For the past seven or eight months I’ve been listening to these two albums of old-time and bluegrass music without a clue when they were released, who the players were nor how they landed in my library. I imagine the latter came about as a recommendation from Apple Music’s algorithms based on my listening preferences.
As I’ve been recently reviewing some of my favorite albums of 2024, I tried to get some information on these folks so I could include them but there is very little to find other than a Bandcamp page for one, and an AllMusic mention on the other. And both are available to stream on every major platform. Today I threw my hands up and went to my Chat GBT app to see if that platform could do any better than my Google searches. With a little interrogation and coaxing I got the story.
Released in 2014 and 2015, the duo turns out to be Chris Wadsworth and his then teenagedaughter Lily. And the friends on the second album include Molly Tuttle and David Grisman as well as a few more musicians. Huh…I know of a Chris Wadsworth, but could it be one and the same? Indeed it is. Yes, Chris began his music career as a bluegrass lead singer and guitarist with the Golden Elixir Bluegrass Band, but that’s not how I knew of him.
Chris is the founder of the annual FreshGrass Festival and heads up the foundation of the same name which owns No Depression and Folk Alley.Well heck, how did I not know that? As I spent over a dozen years writing for the ND website, I knew of Chris only as a music lover, whose day job was based in finance. Perhaps I’m the last to know about his other talents, and if you haven’t heard either of these albums, you’re in for a treat. The one on the left with simply father and daughter is my favorite, but the follow-up is right up there. Together they are two of my favorite “lost and found” albums of 2024.
Top photo by Snap Jackson. Band photo from Natia Cinco.
I originally wrote this spotlight on AJ Lee back on June 15, 2017 when I was publishing my weekly Broadside columns over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music website. Jumping forward seven years, and No Dep has made AJ Lee and Blue Summit their Spotlight band for July 2024. This band is on the verge of exploding and their new album City of Glass will be released July 19th on Signature Sounds. And now…hop in the Wayback Machine with me.
When I reached out to Betsy Riger-Lee and asked her to give me a rough idea of how many views her daughter AJ Lee has had on YouTube, she came back to me in three hours and wrote: “As of this moment, it’s 3,358,333.” That right there tells you she’s one proud mama. It’s a simple fact that there are many musicians who have been working on the road and putting out albums for decades who have yet to hit that particular milestone, so a few months ago when I came across this young woman from Northern California singing the Gram Parson classic “Hickory Wind” with The Tuttles, a family of stellar musicians, I took notice.
That clip, which accounts for about ten percent of that huge number mentioned above, was uploaded six years ago, when AJ was only 13. She gives credit to Jack Tuttle, who wisely invited her to join up with him and his kids in their band, for introducing her to that song and many others. And when they uploaded that song, AJ had already been performing in front of audiences for nine years. Not a misprint.
“The initial event to my introduction to bluegrass happened one night at an open mic at a pizzeria. I was 4 years old, my mom held me up to the mic, and I sang the song ‘Angel Band.’ There was a man named Frank Solivan in the audience who happened to be the director of a program called Kids On Bluegrass for the California Bluegrass Association (CBA). I stuck with the program every year for several years after that. That’s also how I got into other bluegrass events — through the CBA. Throughout this whole process, I was never forced to play music, but always encouraged and inspired. It helped immensely being around kids my own age, and to this day I am great friends with a lot of the kids who came out of the CBA kids programs. Having a sense of community and belonging through music is something greater than anything I could have asked for.”
Want to hear what this eight-year-old girl sounded like onstage in 2006?
I’m going to let mom tell this part of AJ’s story:
“AJ was invited to be part of the first Kids on Bluegrass Fanfest in Nashville, where International Bluegrass Music Association’s ‘World of Bluegrass’ was taking place annually at that time. It was a pilot program that originally began in California, that has now become the standard for talented bluegrass children to meet up each year. AJ shared that stage with Molly Cherryholmes, Sarah Jarosz, Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, Angelica Grim Doerfel, and a host of many other gifted young female artists. She did that for several more years, and during that run, she was asked to be part of the revision of the ‘Discover Bluegrass’ video that the IBMA created for educational purposes, their intent being to spread the word of this genre of music.”
Author’s prerogative and detour: When Angelica Grim married TJ Doerfel in June of 2008, AJ and Betsy sang a duet of this Richard Thompson song y’all probably know at the wedding. It’s just basically a home video, but one that’s been watched watched over 65,000 times. And while I’m not exactly sure why, I keep coming back to this one over and over. Here’s a secret … somewhere about two minutes into it I can’t keep from crying.
AJ grew up in Tracy, an agricultural town that is being suburbanized as the Bay Area population looks for affordable housing in an area with a “Mediterranean climate.” AJ describes herself as preferring the rural lifestyle: “I grew up with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, rats, opossums, lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, quails, sheep … and a turkey. I’ve taken many trips to cities, but the country is where my heart will always stay.”
The family enjoyed the camping lifestyle, especially around the regional bluegrass festivals. It seems that it was the Riger side of the family from whose tree the music fell: AJ’s siblings and other relatives are accomplished players of various degrees and styles. Betsy is an excellent singer, guitarist, and dancer, and taught AJ how to find pitch and use basic techniques for singing. Rodney Lee doesn’t share in this talent pool … or, as AJ puts it: ‘My dad is NOT musical… haha. I’ve been trying to teach him how to play one song on the mandolin for years. I’m sure when pigs fly, my dad will learn how to play ‘Angelina Baker.’”
In 2011, when she was 13, Mother Jones published an interview with AJ titled “Could This Kid Be The Next Alison Krauss?” In addition to the mandolin as her main instrument, AJ plays fiddle, guitar, ukulele, and banjo, and her incredible vocals have earned her the Female Vocalist award for six years from the Northern California Bluegrass Society (NCBS). As the years rolled by she attended a number of music camps through the CBA and NCBS — “great organizations that are very supportive regarding kids and music,’…” she says — and she was playing in a number of band configurations, including The Tuttles with AJ Lee.
In the world of California bluegrass, Jack Tuttle is a legend. For over 30 years he’s taught fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and guitar, developed a solid curriculum, written a dozen instruction books, and put a band together with his daughter Molly and sons Sully and Michael. AJ joined the group in 2008, when she was about 10, and they released their first album two years later. I should note that Molly is making a lot of noise down in Nashville now, where she settled after attending Berklee College of Music, having won the first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship from the Foundation For Bluegrass Music.
By the time AJ was 16, you can see how she had developed not only strong musical skillsets, but was poised and polished onstage. She also began writing her own music and released her first EP, titled ASong for Noah, and was invited into the studio for The Prava Sessions, a series where “there are no overdubs, there is no Auto-Tune, the sounds aren’t pitch or time corrected with a computer. It’s all real, it’s all live and it only happens once.” As you’ll see, she began to drift away from the traditional bluegrass format.
The past couple of years, AJ has been playing locally throughout the Bay Area, and since graduating high school she’s taken some college classes, and is “off and running, away from home, working in the real world of service and people, busking and gigging to help pay rent, as honest and real living goes,” according to Betsy. “If she can handle all that life throws at her, she will probably stay the course with music as a career.”
AJ speaks about following the route Molly Tuttle is taking down in Nashville, but with the logic and reasoning of someone much older than their years, she’s quick to add that “those thoughts are still developing and I’m still trying to figure out what the best path for me to take is. At least in this time in my life.”
Postscript: July 2024
As many already know and many more will soon discover with the release of their new 2024 album City of Glass, AJ Lee and Blue Summit have been slowly bubbling under the radar, honing their craft, writing more and more and touring far beyond the West. Over the past seven or so years and have had several changes in their lineup. AJ and Sullivan Tuttle have been the two constant members and along with Scott Gates on guitar and vocals, and fiddler Jan Purat they are at their best and growing more popular day after day.
There’s a reason I’ve become fascinated with AJ’s musical journey back in 2017. She grew up with the opportunity to learn and play music in the world of bluegrass, one that has always worked hard to pass the baton down from generation to generation. In the political climate we live in, one party in particular doesn’t give a damn not only about music, but specifically public funding for any of the arts. In April 2017, in an open letter to Donald Trump and Congress, the IBMA spoke directly to that point:
“The United States of America cannot afford to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (“NEA”) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (“NEH”). These two government agencies carry out three highly beneficial missions across our country: preserving and promoting the arts, educating and inspiring children, and expanding commerce through the grants provided by these public endowments.
An important principle of our nation has been to protect and promote our rich artistic and cultural heritage. Bluegrass music, as a core genre of American roots music, was created on American soil as an extension of our country’s working class communities. It is this cultural history, along with exceptional musicianship, that makes this music loved throughout our country today. This is not simply entertainment; it is a vital part of our nation’s identity.”
Amen.
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music website.
I read an article recently from a dude who advocated ignoring whatever is current and on the charts, and simply coming up with your own Top Ten songs du jour. It’s not all that far from what I do minus putting a number on it. Why limit yourself to just ten when there are millions to choose from? But it did make me think of my own consumption and collecting, albeit digitally, and I began to realize I am absolutely overloaded with too much music and not nearly enough time.
Yes, I’m part of the problem, since I enjoy writing about new releases, and artists who aren’t famous but nevertheless fabulous, and those lost or forgotten recordings. For me the biggest thorn in my side is the algorithms used by the streaming sites to make suggestions. And the more you use them, the more they are able to include what they think you’ll like and exclude what you might not.
Although it’s an imperfect system, it’s also very good at getting me stuck in a rabbit hole the size of the Grand Canyon. You find a song by one musician that you like, and add their album to your playlist. You also see they have five previous releases, so you add them too. One song of interest becomes fifty in a flash. And because you like them, there are now a dozen other things recommended. Endless.
I have a playlist where I place things – new or old – that I haven’t yet heard. It used to hover between 250-500 songs and not it’s over 3000. There in no way I can get into checking out each and every one, and no time to listen to the older music in my library that I’ve loved over the decades.
I’m drowning in a sea of music and it’s becoming work versus pleasure. There could be a sense of urgency here…advanced expiration date…and I’m fearful I won’t get to listen to all the things I’ve collected over the years along with the new things I’ve yet to discover.
Some might say it’s a first world problem, having too much access. And it’s true that after re-reading this section it’s pretty insensitive to even think about “my music problem” considering all the other gruesome things happening around the world.
So if you got this far – just disregard it please.
The daughter of an overseer of a Jamaican sugar plantation, teenager Millie Small was discovered by Chris Blackwell in 1963 and taken to London, where she recorded a number of singles before breaking through a year later with “My Boy Lollipop,” considered by many to be the first international “blue beat/ska” hit.
Prior to going to England, she had recorded in Jamaica at Sir Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One label with Roy Panton (as Roy & Millie), scoring one local hit called “We’ll Meet.” She only charted once more in America, and performed through the ’70s until settling in the United Kingdom, where she passed away in 2020.
“My Boy Lollipop” was originally written by Robert Spencer from the doo-wop band The Cadillacs for a singer named Barbie Gaye who was promoted by disc jockey Alan Freed. Notorious gangster-record exec Morris Levy, who was sort of like a Jewish version of Suge Knight, also received credit. When Small’s version took off, Levy took full credit and stripped Spencer’s name off the song.
As ska music began to evolve during that time period, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingstone came together and began recording in the studio initially with Leslie Kong in 1962, and then producer Coxsone Dodd. They were first called The Teenagers, followed by the Wailing Wailers.
The aforementioned Chris Blackwell began releasing the band’s albums worldwide in 1969 on his Island Records label that he founded back in 1958. Tosh and Livingstone left in 1974 for reasons having to do with their religion and the clubs they were playing in, but each went on to have their own successful careers.
Sometime in the mid-’70s I got a chance to meet Bob Marley at a hotel in Philadelphia. I was doing sales for Island’s local distributor and was invited to a dinner in his honor with local radio and record store folks. Several of us got there early, finding Marley sitting and talking to a couple of old friends. In 1966 he had lived with his mom for a short time in nearby Wilmington, Delaware, working briefly at both DuPont and on the Chrysler assembly line.
With a big fat spliff in his hand, he stood up in bare feet, walked over to greet us, and extended his hand. He was soft spoken and very gracious; we spoke for several minutes and I was disappointed he didn’t offer to share his spliff. Could have made for a better story, but this is all I’ve got. A memory.
This album was released on April Fool’s Day back in 2014 and it’s one I’ve kept close at hand. It sort of came and went without making much of a splash, another tribute that gets lost like dust in the wind.
For a couple of decades I pretty much forgot about how much I like the music of Jackson Browne. During the ’70s I bought and listened to all his albums, but I think he became oversaturated with too much airplay on FM radio which made him part of that giant generational soundtrack rather than a singular artist. After time I just moved away from his work, but thatnks to this one I rediscovered the songs..
Browne’s name is Clyde. He was born in Germany and raised in Orange County, California. For a couple of months in 1966 he played in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when they were doing jugband music. He moved to Manhattan, where his friend Tim Buckley got him a gig accompanying Nico after she left the Velvet Underground. He plays guitar on several tracks of Chelsea Girl and she covered “These Days.” For a short time they were a thing.
When signed as staff writer for Elektra Record’s publishing company in 1967, his songs were recorded by the Dirt Band, Tom Rush, Gregg Allman, Joan Baez, The Eagles, Linda Rondstadt, and The Byrds. He didn’t release his own album until 1972.
Here’s the track list and although it was panned by Rolling Stone for not having a younger generation lineup, but I think it’s pretty good.
1 Don Henley Feat. Blind Pilot- These Days
2 Bonnie Raitt and David Lindley- Everywhere I Go
3 Bob Schneider- Running on Empty
4 Indigo Girls- Fountain of Sorrow
5 Paul Thorn- Doctor My Eyes
6 Jimmy Lafave- for Everyman
7 Griffin House- Barricades of Heaven
8 Lyle Lovett- Our Lady of the Well
9 Ben Harper- Jamaica Say You Will
10 Eliza Gilkyson- Before the Deluge
11 Venice- for a Dancer
12 Kevin Welch- Looking Into You
13 Keb Mo- Rock Me on the Water
14 Lucinda Williams- the Pretender
15 Lyle Lovett- Rosie
16 Karla Bonoff- Something Fine
17 Marc Cohn Feat. Joan As Police Woman- Too Many Angels
18 Sean and Sara Watkins- Your Bright Baby Blues
19 Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa- Linda Paloma
As you may have noticed, The Broadside was broadsided in April, so I’ve combined it with the month of May to give you two-thirds of a season. I won’t trouble you with my troubles, but there are some glitches on the website that are beyond my skill set, and since we’ve last connected I have moved from one place to another which took a lot of time and energy. It felt quite liberating making trip after trip to the local recycling center and the Goodwill drop-off, as I said goodbye to a mountain of possessions I no longer need, as if I needed them in the first place. The albums and CDs, not played in a dozen years, survived. Most books did not. Clothes and shoes older than my twenty-something kids were discarded, and I kept only a few gold records out of the two dozen or so that once adorned my walls. Only two have been hung up, and the rest are resting in the closet.
Here’s the thing about gold or platinum records: they’re handed out like candy to every Tom, Dick, Sally and Carol. They aren’t earned, they are a stroke of ego given mostly to those who had little to do with their success. The first round rightously goes to the musicians, composers, band members, producer and manager, and other people on the creative team. And then the second batch go to us weasels: label people, distributors wholesalers, retailers, radio stations and a whole boatload of freeloaders. Anyway, most of mine hit the trash can because I wasn’t about to go through the trouble of posting them on eBay, like many of my former music biz friends have done.
Meanwhile, since I last posted there’s been a war, the Supreme Court is probably going to take away fifty-years of women’s rights, supermarkets are now considered soft targets for the radical right racists, and we’ve learned that the pandemic isn’t quite over as many musicians are having to interrupt their tours or go out solo while leaving the band behind. This week here in NY, we were told to start wearing the masks again while indoors, as cases are rising rapidly. Other states are following. And as music festival season is kicking off, some returning for the first time since 2019, we’ll likely need to be flexible in our expectations as performers on the bill will likely shift often.
Can We Please Get To The Music Now?
Anybody else notice that there’s been more new music coming out this year than the last two years combined? Likely an overstatement, but there does seem to be a growing list, week after week, and I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to listen more while discarding the things I’ve tried hard to like but just couldn’t. Yes, Spring cleaning.
Pharis and Jason Romero
Here’s the first song from their forthcoming album, Tell ’Em You Were Gold, out on 17th June 2022 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Their seventh album was written and recorded at the couple’s homestead in Horsefly British Columbia in an old barn that they restored themselves, milling their own spruce, hoisting beams, and rebuilding a roof originally covered in tin printing plates, all done between building banjos, adventuring outdoors, and loving up their two kids. I love these folks.
The Hanging Stars
Wearing their cosmic country and late 60s West Coast folk-rock influences on their sleeve, embroidered with seams of Crosby Stills and Nash and The Byrds, recorded at Edwyn Collins’ Helmdale studios in Scotland, The Hanging Star’s fourth album Hollow Heart is their best yet. (folk radio.co.uk) The band is based in London and they cite a long list of reference points from Fairport to the Byrds, but they bring on their own unique sound that borders on psych-folk-cosmic-power pop, without the pop.
Erin Rae
Erin Rae makes gentle music that’s easy to listen to over and over again, and yet it is never boring. The Nashville songwriter’s 2018 album Putting on Airs established this strength with 12 impeccable, minimalist recordings that showcased her subtle vocal style and acoustic guitar playing: It also demonstrated a consistent gift for writing earworms. With her latest album, Lighten Up, Rae keeps the songwriting focused and tight while broadening her stylistic palette, landing on a sound that’s less acutely folksy and more classic, unpretentious pop music. (Pitchfork)
Eddie Berman
His fourth album Broken English (released in January) is a modern folk commentary on our tenuous American life–written before the pandemic. Though performed on guitar, the songs were written on the banjo. “With the fingerpicking, flat-picking style I play there’s sort of the bones of the melody baked into whatever I’m playing. When I come up with a progression I like, I turn on a recorder and just start singing to it off the top of my head — sometimes gibberish, sometimes fully formed thoughts, usually a combination of the two. And then at some indeterminate, later point, I’ll take all that subconscious/left brain shit and try to turn it into something more coherent.” (Spin)
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
For her recent album, Crooked Tree, Molly put together a list of supporting bluegrass and Americana musicians that would catch anyone’s eye: Gillian Welch, Billy Strings, Sierra Hull, Dan Tyminski, Margo Price, Jason Carter, Tina Adair, Old Crow’s Ketch Secor, and Jerry Douglas, who produced the album. With all the songs co-written by Tuttle, the album serves as a reflection of her past in many ways; her love of music as a child, her home town of San Francisco, her challenges and her maturation. (musicfestnews.com)
Billy Strings (and Post Malone)
Hard to connect Billy with Molly, as they represent a new tradition of kids raised on bluegrass festivals with parents who are exceptional players, and have morphed into something new and different. Not surprising that they were room mates when they moved to Nashville, and that their increased popularity seems in synch. Billy has turned out to be more of a live concert creature, constantly on the road and tapping into the work ethic as well as joining the extended family of the Grateful Dead. This video features the unlikely rapper/country-lovin’ Post Malone, and I’m telling you….I sing this song all day, every day since I first saw it.
Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert
(Wait! Didn’t you post this in March? Yes. What’s your point?)
Kieran Kane’s a folk-music lifer, known for his work in the all-star trio Kane Welch Kaplin and his killer songs, which have been recorded by big names like John Prine and Emmylou Harris. Rayna Gellert’s a world-class fiddler who grew up playing old-time music before finding success in the 2000s with her string band Uncle Earl. Together, they’re not an odd couple, but a finely tuned folk duo whose parts fit together perfectly. The songs on their third album The Flowers That Bloom In The Springare built from memorable melodies, homespun harmonies, hard times, heartbreak, and the clarion sound of strings plucked, strummed, and bowed. (Bandcamp)
Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage
Making the best of a bad situation, when the pandemic struck, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage revised plans for their third album Ink of the Rosy Morningand recorded the album while holed up in an old seaside schoolhouse in Hastings. They stripped arrangements back to basics with just two guitars and emerged with a collection of mostly traditional numbers subtitled A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America. The album opens with their voices mingling on gorgeous harmony for the twin fingerpicking of A Winter’s Night, more strictly A-Roving On A Winter’s Night, an Appalachian folk tune learnt from the repertoire of Doc Watson, followed by some nimble fretwork with Hannah singing lead for the equally traditional Appalachian murder ballad Polly O Polly. (folk radio.co.uk)
Hannah and Ben have released three albums together since 2016, and they each are from the UK but seem to have travelled extensively. They’ve toured throughout North America, Europe and of course the UK, playing a hybrid of American roots and traditional folk music. Spiral Earth wrote ” This is folk music for everyone – a master-class in proficiency, an exercise in individuality and a declaration of love of the folk tradition from both sides of the Atlantic’. This last clip is the song that led me to them, appearing on a playlist built on an algorithm of my taste in music. It worked.
Neither the age progression photographs of myself nor the bold title above have anything to do with what’s on my mind this month. I did have a birthday, but that was last month. Old new. I mean, really old. Originally I was going to use a Frank Zappa shot holding an electric fan, but I had used it years ago for another column. So you’ve got me in triplicate, but there is still a Zappa thread to pull.
The topic is Verve Records, which came to mind during a walk I took this afternoon. It has a long history that in some ways almost parallels my life. It was founded in 1956 – I was four by then – by Norman Granz, and became home to the world’s largest jazz catalogue. A producer and concert promoter, Granz was acknowledged as “the most successful impresario in the history of jazz” and he was also a champion of racial equality, insisting, for example, on integrating audiences at concerts he promoted. And he spearheaded the fight to desegregate the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, arguing that it was unfair that black artists could perform on the stages, but could not stay or gamble at the hotels, or even enter through the front doors.
In 1965 Frank Zappa joined a band called Soul Giants and they changed their name to The Mothers. In early 1966, they were spotted by leading record producer Tom Wilson when playing “Trouble Every Day”, a song about the Watts riots. Wilson had earned acclaim as the producer for Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and was one of the few African-Americans working as a major label pop music producer at this time. Wilson signed the Mothers to Verve, a division of MGM, which had built up a strong reputation for its releases of modern jazz recordings in the 1940s and 1950s, but was attempting to diversify into pop and rock audiences.
Verve insisted that the band officially rename themselves the Mothers of Invention as Mother was short for motherfucker—a term that, apart from its profane meanings, can denote a skilled musician.They released their first five albums (if you count Lumpy Gravy, which really wasn’t the Mothers) on Verve, and Zappa, his wife, and all of the Mothers of Invention moved from LA to New York where they got an extended booking at the old Garrick Theater on Bleeker. They moved back to California in 1968, formed a deal with his own Bizarre label and that was the end of Frank and Verve.
Let’s backtrack to 1964, and Jerry Schoenbaum of Verve and Moe Asch of Folkways created Verve Folkways to take advantage of the popularity of folk music and get it on the shelves of the record stores, something Folkways by itself wasn’t able to do. They were distributed by MGM Records which also owned Big 3 Publishing. The president of that entity was Arnold Maxin, who was a huge believer in roots music. In an article in Billboard Magazine from 1965 he said “The most important music developments of our generation have come from the “roots”. I welcome all the material I can get from these sources for it is from these sources that we will obtain the standards of tomorrow”. With that he announced the signing of John Lee Hooker’s publishing. (Arnold is my cousin and and we share the same last name, which helped open doors for me throughout my own music career.)
To broaden the label’s appeal, in 1967 the name was changed from Verve Folkways to Verve Forecast. They first signed The Blues Project and then quickly added Tim Hardin, Jim and Jean, Janis Ian, Richie Havens, Odessa and Dave Van Ronk. There was also The Paupers from Toronto, and Velvet Underground, who had little sales but would end up casting a long shadow.
Over the years MGM had acquired both Verve’s jazz label and Verve Forecast catalogs, and in 1968 Arnold oversaw all three. They were riding high until they weren’t. The following year MGM shut down Verve Forecast and the entire company was soon swallowed up themselves in a purchase by PolyGram, the huge German music company. The product from all three labels was sliced, diced and shifted to various divisions and labels. The party was over.
In May 1998, PolyGram was sold to Seagram which owned Universal Music Group. They too split the catalog up like an apple pie. In 2004 they decided to reactivate the name Verve Forecast, and began signing new artists, Blues Traveller and Teddy Thompson among them. In 2016 Universal created the Verve Label Group to place all of it’s jazz and classical labels, as well as the flotsam and jetsam collected from over the decades. A few years later they made more changes and today the Verve Label Group reports up to the hip-hop/rap division.
And that’s what I was thinking about today. Verve….it was a helluva label.
