Concord Jazz -- Still Swinging After 50 Years

Downtown Concord, CA

About 30 miles east of San Francisco is the city of Concord, CA.  The photo I found online of Concord's downtown (above) makes it look quite fetching.  Since I've never been, I can't say for sure, but the next time I'm in the Bay area I'll try to stop by and report back.  For the moment, I will just say that all jazz fans owe a large debt of gratitude to Concord, CA.  Pound for pound, it's one of the most important cities in the history of jazz.  

Concord's favorite son, Dave Brubeck

First of all, Concord is the birthplace and childhood home of Dave Brubeck, one of the seminal figures in jazz music.  Brubeck was born in 1920 and lived at the family's home on Pacheco Street in Concord (where his mother gave piano lessons) until he was 12.  On the Concord Historical Society web site, there is a page dedicated to Brubeck that quotes him as saying: "I have many happy memories of life in Concord. It was an ideal place for a boy to grow up. I recall playing in Todos Santos Park on summer evenings . . . I roamed the hills surrounding Concord on my Cleveland bike and door to door peddled apples from our back yard tree."  Brubeck alone is more than enough to put Concord on the jazz map of the world.

Carl Jefferson
at the Concord Pavilion

But Concord also boasts another famous long-time resident who had an enormous impact on jazz music.  Carl Jefferson was born in 1919 (almost exactly one year before Brubeck) in Alameda, CA, a suburb of Oakland about 20 miles west of Concord.  Jefferson moved to Concord in 1958 to become the general manager of a car dealership called Montclair Motors.  Two years later, he bought out the owner and renamed the dealership Jefferson Motors.  By the end of the 60s he was one of the premier Lincoln Mercury dealers in the country.  As a big jazz fan (who apparently loathed rock 'n' roll music), Jefferson wanted to help promote jazz and give back to the community that had made him quite wealthy.  What better way than to sponsor a jazz music festival in Concord?  He contributed seed money, recruited donations from his friends in the business community, talked the city into matching their contributions, and together they launched a summer music festival in Concord.

The first edition of the festival opened on August 26, 1969, just one week after Woodstock closed in upstate New York.  According to the "Visit Concord" website: "The music showcase was called the Jazz in the Park Festival, and was held in a field near Concord High School.  More than 17,000 jazz fans showed up to hear music by Vince Guaraldi, Stan Kenton, Jean Luc Ponty, Carmen McRae, Don Ellis, Mel Torme, and the Buddy Rich Band."  Not a bad lineup to kick off a jazz music festival.  A brief report in the September 6 issue of Billboard Magazine (correctly) refers to the event as the "Concord Summer Festival" and adds that artists Bola Sete, Shelly Manne, and Cal Tjader also performed.  (By 1972 the name of the festival had changed from the Concord Summer Festival to The Concord Jazz Festival, but both names appear interchangeably in news articles for a couple of years.)

Vintage post card of the Concord Pavilion

The Jazz Festival grew so quickly and became so popular that after only a couple of years, Jefferson began to urge the city to build a performing arts center that could serve as a permanent home for the event and that would attract other cultural performances to the community throughout the year.  In 1973, a search committee (including Jefferson) made a fact-finding tour of performance sites around the country.  Based on the committee's recommendations, the city agreed to a $4.5 million bond issue to fund construction and hired architect Frank Gehry to design the Concord Pavilion, a covered, open-air venue in the hills east of the city.  The Pavilion opened in May, 1975, in time to host the 7th Festival.

If Jefferson's only contribution to the promotion of jazz had been the creation of the Concord Jazz Festival and the construction of the Concord Pavilion, that still would have been significant.  But as it turns out, Jefferson was just getting started.  As a fan of straight-ahead jazz, Jefferson lamented how rock music was changing jazz, pushing the music toward fusion, free jazz, and other non-mainstream styles.  He is quoted as saying that "The major labels are no longer making the kinds of records I like to listen to."  If you are a determined, wealthy businessman with a long list of musician friends and growing influence in the jazz music world, what do you do?  Well, if you are Carl Jefferson, you start your own label.

According to the founding lore, the light-bulb moment came during the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  After one of the shows, Jefferson invited some of the performers out for drinks at a local inn.  Among the musicians present were jazz greats Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, and Ray Brown.  During the conversation, the musicians expressed their sadness at how the music industry was changing and said that for the first time in a long time, they were having trouble getting a record deal.  Sources differ somewhat on Jefferson's exact response, but it was something on the order of:  "Well, hell, how much could it cost to make a record?  I’ll make a record with you.  How do you do it?"  Within a few short months, Jefferson had started his own record label and named it Concord Jazz.  [It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the label was formed.  The date the label was incorporated, January 5, 1974, is often cited as the founding date, but it seems clear that things were up and running well before the end of 1973.]

In the beginning, Jefferson ran the label out of his Lincoln Mercury showroom.  John Burk, a former producer for Concord Jazz who eventually became president of the Concord Music Group, says that "They literally ran the label out of the dealership.  The guys who washed cars would pack records.  It was a great way to start a label, because all the overhead was covered by the car dealership.” 

The 1st release on the Concord Jazz label

True to his word, the first album released on Jefferson's new label featured guitarists Joe Pass and Herb Ellis, with Ray Brown on bass and Jake Hanna on drums.  The album (left), catalog number CJS-1, is titled Jazz/Concord, and perhaps not surprisingly for a record label run out of a car dealership, it seems a bit slipshod.  

To begin with, the cover art has a home-made feel to it -- which turns out to be the case.  The drawing is credited to Jay Toffoli, who, at the time, was the teenage son of the Executive Director of the Concord Summer Festival, John Toffoli.  The fact that the references in the drawing -- a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train, a stage coach, a festival ticket, and the large "C" on a red flower background (the logo of the city of Concord) refer to the Summer Festival and the city and not to Herb Ellis and Joe Pass leads one to believe that Jefferson pressed the advertising agency for his car sales into service, and they recycled a poster from the festival for the album cover. 

Beyond that, there is confusion about where and when the session was actually recorded.  While the album cover art and title imply that this is a live session from the Concord Jazz Festival, the credits on the back of the jacket say: "Recorded at Wally Hyder (sic) Studios in Los Angeles on July 29, 1973."  Hmmm.  In the first place, the studio is Wally Heider's.  But regardless, it couldn't have been recorded there on July 29, 1973, because Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna were the featured performers at the 4th Annual Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, CA on that date.

In his extensive liner notes on the back of the jacket, San Francisco music critic Philip Elwood doesn't provide any explanation.  Even when he comments on the track titled "Happiness Is The Concord Jazz Festival," he doesn't take the opportunity to reveal if the track was, you know, actually recorded at the festival.  

Jazz/Concord Mk. II

In his AllMusic review of the album, critic Scott Yanow states that the album "was recorded at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival."  In my experience, Yanow knows his stuff, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  However, the recording doesn't sound live, as there is no audience noise or applause, and no patter between the performers.    

I couldn't find the precise release date for the first album, but it appears to have come out at the beginning of 1974.  (Although a couple of sources indicate that it may have been released in late 1973.)  Interestingly, not long after the album's debut, a second version with a new cover (right) was released.  The new cover replaced the "Festival" drawing montage with a mocked-up image of ticket stubs from the 1972 Festival.  While the new cover looks more professional, it actually adds to the confusion by suggesting that the recording might have been made made at the 1972 Festival.

Herb Ellis signed copy of CJ-2

The revised version of Jazz/Concord came out around the same time as the label's second release, in February of 1974, which was titled Seven, Come Eleven.  Since a professional team (credited as Dan Buck Graphic Design on the back of the jacket) were thankfully brought on board to create the second cover, it appears that Jefferson may have taken the opportunity to have the team revamp the first cover in order to create a more uniform look for his new label.  The team from Dan Buck also came up with a new label design and a new corporate logo (below) both of which were used on the second album and subsequent releases.

The original logo (left) and revised logo (right)

There is no mystery about the source for the music on CJ-2, Concord's second release.  The subhead on Seven, Come Eleven (named for the second track on the album, a classic written by Benny Goodman and guitarist Charlie Christian) reads: "From their live performance at the Concord Summer Festival."  The lineup is the same as the first release, with Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna.  The back cover of the jacket features photos of the quartet onstage at the 1973 festival.  [Fun fact: My copy of CJ-2 (above left) is signed on the front in green ink by Herb Ellis.  I bought the album online, and didn't know it was signed until it arrived.  The inscription is a little hard to make out, but says: "I Loved It - Herb Ellis."  I don't know if he's referring to the Festival or something else, but it's very neat having his signature on the album.

In his AllMusic review of Seven, Come Eleven, Scott Yanow states that "The second Concord album was recorded the day after the first with the same lineup."  Which would mean that CJ-2 was recorded at the Festival on July 30, 1973.  Once again, I'm assuming that Yanow knows what he's talking about, which means that the first two Concord Jazz releases actually make up Vols. 1 and 2 of Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna live at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  In contrast to the first album, Seven, Come Eleven is clearly a live recording, with lots of applause and other audience noise, as well as Carl Jefferson's welcome remarks and introduction of the band.

Jefferson may have started Concord Jazz as a sideline (or almost as a barroom boast), but it wasn't long before the label was the dominant player in straight-ahead or mainstream jazz.  While most of the major labels were promoting free jazz, fusion, or other new crossover trends, Carl Jefferson stuck with making records that he liked.  By the fall of 1978, just four and a half years after he started the label, Concord Jazz had a catalog of 69 albums, including recordings by veterans like Bud Shank, Hank Jones, Barney Kessel, Joe Venuti, Tal Farlow, and Louie Bellson, as well as newcomers like Scott Hamilton and Grant Geissman.  

In 1980, Jefferson sold his car dealership in order to devote full time to running the label.  At its peak, Concord Jazz put out 30-40 new albums each year.  By the time Jefferson died in 1995, he had supervised the release of more than 650 albums.  (The last vinyl release was CJ-397 in 1992, which featured Gene Harris And the Philip Morris Superband on an album titled Live At Town Hall, N.Y.C.)  Jefferson is listed as "Producer" on almost all Concord Jazz titles, although numerous sources say that he had little musical or creative input into the recordings, giving the artists a free hand to play what they wanted.  Like other successful independent jazz labels such as Contemporary, Pablo, and CTI, Jefferson had an in-house stable of musicians who regularly played on each other's sessions and toured together to play at music festivals around the world (not least of which, the Concord Jazz Festival).

Shortly before Jefferson's death in 1995, he sold Concord Jazz to Alliance Entertainment.  In 1999, Alliance was bought out by a group of investors that included film and TV producer Norman Lear.  In 2004, Concord Jazz bought the Fantasy Group of labels, and renamed the new, combined company the Concord Music Group.  Today, the Concord Music Group is the largest independent music organization in the world, controlling a staggering number of classic labels, including Concord Jazz, Milestone, Pablo, Prestige, Riverside, Savoy, Stax, Telarc, Vee-Jay, and many others.

Sadly, the Concord Jazz Festival folded in 2004 after 35 years.  In 2019, the Concord Music Group put together a one-time 50th anniversary festival to honor founder Carl Jefferson and his festival, which featured an all-star lineup of current and former Concord label performers (poster above).

A note about the labels on Concord Jazz albums.  The original label that first appeared in 1974 on CJ-2 (and on the revised CJS-1) is white with black text and a gray Concord logo at top (left below).  The logo is cleverly designed to be both a "c" connected to a "J" for Concord Jazz, as well as an eighth note.  Beginning with the release of CJ-80 in 1979, the redesigned label (right below) features "Concord Jazz" in a new, white font at the top on a gray/silver checkerboard background covering the entire label.  The gray squares (which can appear tan-colored in the right light) are copies of the original Concord logo that used to appear at the top in the old label.  The revised label was used from CJ-80 up until the last LP (CJ-397) in 1992.

The original 1974 label at left was used up until CJ-80 (right), which was released in 1979

Be aware that many of Concord Jazz's early titles were reissued over the years.  If you find a title with the catalog number CJ-1 through CJ-79 on the checkerboard label, then you know it is a reissue from 1979 or later.

I have about 175 of the 379 Concord Jazz releases on vinyl.  Almost without exception they are great, swinging, mainstream jazz.  You (almost) can't go wrong with any title in the catalog.  The engineering and mixing (mostly by Phil Edwards) is first-rate, as is the mastering (mostly by Leo Kulka and George Horn).  In general, Concord Jazz titles sold well and most are not difficult to find.  However, because of the high quality of the catalog and the enduring appeal of the music, they remain in demand and usually sell for $10-15 in VG+ or NM condition.  If you are a fan of mainstream jazz and run across any Concord Jazz titles, I urge you snap them up.  

Enjoy the music!