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John hammond columbia records12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() At the same time he used his income from family trust funds to subsidize and promote the recordings of black artists for a while he produced jazz programs for a New York radio station and staged jazz concerts at the Manhattan theatre he bought expressly for the purpose, using racially mixed bands. Hammond entered the music business in the early thirties as a jazz writer for British publications Gramophone and Melody Maker. It also awakened in him a new passion-writing-which would soon come to serve his musical and social agendas. Entering Yale University in 1929, Hammond worked as a summer apprentice for the Portland Evening News, an eye-opening post that taught him about the civil rights movement, labor unions, and politics. An avid record collector by the age of twelve, Hammond recalled that "the simple honesty and convincing lyrics of the early blues singers, the rhythm and creative ingenuity of the jazz players, excited me the most." His forays into the city often ended at Harlem's Alhambra Theatre or Roseland Ballroom where black artists like Bessie Smith and Fletcher Henderson performed. Here, too, he first became privy to the discrimination against race and class that he would later fight so hard to eradicate. fell in love with music-early classical pieces on the family phonograph and jazz and blues heard in the servants' quarters. Home was a six-story mansion in New York City, where John Jr. Hammond was born into a life of great wealth and privilege: his father was a prominent lawyer and corporate executive and his mother, a Vanderbilt daughter. This is what gave substance to Hammond's instinct for new musical voices." Music wasn't just an artistic pursuit in his view, it was a social force-both an agent and an expression of broad social and political meaning. Others were doing it, but he went to inspired lengths." Writing in Down Beat, John McDonough concurred: "One has to look beyond music to understand the forces that governed his deepest passions. He unearthed it, collected it, brought it to light as a self-appointed missionary, the phonograph record was his instrument," wrote Leslie George Katz in the New York Times Book Review. Late in that decade his "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall brought legitimacy to American black music and appreciation for jazz around the world. Instead, he was driven by his sheer love of music and by his enthusiasm for unique and exceptional talent.Įspecially devoted to jazz and its practitioners, Hammond was enraged-during the 1930s-that the best jazz players were kept from a decent living and the recognition they deserved simply because they were black a civil rights activist throughout his lifetime, Hammond worked tirelessly to erase the music industry's color barrier, promoting black artists on major recording labels and integration within bands. Instrumental in the careers of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and many others, Hammond had no financial stake in the artists he promoted. With his uncanny ability to recognize musical talent, record industry executive John Hammond shaped the musical taste of American listeners for more than five decades, discovering the performers and tapping the trends that would define each musical generation. Lecturer at New York University, 1953-56. Producer of plays and concerts, including From Spirituals to Swing series, 1938. Apprentice reporter for Portland, ME, Evening News, 1929-30 free-lance record producer for Victor, Vocalion-Brunswick, and other labels disc jockey, announcer, and producer of live jazz shows for New York City radio station WEVD, 1932 American recording director for English Columbia and Parlaphone Co., 1933-36 associate recording director for Columbia Records, 1939- president of Keynote Records, 1946-47 recording director of Majestic Records, 1947 vice-president of Mercury Records, 1947-52 producer for Vanguard Records, 1953-58 producer, director of talent acquisition, and vice-president of Columbia Records, 1958-76 independent record producer and consultant, 1976-87 chairman of the board of Hammond Music Enterprises, 1982-87. Education: Attended Yale University, 1929-31 studied music at the Juilliard School. ![]() Born John Henry Hammond, Jr., December 15, 1910, in New York, NY died July 10, 1987, in New York, NY son of John Henry (an attorney and corporate executive) and Emily Vanderbilt (Sloane) Hammond married Jemison McBride, Ma(divorced, 1948) married Esme O'Brien Sarnoff, Septem(deceased, 1986) children: (first marriage) John Paul, Douglas (deceased), Jason (second marriage) Rosita Sarnoff (stepdaughter). ![]()
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