Dawn Label
The most distinctive Jazz is on Dawn....
In 1984, when I was still in school and got a weekend pass, after dinner on Friday I’d always head down to NYC. It was only about a 45 minute drive south on the Palisades Parkway, across the George Washington Bridge, and right down the West Side Highway. Within about an hour or so, I’d be looking for parking in Greenwich Village. My destination was Midnight Sun, where my girlfriend worked. After work, we’d go somewhere for dinner and then catch some music somewhere. The Blue Note was always on the list. Right down the street from the Blue Note was The Village Gate, where we’d see this sign: Salsa Meets Jazz every Monday.
We’d look at each other and yell: “Salsa Meets Jazz!” and do a little Cha Cha Cha. The bad news was, I had to be back at school by 11:00 PM on Sunday. So no Salsa Meets Jazz for me. However, all that changed after I graduated. I had 30 days leave before I had to be down at Fort Benning for Airborne School.
So in the meantime, I stayed with my girlfriend in Brooklyn Heights. One of the first Mondays there, we went to see what Salsa Meets Jazz was all about. At that time Salsa Meets Jazz was always with Tito Puente and Celia Cruz. Yes, that Celia Cruz! If you opened the intro music at the top of this page, you’ve been listening to a taste of that sound. Even though this particular recording is from the 1940s with Celia Cruz singing with La Sonora Matancera in Cuba, this is what the Village Gate sounded like on a Monday night in the spring of 1984.
In the 1980s, Latin and Salsa music was making a comeback, fueled in large part by the over a quarter million fans who tuned in from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm to listen to WRVR’s Sunday Salsa Show hosted by Roger Dawson. It was Dawson who introduced his Salsa Meets Jazz series to the Village Gate in Greenwich Village. However, the first surge of Latin music in Manhattan took place at the start of the 1940s.
Dawn Records was started in 1954 as a subsidiary to Seeco Records by a jeweler, Sidney Siegel. He owned the Casa Siegel, a jewelry and furniture store that also sold Latin 78rpm records in the back. During the height of the war, he noticed the growing popularity of Latin dance music. So in 1943, he pooled his assets from his business and started a record label: Seeco Records. According to The Mamboniks blog:
Sidney Siegel parlayed a ghetto jewelry store into one of the largest independent Latin record label of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Promising “The Finest in Latin American Recordings” on every disc, Seeco Records delivered stars including Celia Cruz and La Sonora Matancera not only to the U.S., but to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guatemala and Japan. It all began in a bombed-out building at 115th St, in the Spanish Harlem that until recently had been the second largest Jewish community in the country.
Seeco Records specialized in authentic Latin music, which meant traveling to South American and Caribbean locations to make their records. Here is an example of the early Seeco sound:
Eventually they carved a niche with Cuban recordings, from the boleros of the Trio Matamoros to the fiery big-band sound of La Sonora Matancera and its young vocalist Celia Cruz.
Here’s a later picture of Celia Cruz with Sidney Siegel:
In order to expand his music business into the growing jazz market popular in New York, Siegel started Dawn Records. Here is the first Dawn jazz release, Jazzville ‘56:
Notice all the excellent musicians Siegel was able to attract to his new label. Although the label was around for just a few years, the records Dawn released were of a consistently high quality - or as the label advertised: “The most distinctive Jazz is on Dawn”. I’d like to highlight three of my personal favorites from this obscure but significant label.
First, recorded in September of 1956, is Al Cohn’s Cohn on the Saxophone:
Here is We Three from that album, with the great Hank Jones on piano.
This next album is perhaps my favorite of the Dawn jazz series. Mats Mathews was born in Den Haag and learned to play the accordion while the Netherlands was still under control of the Nazi regime. Allegedly, after hearing American jazz and pop accordionist, organist, and vocalist Joe Monney (link to his 1947 Tea For Two - wow!) on a radio broadcast after the war, he decided to play jazz. He moved to New York in 1952 and formed a quartet with Herbie Mann. In the winter of 1955, he recorded this terrific album on the Dawn label, The Modern Art of Jazz by Mat Mathews:
Here is Now See How You Are from that album, a great accordion duet with Oscar Pettiford on cello:
Although Mathews would sustain a solid following in the jazz community, he returned to the Netherlands in 1964.
Finally, Zoot Sims' Zoot Sims goes to Jazzville with…. Note he records here with the underrated bassist Knobby Totah, who we listened to last week playing with Herbie Mann’s band.
Here is Ill Wind from that album:
Zoot Sims goes to Jazzville with… was recorded and released in 1957, at the same time Columbia was releasing Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead. This was still before the seismic changes in jazz that began in 1959 with Davis’ Kind of Blue and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. This was a time when the waters of jazz were still pretty smooth. You might say it was the calm before the storm….
Here’s one more for the road. I think I know I’m old when I love this album and in particular this old school song, As Time Goes By, with Joe Puma on guitar and Julius Watkins on french horn. I wonder what some of the younger readers actually think about this stuff??
Next week, we’ll drift along in some smooth and cool waters, as we explore the music and impact arranger and composer Gil Evans had on that Big River called Jazz.
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Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….