"Although Mosaic Records' first release came out in July of 1983, the seeds for the business were planted in 1970. As a journalist, radio show host and record producer, I began coming into contact with many musicians who had been major players in Blue Note's repertory company. Since Blue Note had always been my favorite label for its consistent quality, conversations would ultimately drift to those great days of the label.
Increasingly, I would hear about tantalizing unissued sessions. Soon I began writing down sketchy information from musicians about these unknown treasures in a notebook. The staggering amount of unissued material soon became evident, and I tried constantly to get into the vaults. But George Butler, who had been put in charge after Frank Wolff's death, was oblivious to serious jazz and took the label into a very commercial direction. He stalled me for years.
Finally, Charlie Lourie, a former jazz and classical musician and executive at CBS Records, accepted the job as head of marketing for Blue Note in late 1974. We met in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1975. I showed him my notebook, which by this time had grown to sizable proportions. He was so excited that the next morning a contract was drawn up and by afternoon, I was at last in the Blue Note vaults..."
"The nicest part of having this dream come true was the response of the musicians. I remember when I first starting producing Andrew Hill for Freedom Records. He sat in my living room and from memory gave me the complete personnel of 12 unissued Blue Note sessions, hoping I could get them out. Once walking down Broadway, I heard my name shouted form a cab. It was Howard Johnson asking me if I had found the Hank Mobley date that he told me about and if it was coming out. People like Elvin Jones and Hank Mobley would come up to me in clubs and hug my and thank me for getting albums issued. The approval and the enthusiasm of the artists who made the music was very important to me..."
"As serious collectors and lovers of the music, Charlie and I hope to assemble packages that all collectors and serious students of jazz will find valuable. That is one reason why we strive to make every set complete within its own scope. This not only brings unissued material to light, but eliminates the need the have music stretched over scattered albums of varying quality in an incoherent form that makes intelligent listening difficult. The Mulligan set is a classic example. In order to have the 49 issued from our set, one would have to own 10 different albums, most of them very rare and many having duplication of tunes
Our first year was filled with both problems and rewards. But we wouldn't have had it any other way. As for the future, in true jazz tradition, we're just going straight ahead.
(Charlie Lourie passed away in 2000 but his passion and respect for jazz will always be a part of all that Mosaic offers.)
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).