Ross Russell, 90: jazz critic, producer, biographer
saintkiss
Ross Russell
At one time or another Charlie Parker's record producer, manager and
biographer
by Ronald Atkins
Thursday March 2, 2000
During a crucial period in the late 1940s, the author and jazz critic Ross
Russell, who has died aged 90, produced many of Charlie Parker's finest
recordings, and issued them on his own Dial label. He briefly became
Parker's manager and, after his death, wrote the definitive Parker
biography.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Russell had two spells at the University of
California, earning money in between by delivering telegrams. He became
interested in jazz and collected records avidly. In the 1930s he spent time
with a black swing band, experiencing the way such bands were treated on
nationwide tours.
He became involved with the contemporary jazz scene in 1945, after wartime
service as a merchant navy radio officer. Having saved some of his wages, he
used them to open the Tempo Music Shop in Hollywood Boulevard, selling jazz
records at a time when the scene was splitting between traditionalists and
the supporters of a new style, bebop. The beboppers soon took over the
store - driving the opposition to the rival shop across town - and more than
justified Russell's initial gamble in ordering, unheard, the latest New York
78s - the first consignment sold out in hours.
The alto saxophonist Charlie Parker came to Los Angeles in 1946 with Dizzy
Gillespie and hung around after the band returned to New York, finding work
in a club. By now a convert to Parker's genius, Russell not only agreed to
record him for Dial, but relocated the label to New York shortly after
Parker returned there.
Once a budding author, whose work included detective stories that were
published in the same magazines as Raymond Chandler's early efforts - he
knew Chandler and wrote an unpublished biography of him - Russell wrote
about bebop for the Record Changer magazine and later, in 1961, published a
picaresque novel, The Sound, whose main character is based on Parker.
Researching Parker's origins in Kansas City, Russell produced his Jazz Style
In Kansas City And The South West in 1971, followed in 1973 by the Parker
biography, Bird Lives, the essential work about a man whose musical genius
and disorganised lifestyle turned him into a 20th-century icon.
Writing occasional articles and running courses on African-American studies
at the University of California and Palomar college, Russell kept control of
the Dial catalogue, which was released most notably on the British Spotlite
label, to whom he eventually sold the rights in 1990. For the past 20 years
he was living in mobile homes, most recently in Palm Springs, though he
often contemplated leaving the US. Described by a friend as paranoid about
money, he moved an account estimated at $150,000 around offshore banks
before settling on Austria, from which he would draw enough to finance his
many European trips.
He often came to Britain, notably in 1994 when he attended the September
auction at Christie's of Parker's saxophone. A few weeks earlier, he had
given a recital of Parker's Dial recordings to a meeting of the
International Association of Jazz Record Collectors held in London's
Docklands. White-haired and sounding a bit like the older James Stewart, he
spoke about such controversial events as Parker recording Lover Man while
suffering from acute alcoholism and malnutrition - Parker announced he could
get through the session provided someone gave him a handful of benzedrine
tablets.
Russell had often been accused of cashing in by releasing everything Parker
recorded for Dial, including several rejected versions. He told us that
other musicians pressed him to do this because they wanted to hear as much
Parker as possible.
He did not think much of Miles Davis, the trumpeter on most of the Dial
records, and believed that jazz ended with the death of Parker. Russell had
nearly finished writing a book on bebop when he died. The only music he was
then listening to was opera, preferably in Vienna.
He was married four times and is survived by twins - a son and daughter.