhead, especially including any salary you should be paying yourself, much less what you're paying anybody else who's working for you; 2)did you ship all 3000 copies for sale, or did you perhaps send out 200 to reviewers and radio stations?--there's $1500 less off the $7500, to say nothing of the cost of sending them out, following up by phone, mail, etc; 3)you already paid your costs, but how are you doing on collections? you need those records out at the distributors, so they'll find their way into the stores, so there's a limit as to how much pressure you can put on your distributors to pay.

It's a tight little room in which you find yourself. Actually getting all those things done for $15,000 isn't all that easy. Still less easy, if you're an independent company without some substantial catalog or a couple of hot items, to actually move 3000 copies of a legit jazz release. Your margins get squeezed further. But look at it from the artist's point of view. S/he's getting (for the sake of convenience, and, again, these are really positive figures) a 10% royalty, based on retail price. Since we stipulated that $15,000 got spent, this obviously includes the artist's advance, which is almost universally charged against royalties, along with almost all of the costs broken down above. Assuming, again for convenience, that all 3000 copies are sold, the artist is due 10% of the retail price (I won't bother with all the deductables that will lower that figure, but anyone who's run into a recording artist's contract knows they are there, plentifully), which is $14 x 3000, or $45,000, 10% of which is $4500. So if the costs are all charged against the artist's royalty account, s/he's $15,000 less earned royalties of $4500, or $10,500 in the red. At $1.50 per disc sold, the artist has another 7000 CD's to sell before any new royalties are going for anything except paying off the expenses accrued so far.

From the artist's point of view, it looks as though s/he's being ripped off by the record company. From the record company's point of view, they're being pushed against the wall by the reality of the cost structure of the business as a whole, and the last thing they need is for the artist, who they've coddled, nurtured, and spent money recording, promoting, publicizing, and, usually, supported to one degree or another, to consider them a bunch of ripoff swine.

And this is about a small recording company, usually one or two people, with close ties to their artists. The situation gets a whole lot worse when you're into a corporate large- company situation. But, for the moment, let's leave it here--there's already enough to think about.

Snit at The Knit - Round 3

Dr. Eugene Chadborune, who plays the guitar, has appeared on more than 100 CDs and albums, many self-produced. He feels that one of his greatest accomplishment is "blending avant garde jazz free improvisation and traditional country and western music."

The author of a potent tool for empowerment, "I Hate the Man Who Runs This Bar, A Survival Guide to the Music Business," published by Mix Books, he is also a veteran of the New York loft jazz scene of the 80s. After reading about the "Snit," he remembered several similar incidents:

"Having spent time on the New York "jazz scene" in the '80s, it is obvious to me that Crouch is a failed free jazz drummer who now spends his time criticizing the music because he was unable to play it. I also watched the fight with Sam Rivers, but remember Sam knocking down Crouch."

"Also, the day before I remember Crouch being knocked down by Sunny Murray who said "You are a Sunny Murray wanna be, but I am the real Sunny Murray and there is only one, me, you will never be me," and then knocked Crouch flat. This occurred inside the old Ladies Fort club."

"This was the same day or close to it, that Crouch had announced a "Stanley Crouch All Stars" concert featuring himself as leader with David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Leo Smith, George Lewis and who knows who else...Leo Smith got wind that Crouch was planning to record and release the concert on disc and got just about everyone to back out of the gig except for the bassist (Fred Hopkins?? He was the bassist at every gig I went to during this period) and David Murray, who was Crouch's buddy at the time. Crouch of course was sheepish having all his big names back out on him and played really wimpy drums."

"But what do I know? It is Crouch, not Sunny Murray, who is on 60 Minutes philosophizing with Molly Whatshername, who is profiled inNew Yorker, who has the keys to Lincoln Center, etc, etc.…hey, it's Amerikka, bad plumbing and all, shit rises to the top.. "

"As for the Knit, it is a typical big city club-- rips off musicians and the audience and will go out of business eventually, only to be replaced by something worse... "

"The main thing is, I don't respect Crouch's current stance on the free jazz of the '60s. And I think the knocking of any particular style within the wonderful world of jazz is a drag, and anti-jazz...to me the tradition of the music is learning and studying all the traditions, and the free music is certainly one of the traditions at this point!"

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