John Hammond with Bob Dylan in 1961. Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Pictures
The identify of John Hammond Sr. stays unfamiliar to many, however as a expertise scout, producer, musicologist, broadcaster, journalist, and mentor, he helped the world to find artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, and scores extra in between. When you examine his extraordinary contribution, do take a take heed to The Legacy of John Hammond, a hand-picked playlist that includes the artists he produced and championed.
A local New Yorker born on December 15, 1910, who studied violin and viola at Yale, Hammond introduced a thought-about scholarliness to the usually frenetic world of widespread music. He was the son of a Vanderbilt heiress, and developed his love of jazz by listening to information along with his dad and mom’ servants. He was producing discs in Greenwich Village by the early Thirties, when an affiliation started with Columbia Information that may final for the remainder of his life.
Within the pre-war period, with racial segregation rife in music, Hammond’s open-mindedness helped numerous black artists to open doorways that may in any other case have been closed. It was John that persuaded Benny Goodman to file with the 17-year-old Billie Vacation, giving the teenage vocal phenomenon her break, and he did the identical to advance the careers of Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton, and others.
“She was 17 when I first heard her, she was nearly 18,” Hammond later mentioned of Vacation. “She was just unbelievable, she phrased like an improvising instrumentalist. She was the first singer I ever heard do that. She didn’t read music, didn’t have to. To me she was unbelievable.”
The extremely important From Spirituals To Swing live shows at New York’s Carnegie Corridor in December 1938, and 12 months later, had been additional Hammond landmark. Goodman, Basie and Turner all shone on this elevated setting, as did jazz notables comparable to Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, blues names like Sonny Terry and Massive Invoice Broonzy, and gospel acts together with the Golden Gate Quartet and Sister Rosette Tharpe. They might even have shone a multi-racial highlight on Robert Johnson, if not for his homicide in August of that 12 months.
After World Warfare II and his military service, Hammond expanded past even these catholic tastes by championing such artists as people troubadour Pete Seeger. He discovered the teenage Aretha Franklin and produced her preliminary, jazz-leaning Columbia albums of the early Nineteen Sixties.
By then, a younger man referred to as Bob Dylan had crossed his path; Hammond signed him to the label, produced his self-titled debut LP of 1962 and co-produced the next 12 months’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with Tom Wilson.
Hammond continued to establish and to signal artists to Columbia with an uncanny and unmatched intuition for uncooked expertise, from Leonard Cohen in 1967 to Springsteen in 1972. Hammond’s son, additionally referred to as John, grew to become a revered blues musician himself.
Hammond Sr. retired in 1975, however as he grew older, he remained a father determine to lots of the artists he had mentored. Even on the age of 73, in 1983, underlined that his instinct was as dependable as ever when he signed the guitar phenomenon Stevie Ray Vaughan.
John was inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in 1986 and died on July 10 the next 12 months, on the age of 76. He stays, for a lot of, the final word A&R man.
