Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice by Tad Hershorn (review)

Tad Hershorn’s biography on jazz impresario Norman Granz belongs in all music libraries, not only for the praiseworthy writing, but also for the fact that its subject is a leading light of the arts in the twentieth century. In the world of jazz, there were three main players who developed artists and records, concert tours, and the concept of the live music festival. George Wein brought this last phenomenon to fruition, while John Hammond was an influential talent scout and record producer who began with Swing Era jazz and ended in the 1980s with pop/rock. The third major player was Norman Granz, and as Hershorn himself states in his prologue, “this volume, by telling the story of Granz, the most independent of the three, completes the narrative of how jazz reached a mass audience in the heyday of the music” (p. 3). Hershorn’s organization and presentation of the material, gleaned from unique primary source riches (many of which are housed at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers where Hershorn is an archivist), along with numerous secondary sources and interviews, make this book an authoritative overview of Granz’s life. As Hershorn was able to interview many people close to Granz, and the subject himself at the end of his life, the material here offers deep insight into the rarified experiences at the top of the jazz world, with engaging accounts of the inner workings of concert tours, major milestones in the recording studios, and Granz’s devotion to the struggle for racial justice.

Hershorn’s own skills as a former newspaper writer, cultural historian, and archivist help to draw out and interpret the key events of Granz’s life, even when Granz himself worked to obscure some of that effort: “He disposed of about seventy boxes of files probably dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s, a veritable treasure, stored in the back room of his Beverly Hills offices. . . . It underscores the biographer’s difficulties in venturing to reconstruct a whole from fragments of the past” (p. 10). Despite this loss, Hershorn’s research and interview subjects (such as Oscar Peterson, Buddy DeFranco, and tour manager Peter Cavello) yielded a wealth of material that resulted in this book. With as much access as he had to the subject, he explains that unpacking all of the personal accounts and creating a reliable story was no easy task: “I have withheld some personal details where the omission does not distort the story, and I resisted speculation when there was no collaboration to justify including in this book. Norman Granz primarily recounts a professional life writ large upon jazz performance and recording, the life of a man with a gift for turning both into gold and a will to lock horns with anyone that got in his way, especially where racial justice and ‘his’ musicians were involved” (p. 13).

Since the strengths of Hershorn’s research and writing bear themselves out in a narrative, and neither he nor Granz were musicians, this book does not feature a music-analytical focus. Hershorn is a historian (and eager raconteur), but not a musician or musicologist, and he is careful in providing context for the stories that are told in Norman Granz. The jazz-enthusiast reader will not find a transcription of an Oscar Peterson solo, an example of Ella Fitzgerald’s scatting on “How High the Moon,” or a page of an arrangement from a Count Basie recording session. That said, Hershorn does have a unique ability to properly frame Granz’s detailed involvement in advancing music, and shows how he was able to define how concert tours (jazz and pop) were organized in Europe, and how he formed one of the recording industry’s biggest record labels (Verve) around a stable of leading artists. For that reason, scholars outside of musicology might take an interest in the biography, since it...