Playlist: Granz, Picasso, Oscar and Ella
Music, art, friendship and Pablo Records.
Read down to listen to my beloved Pablo Records playlist and to learn about Granz’s relationship with Picasso and the origin of the Pablo Records logo, which graces Norman Granz’s tombstone in Ordrup Cemetery in Denmark.
“The older you get, the more you’re forgotten by record companies,” the irascible jazz world genius Norman Granz told writer Josh Mills for a NY Daily News article in 1976. It was a Sunday feature about his label Pablo Records, which Granz had started in 1973. That was after Verve, after Clef, Norgran and Down Home, and after a withdrawal from the whole damn record business.
“That’s what brought me back to Pablo,” Granz said. “The sorry state of recording in this country. The major companies have this theory that you constantly have to seek new talent. But it’s often not new talent for what they have to say, but newness for its own sake. That’s true with pop and its love affair with built-in obsolescence. But not with jazz…
…I’m not going for the short haul. I can’t make hits and I don’t want to. Jazz endures; it’s the longevity that counts.”
Pablo released records by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, who he managed, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughn and Milt Jackson, among others; a lot of it live, unedited material.
Departing from the illustrations that have made the Verve covers by David Stone Martin enduring artworks in themselves, the Pablo covers followed the Norgan pattern of featuring outstanding photographs of the artists. In this case, fabulously spotlighting the musicians in their later years in sublime photos that venerated their status as vital masters.
One of many label highlights was the Cleo Laine and Ray Charles’ Porgy and Bess album. Here’s a clip from a performance they did for Brazil’s Globo TV:
Granz named Pablo Records for his friend Pablo Picasso, who died the same year that he started the label.
The producer had come to know Picasso in the late sixties, and was an important collector of his works before then, in the time before Picasso was a household name. As with the music that he chose to promote and record, Granz collected art on instinct. Some of the Picassos in his collection were gifts from the artist. Granz visited Picasso at his home in the South of France, where Picasso, then in his eighties, would show his American friend his new paintings and invite him to tea. As told by Granz’s biographer Tad Hershorn, Granz called it “one of the most joyfuld periods of my life.”
The logo for Pablo Records came not from a painting or drawing, but from a lithograph, one of a set of 125 medievally-influenced illuminations. Picasso created them to illustrate a 1948 book of poems by the French Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy, titled Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead.)
In 2019, about a year-and-a-half before Granz died at the age of 83, his collection was sold at Christie’s at an auction titled “A Close Friendship: Picasso From The Collection of Norman and Grete Granz.” The sale was led by Picasso’s ink drawing Baigneuses et crabe, from 1938. That piece alone sold for $1.45 million.
Granz had selected one of the images that Picasso created for Le chant des morts to use as the Pablo Records logo.
The same symbol graces Granz’s tombstone.
Listen to my Pablo Records playlist on Qobuz:
On Spotify:
Norman Granz, we will love you forever.
Fascinating read! Granz’s dedication and his friendship with Picasso make for such a unique legacy. A testament to artistic longevity. Love seeing how music and visual art intertwined in his world!