JATP touring in Japan. © Please view disclaimer

In 1944, jazz impresario Norman Granz began a series of jazz concerts at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. The form, style, and content of the concerts caught the jazz public's imagination. The series continued through the rest of the decade and into the 50s, gradually becoming more spectacular.

Norman Granz had the foresight and acumen to record all his concerts. The LP releases of these extended jam-session performances proved commercially profitable and helped to establish Granz as a leading record producer. From 1957 on, JATP tours were confined to Europe and, in 1967, after a farewell tour of the U.S., the concept was largely abandoned, although Granz continued to tour artists under the generic JATP banner. (Indeed, it might be claimed that his concept is mirrored in many latter-day festival packages.)

Although often criticized for their showier aspects, JATP concerts included a wealth of fine playing by a succession of outstanding mainstream and bebop performers. 1 JATP was also notable for its effects on race relations. Norman Granz felt that audiences, as well as performers, should be integrated, and he used the economic power that JATP gave him to do it. Promoters seeking to book his concerts were presented with contracts forbidding discrimination at the door.

JATP played the first concert for an integrated audience in the history of Charleston, South Carolina, for example. Granz cancelled a New Orleans concert when he learned that black patrons were to be segregated from the white audience. He housed his artists at the best hotels, often hotels that had previously been barred to black people, and moved them from one engagement to another by airline, rather than hauling them on long, dreary bus rides. On at least one occasion, he chartered a plane to move company members out of a southern city after a concert rather than letting them spend a night under “Jim Crow” (i.e. discriminatory) conditions. 2

Oscar Peterson joined the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours in 1950. His second JATP tour closed at the end of 1951 at the Russ Auditorium in San Diego, California, where he was interviewed by Don Freeman, then a stringer for Down Beat magazine and, in later years, a prominent syndicated television reporter. As he said in the interview, “I was a rookie, a kid of twenty-three… I had heard about these big names for years and now I was playing with them. In the first place, I didn’t know how they’d take me, a kid from Canada with the big build-up. I knew I could play a little, but this was the big leagues. To tell the truth, I wasn’t relaxed very much. I couldn’t, not being sure of myself, or of how the musicians and the public would accept my work. The first tour was pretty rough, for just that reason.”  3

By 1953, when Herb Ellis joined the Oscar Peterson Trio and Jazz at the Philharmonic, JATP had grown to enormous proportions. A 1954 Saturday Review 4 story noted that Granz was the “first person who has ever been able to successfully mass produce jazz…(He) owns and operates a record company that has mushroomed so violently in its first year it has had to be split into two companies to accommodate overworked distribution facilities.” 5

At that time, Granz enterprises were worth an estimated $5 million – an astounding figure in 1954. The JATP company then comprised 11 musicians, including the Oscar Peterson Trio and Ella Fitzgerald, who played 75 concerts in 50 U.S. and Canadian cities, 24 concerts in Japan, and 50 concerts in 25 European cities that year. Some 400,000 patrons paid from $2 to $4.80 for tickets. The two Granz record labels, Clef and Norgran, had released more than 200 albums, and in one month alone in 1954, they shipped 25 new titles to record stores. In fact, some 50 per cent of all the jazz records released at that time came from the Granz companies. 6 At this point, Oscar Peterson was featured on 16 of the albums.

Norman Granz closed down North American tours of JATP after its 1957 season, though he continued the European tours. Among the musicians who appeared with JATP over the years were trumpeters Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, trombonist J.J. Johnson, saxophonists Benny Carter, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Charlie Parker, Flip Phillips, and Lester Young, pianists Nat 'King' Cole, Hank Jones, and Oscar Peterson, and drummers Louie Bellson, Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, and Buddy Rich. Granz also included the entire Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands in some of his more ambitious packages. Ella Fitzgerald, too, was a mainstay for many years. 7

O.P. & Friends

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