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George Avakian Interviewer Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. GEORGE AVAKIAN NEA JAZZ MASTER (2010) Interviewee: George Avakian Interviewer: Ann Sneed with recording engineer Julie Burstein Date: September 28, 1993 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 112 pp. Sneed: I’m Ann Sneed. We are in Riverdale. We’re interviewing George Avakian. There’s so many things to say about you, I’m just going to say George Avakian and ask you first, why jazz? Avakian: I think it happened because I was born abroad, and among the things that came into my consciousness as I was growing up was American popular music, and then it drifted in the direction of jazz through popular dance bands, such as the Casa Loma Orchestra, which I heard about through the guys who were hanging around the home of our neighbor at Greenwood Lake, which is where we went in the summers. We had a house on the lake. Our next-door neighbors had two daughters, one of whom was my age and very pretty, Dorothy Caulfield, who incidentally is responsible for Holden Caulfield’s last name, because J. D. Salinger got to know her and was very fond of her, named Holden after her family name. These boys came from the Teaneck area of New Jersey. So it was a short drive to Greenwood Lake on a straight line between New York and New Jersey. They had a dance band, the usual nine pieces: three brass, three saxophones, three rhythm. They loved the Casa Loma Orchestra and started playing records of the band. I heard them on the radio after a while, when I discovered that they were on the air about 11:15 every Saturday night, and sometimes in the middle of the week, after the news. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Page | 1 They also had a program. I guess it was the Camel Caravan already at that time. I’m not sure. Through that I got to listen to other unusual pop music. I put it that way, because it wasn’t Bing Crosby or Russ Columbo or the ricky-tick pop bands. Very quickly I discovered, through the radio basically, Fats Waller. Then I ran across the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, which impressed me as being a lot freer and more exciting than the Casa Loma band. It was hard to get their records, but I finally found one at Macy’s and bought it and didn’t show my parents the label, because the title was Hotter than ’ell, on Decca, which was sort of a godsend, because those records were 35 cents each and three for 88 cents at Macy’s. Everything else was 75 cents – 69, I think, at Macy’s. And see, my mother had a Macy’s charge card. She’d take me down shopping. I’d head for the fifth floor and start hanging around the record department until she let me buy anything from one to three records. So that was how my consciousness came about, through . Sneed: So really, through a woman, Miss Caulfield. Avakian: Yeah. Yes. Right. Sneed: Wonderful. Avakian: Dorothy is still living. She’s a widow now in Connecticut. We don’t see each other as often as we should. Sneed: We owe her a lot. Avakian: I owe her a lot, because if she wasn’t there, those guys wouldn’t have been hanging around, and I might not have discovered jazz so quickly. Sneed: And you wouldn’t have bought all those records. Do you remember the Fats Waller? Avakian: Which one? Sneed: It’s a 78, obviously. Christopher Columbus and Us on a Bus on the other side. I never – I don’t think it’s ever been redone. Avakian: I’m surprised, especially since . Sneed: I can’t find it. Avakian: It must be in a collection somewhere. I bet I have it in a reissue that was made in Europe. I will copy it for you. I’ll put it on a . For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Page | 2 Sneed: Wonderful, because mine has a nick. Avakian: Oh, well I’ll take care of that. I’m sure it’s there, because it said it was complete Fats Waller. Sneed: Was there music at home too? Avakian: Yes and no, because my parents had brought a few records of Armenian music with them. We didn’t have a record player until a cousin of mine from Belgium came over to study at Columbia University, and he brought a hand-wound phonograph that he had bought in London. I still remember the Columbia logo with the two – I guess it’s two sixteenth notes. I can’t remember now. Yes, it is. Once I got hold of that – he only had two records – I started playing my parents’ records. Eventually we got a very nice phonograph, and that’s the phonograph on which I played my first records. It was a big cabinet model with a crank that went into the side. Sneed: And the top lifted up? Avakian: The top lifted up, yep. Sneed: I remember. Avakian: It was a wide top, not the Victrola type, which was tall and narrow. Sneed: Do you remember the [K?] that came later? Avakian: Yes I do, but the one I loved was the Ansley Dynaphone. I bought an Ansley Dynaphone, which was a beautiful cabinet, very modern, very simple. It was, I think, one of the best machines that one could afford in those days. I bought it from Avery Fisher, who had a record, phonograph, and radio shop. I remember how nice Mr. Fisher was to me. I was a freshman in college at the time. But that was a heck of a machine. I kept it until well after the war, when it finally fell apart, broke down. I don’t know what I got after that. But that was one on which all those early test pressings got played in the rooms at the Yale campus. Sneed: And remember all the radio shows late at night, when you could hear bands. Avakian: Those were very influential in increasing my interest in American pop music. I put it that way, because I didn’t think of it as jazz yet. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Page | 3 The first real consciousness I had of this music being called jazz had to be, I guess, the Benny Goodman orchestra, which broadcast late at night on NBC, the famous “Let’s Dance” show in which the third of the bands – 1, 2, 3, third – was the Benny Goodman orchestra. I stayed up late every Saturday night to listen. Of course, that’s the great story of how the band was so popular on the West Coast, but in the East and the rest of the country, people weren’t listening to it, because it went on so late. People didn’t stay up late in those days they way they do now. Sneed: I did. Avakian: Well, you’re naughty. I used to turn the radio on and catch things like the rebroadcast of the Casa Loma orchestra, which happened because in different parts of the country the programs were on at different times, and that was because these programs were put on electrical transcription discs, which were 16-inch aluminum discs that played for 14½ minutes on each side, So there was time for the station to turn the record over and have an announcement in the middle of the program. That was also the kind of philosophy that I personally developed when I was in charge of the pop album department at Columbia and LP came along, because Columbia engineers invented it. I had to convert so many pop albums to 10-inch LPs and then create new ones. So the idea behind the creation, as well as the sequencing of the material, was always, think of a half-hour program. Have a good opener. Have something that makes the person turn the record over and listen to the second half, just as they ended the first half of a half-hour program with something that would make you hang on through the one-minute commercial. Sneed: The thing that I think will surprise people who are younger than we, is that you are talking about pop music, and that’s what jazz was. Avakian: Yes, it was. There was no separate category anywhere in the press and so on. There was almost no press, in fact. Down Beat was operating at the time. So was Metronome, which was an older magazine. But you had no things – no references to jazz or even really to pop music as a separate category in the ordinary day-to-day press. This really started to break open through Benny Goodman, because he became so popular so quickly. He was sort of a special phenomenon. People did not write articles about Bing Crosby, for example, as the most popular singer, or certainly not the Guy Lombardo orchestra, which was the most popular band. But they did start writing about Benny Goodman after he came to New York in 1936, and the word “swing” became a part of the American language. That was also the first time that I met a jazz musician.
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