Ross Russell (jazz), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ross Russell (jazz)

American record producer

Date of Birth: 18-Mar-1909

Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California, United States

Date of Death: 31-Jan-2000

Profession: composer, record producer, author, music critic, journalist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About Ross Russell (jazz)

  • Ross Moody Russell (March 18, 1909 – January 31, 2000) was an American jazz producer and author.
  • He was the founder of Dial Records. Russell wrote pulp fiction in the 1930s.
  • His heroes were Dashiell Hammett and, especially, Raymond Chandler, on whom he wrote an unfinished study.
  • He also worked as a reporter, at one point writing on Luis Russell while on tour.
  • He was in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II.
  • He served in the North Atlantic and was shipwrecked on Novaya Zemlya far above the Arctic Circle.
  • His accounts of this episode appeared in Life magazine and two other periodicals.
  • Later, he had long duty in the South Pacific.
  • After the War he set up his own record store, the Tempo Music Shop, in Hollywood.
  • In 1946 he founded Dial Records in order to record Charlie Parker, who was in Los Angeles at the time.
  • He also recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Earl Coleman.
  • Russell saved all of the alternate takes he did, which made vault releases of his material particularly rich for jazz aficionados.
  • Dial also was the first record company in the US to record the music of Arnold Schoenberg and other modern masters, such as Béla Bartók and John Cage.
  • He shut Dial down in 1949 and spent several years away from jazz music as owner of a golf course and other pursuits. Russell's jazz novel The Sound, a book inspired by Parker's life, came out in 1961.
  • In 1971, he published a nonfiction book, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, and two years later his biography Bird Lives! was published.
  • Bird Lives! was criticized for its factual inaccuracies; some of the details Russell relates were shown to be fictional.
  • Russell also wrote articles for jazz magazines and taught at the University of California and Palomar College.
  • His large collection of records, books, periodicals, manuscripts, correspondence, interviews, and other materials was sold to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981.
  • After retirement he lived variously in the California desert, South Africa, Spain, and Niland, California, on the Salton Sea.
  • He was writing another book on bebop at the time of his death in 2000.
  • He was married five times and left four children.
  • He was buried at the Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.

Read more at Wikipedia

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