Origin Jazz Library

Last updated
Origin Jazz Library
Founded 1960 (1960)
Founder Bill Givens
Pete Whelan
Genre Jazz, blues
Country of origin U.S.
Location Thousand Oaks, California
Official website www.originjazz.com

Origin Jazz Library is an independent record label established by Bill Givens and Pete Whelan in 1960 to reissue blues from the 1920s and 1930s. Today the label specializes in reissues of jazz, western swing, folk music, and ragtime.

An independent record label is a record label that operates without the funding of major record labels. Many artists begin their careers on independent labels.

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".

Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.

Contents

Origin's first release was The Immortal Charley Patton. Whelan bowed out of the company in 1967. Givens issued records into the 1990s. Issues slowed due to competition from Yazoo Records, both drawing from the same collection of music. When Givens died in 1999, the label was taken over by Cary Ginell and Michael Kieffer. [1]

Yazoo Records record label

Yazoo Records was an American record label founded in the mid-1960s by Nick Perls. It specialized in early American blues, country, jazz, and other rural American genres collectively known as roots music.

Origin's catalog consists of 16 titles, including the "Bix Restored" series (now five volumes) and the "Western Swing Chronicles" series, documenting the early years of western swing in the 1930s and 1940s.

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "History | Origin Jazz Library". originjazz.com. Retrieved 14 July 2016.
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