ABSTRACT
Jazz label founded in 1946 by Ross Russell (born 1909, Glendale, California), a Los Angeles-based record dealer. After serving in World War II, Russell used his combat pay in 1945 to open the Tempo Music Store on Hollywood Boulevard. With partner and financial backer Marvin Freeman, a local lawyer and jazz aficionado, Russell started Dial Records a year later. At that time, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were in Los Angeles performing; Gillespie was Dial’s first artist, cutting one session before returning to New York in February, but Parker remained. He signed with Dial in March, and made the first recordings of his bop classics “Moose the Mooche,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” and Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia”; the trumpet player on these sessions was a young Miles Davis. However, a second Parker session that July was a disaster; Parker was drinking heavily at the time and suffering from heroin withdrawal and he struggled to complete the session. Shortly after, he was committed to Los Angeles’s Camarillo State Hospital to the psychiatric ward. After his release in early 1947, Russell recorded four more sessions with Parker, two that winter and two more in New York City in the autumn. In addition to Parker, Russell recorded single sessions of a small band comprised of players from Woody Herman’s big band, as well as saxophonist Dexter Gordon. Russell ceased recording new material in 1948, instead reissuing Parker material through 1954 on LPs in various forms. In 1954, Russell sold his Dial recordings to the Concert Hall record company. Russell later wrote a history of jazz in St. Louis (1967), and a biography of Parker (Bird Lives, 1973). Parker’s complete Dial sessions, along with his Savoy recordings from the same period and live and amateur recordings, were released on an eight-CD set in 2002 (Atlantic 92911).
