THE HOUSE THAT TRANE BUILT:

THE STORY OF IMPULSE RECORDS

I've been reading this new one by Ashley Kahn, who in the past has written entire books about the making of particular classic jazz albums (A Love Supreme and Kind of Blue). Here are a couple of nuggets I want to share:

* The label's [Impulse's] devotion to the mostly African-American, mostly avant-garde players collectively responsible for the last significant leap forward in modern jazz -- the point where most jazz histories and timelines tend do end -- stands today as one of its most important accomplishments.

* "Those gatefolds [the unusually sumptuous and expensive-to-produce fold-out album covers] were a wonderful development because they served as a deluxe rolling tray to manicure your marijuana," sixties political gadfly and jazz booster John Sinclair recalls. "The best Impulses has the most seeds stuck in the middle."

Regarding that last comment, I'd like to add that the label's association with herb outlasted the vinyl age. When I was in college at UC Berkeley in the mid 90's, one of my good friends and roommates would spend what little $ he had left over from his weekly buddha budget on Impulse CDs from Amoeba Records down the street. It didn't really matter which Impulse recording -- just so long as it carried that famous orange and black logo, which guaranteed a certain style and quality. I would then ask him, "Yo, how's that Pharoah Sanders you bought the other day?" and he'd say, "I don't really know. I haven't given it the true test yet. I still need to listen to it when I'm high."

Until reading this book, I never realized how much the label was indeed "the house that Trane built." Not in the same way that Atlantic was the house that Ray built. The symbiotic relationship here was even more explicit. After Coltrane's death in 1967, Impulse signed countless saxophonists in a very similar, spiritual, experimental vein: Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, Dewey Redman, Gato Barbieri, John Klemmer, Sam Rivers.

By the seventies, "it seemed as though Impulse became the label characterized by the angry black tenor man," says producer Ed Michel, who led the label into the rock era. "They weren't all angry, they weren't all black, and they weren't all tenor men, but that was kind of what it appeared to be."

According to Kahn, the closest analogy is the post-Bitches Brew succession of amplified-jazz groups on Coumbia Records in the Seventies: Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever.

Can you think of any comparable situations today? (Not including artist-owned labels.)