Jim Carroll: Verve Records’ decline shows jazz is not the commercial giant it used to be

No one ever called Norman Granz a filter or a taste-maker. Today, though, that’s how the Verve Records’ founder would be tagged in articles such as this. Back when he was at the top of his game, he was just the man at the label who worked with such seminal acts as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and hundreds more.

Later after Granz sold the label, Verve continued to be a reliable barometer of new sounds and trends. It worked with acts such as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa in the 1960s and, after a lengthy spell as a reissue label, had a renewed creative run in the 1990s thanks to Herbie Hancock and others.

Today, Verve is no longer the force it once was – and that’s a situation which is unlikely to change given recent developments. A few weeks ago, the label’s current owners Universal Music quietly ushered the remaining staff out the door and handed oversight of Verve’s operations to their Interscope wing.

There’s unlikely to be any room in that kind of set-up for a new Granz to emerge. Major labels are increasingly infertile ground for any enterprising lad or lass who wants to work with idiosyncratic musicians who are not straight-up commercial prospects.

You can see why Universal have as good as shuttered Verve. They’re in the business of making money from flogging music in any and as many ways as they can. The only jazz acts who meet that criteria are crossover stars who don’t require a specialist label and are better off under the pop umbrella anyway.

Unlike the days when Granz was around, jazz is no longer a commercial giant. It’s still a massive creative force, as anyone who pops into the 12 Points festival in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre this weekend will see firsthand. But it very rarely results in the kind of pay-off which would persuade a major label to invest and patiently await returns.

That said, there are still entities who document jazz’s cutting edge, as opposed to reissuing old gems or repackaging standards for Mother’s Day albums. You have established leading-edge and well respected labels as ECM and Nonesuch and fledgling, would-be Motowns such as Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder set-up. Even Blue Note is still at the races with fine, hefty releases of late from Gregory Porter and the excellent trumpet player Ambrose Akinmusire.

The continued existence and rude health of these labels show that there are still operators in the game who are prepared to do what the old school did all those years ago. They want to find exciting, talented acts and work with them to get their music and art to an audience who will appreciate what they’ll hear. It’s a playbook that Granz would certainly recognise, though he’d hardly be hanging around waiting for Interscope to approve his plans.

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We've mentioned Blue Note blue blood Ambrose Akinmusire and he's appearing at the Bray Jazz Festival over the May bank holiday weekend. Apart from the man behind last year's hugely ambitious The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint album, others playing the 16th year of the festival include Brazil's Ed Motta, the Dublin City Jazz Orchestra playing tribute to Kenny Wheeler, Francesco Turrisi's Tacquín Experiments and Sue Rynhart. See brayjazz.com for more.