Joel Dorn: Wiser Angel

New Directions In MusicNov 2, 2026

Joel Dorn: Wiser Angel

“I don’t do things to do them, I really only do what I want to do, which is a tricky way of living.

Nov 2

This is a piece I wrote from an interview that I conducted with Dorn for Jazzitude sometime in 2002-2003. At that time I was also writing for JazzIz and All About Jazz where I wrote the column ‘Late Night Thoughts on Jazz.’

At the time of the interview Dorn had recently launched Hyena Records, the latest in a series of labels that he had started and then abandoned when their investors began to show more interest in the tech side of the business than the music.

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“It ain’t the same as walkin’ in and saying to Leonard Chess or Nesuhi Ertegun or Morris Levy or one of those guys, ‘I got a girl who can sing her ass off, I need five grand.’” Joel Dorn is one of the old-time record guys. There are only a few of them left, guys who can remember when they pitched an artist directly to record label owners and made records on a handshake. “That part of the business is dead. It’s not dead on the niche things. The hip-hop business proved that you could make records in your kitchen if you want, if it’s the right thing and you know how to get it to the people who should hear it.”

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Joel_Dorn.jpg

Dorn’s had more lives in the music business than most cats, whether of the four-legged or the reefer-puffing variety. A Philly DJ in his callow youth (his words), his language is sprinkled with hip argot like “cat” and “baby,” yet it’s such a part of his personality that it never sounds affected or anachronistic. If you like music, acts with personality, if you just plain love records and everything that goes with them, you just gotta love Joel Dorn. And if you love jazz, real rhythm and blues (“I don’t know what the fuck R&B is right now” he opines during our conversation), gospel, or doo-wop, then you really gotta love Joel Dorn. This is the guy who discovered a pile of reel-to-reel tapes from John Coltrane’s Atlantic years in a water-damaged area of a warehouse, who has made it a personal crusade to ensure that Rahsaan Roland Kirk is not forgotten, who counts Mac “Dr. John” Rebennak and the late Doc Pomus among his runnin’ partners.

The thing is, unlike some guys who’ll tell you they’re just in it for the love of the music while their actions make it painfully obvious that nothing could be farther from the truth, Joel Dorn’s actions and demeanor speak louder than any words. He’s walked away from a label he built into a formidable brand, 32 Records, rather than see it become another drab label run by bean counters. His next project, Label M, folded just when it was developing into something. He takes great pride in the fact that he was once able to send the widow of saxophonist Sonny Stitt a check for $18,000. Sure, he’s a businessman and he isn’t giving it away, but he realizes that there are rewards to his business and to this life that aren’t monetary.

And another thing, Joel Dorn likes to have some fun. “I don’t do things to do them, I really only do what I want to do, which is a tricky way of living.” Following the demise of Label M, Dorn took a solid year off, regrouping. “Know what I did?” he asks. “I walked around with a camera and I took pictures of mannequins. In store windows. Yeah, and I got an agent, I’m trying to get my mannequin book published.” I’m not really sure whether he’s pulling my leg or not, but it’s certainly not impossible to imagine Dorn tromping around New York City taking pictures of mannequins in the windows at Barney’s and Bergdorff’s and funky little shops down in the Village, planning his next move all the while.

So, what really happened at 32 Records and Label M? “I walked away from 32 because I had partners who wanted to go into the Internet business. I don’t give a flying rubber fuck about the Internet business. So when they did that I walked and the label folded within six months. Label M was a little shaky from the beginning. The people who backed me were a little shaky, and then they were taken over by, basically, a colony of baboons. And, you know, they wanted to go into the Internet business. One of those dumb dot-com things. I don’t even understand it, you know. The guy who took over the people that funded Label M started to explain it to me, and while he was talking I just got up and cleared my desk. Y’know, I’ll talk to you later, have a nice time. Call me when the Internet comes to a town near you.”

Now Joel and company are back with Hyena Records, and as he says, “We’re doing this one with a vengeance. This is not make believe, I want this one to really score.” Initially Hyena began by releasing masters that Dorn owned while he planned the new label’s direction. The first four releases were reissues of Dorn’s original Night Records releases, live performances by Eddie Harris, Cannonball Adderley, Les McCann, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Likening these recordings to “soundtracks to documentaries that didn’t exist,” Dorn created a whole new kind of recorded document, one that allowed the listener to return to the period when jazz clubs were filled with the electricity of performers who were not only great musicians, but could entertain as well. The next two Hyena releases were the very first Roomful of Blues album and a re-vamped version of Aaron Neville’s Orchid In The Storm EP.

“I think it’s some of the best singing Aaron Neville ever did” Joel tells me. “I had an idea to do an album called Wiser Angels. And what I was gonna do is I was gonna cut sides with Aaron, some sides with Dusty Springfield, and some sides with Frankie Valli. The premise of the album was these are all people who had gigantic hits in the fifties and sixties, maybe disappeared from the public view for a moment or so, but when they resurfaced, were even stronger or had matured in a very impressive way from where they had started. So I cut one side with Dusty and then she didn’t want to continue with the project. Frankie and I never got into the studio, and I cut the five sides with Aaron, and instead of an LP I had an EP. I just think that I happened to catch him at a time when he was…his purest. I don’t know of a better way to say it. And the reason we tuned into the fifties stuff was that both of us loved that music. And he’s the best. I mean, there’s nobody living who can do the fifties stuff like him.”

Orchid In The Storm is truly a minor classic, featuring Aaron’s heartbreakingly gorgeous renditions of “Pledging My Love,” “For Your Precious Love,” “The Ten Commandments of Love,” “Earth Angel,” and a Medley with brother Art on “This Is My Story” and “We Belong Together.” The original tracks also feature Art Neville on keyboards, and the tenor sax work of David “Fathead” Newman as well as the arrangements of Wardell Quezergue. “Orchid is very special to me” writes Dorn in his liner notes, “I didn’t wanna add anything inappropriate, anything that didn’t fit the vibe.” The additional tracks are “Mona Lisa” from the Nevilles album Fiyo on the Bayou, which Dorn also produced, “Save the Last Dance For Me” from a Doc Pomus tribute album, “Warm Your Heart,” a Drifters number produced by Linda Ronstadt and George Massenberg, and the “Mickey Mouse March” from Hal Willner’s Disney tribute album. They fill out the original EP material splendidly without detracting from its perfection.

It was Dorn’s close friend, the legendary Doc Pomus, who hipped him to the Nevilles. “He called me up one day and he said ‘You wanna hear the greatest bar band in the world? And the best singer living?’ Yeah, who wouldn’t wanna do that? So I met him at the Bottom Line, I saw the Nevilles. I went nuts. It was very difficult to get a deal. Eventually, Bette Midler spoke to Jerry Moss, who was one of the owners of A&M at the time, and she convinced him that it was a worthwhile act. I made the record, and they hated it.”

Huh?

“I never worked for A&M again. I was so sure Fiyo on the Bayou was gonna be a smash, I went out to A&M, I took people out to dinner, I kissed ass, I did all the stuff you have to do at a record company to let people know you believe in this.” The marketing people at A&M insisted that the Neville Brothers were an R&B act by virtue of the fact that they were black. Dorn vehemently disagreed. “I said, if you put them out on the college circuit and get them to the places where kids at, say, the University of Ohio go on a Friday night to drink beer, watch what happens.” The marketing people promoted the record to R&B radio anyway, where it flopped. Dorn was subsequently pulled into a meeting with the label’s marketing director, “some idiot who had been brought in because he had been successful at Toyota selling cars.”

The marketing director talked about market share and demographics, drawing circles and lines on a blackboard. The he told the veteran producer, “Now, let me play you a record that’ll show you where you should be, the direction you should be heading.” Dorn is still dumbfounded as he tells the story.

“I gave him the Neville Brothers. And he played me a record by a group called Pablo Cruise. You know, you talk about a one hit wonder and nothing happenin’ on the one hit, right? And he said to me ‘this is what you should be doing.’”

Dorn’s story is more than a rant about the idiocies of the record business, where squares make decisions for the hip people. It demonstrates the fact that most of the great popular music we have today got recorded in spite of, rather than because of, the music industry. Most of the best music recorded and handed down to subsequent generations over the years was recorded because of the personal taste and singular vision of someone who understood that the word “music” precedes the word “business.” “The days of the Alfred Lion, Norman Granz, Leonard Chess, Berry Gordy…all these one of a kind guys who ran labels according to their passion, or their own taste…that’s over. They can come up with all the bullshit in the world about, you know, piracy and MP3 and downloading and the economy…let me tell you something. You make a record tomorrow that makes you feel like a Marvin Gaye record did thirty years ago, I don’t give a fuck how bad the economy is, people will be in there. They’ll buy that record.”

Despite his assertion that “I don’t like jazz any more than I like doo-wop or blues or country or gospel,” Dorn has put out an awful lot of great jazz material from his days at 32 Records, straight through Label M, and continuing on Hyena. Label M released some choice recordings from the fabled Left Bank Society’s archives of live shows, including Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, and Jimmy Heath. Dorn says there is still “boatloads” of material there that he hopes to start releasing again in a year or so. But first there are some other major items in the works at Hyena. The label has reached an agreement with the Thelonious Monk estate to put together packages from the family’s archives of unreleased Monk material. There’s another blues project with Blood Ulmer and Vernon Reid. There’s a guitar/banjo and percussion duet called the Frank and Joe Show. And Dorn is “on the edge of a deal with someone that I can’t talk to you about, but a major, major American pop artist of the last forty years, and we’re going to do something from that stash.”

And then there’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the mutli-instrumentalist/composer/bandleader/visionary who was blinded in his infancy and refused to recognize any kind of boundary, be it musical, cultural, or racial. “There was never anything like him,” Dorn tells me. “For some reason the critical community and some jazz fans looked at him like he was a clown or a vaudeville act or a gimmick thing.” The reason for this is undoubtedly because Kirk played multiple instruments at the same time, some of them not even recognized as instruments by most folks. He also exhorted his audience with all the enthusiasm and hyperbole of a carnival barker. But to judge the seriousness of Kirk’s intentions by these measures is to ignore the very real talent that the man displayed.

In any case, these “gimmicks” as some folks call them, have been part of jazz since its earliest days, as evidenced by some of the music of Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz musicians who were on the scene when jazz went hand in hand with broad comedy and spiritual exhortation. Another reason Kirk aroused the ire of the critical community was his refusal to recognize the boundaries of jazz. He included elements of soul, R&B, and funk into his music, giving them their rightful place beside bebop, hot jazz, gospel, blues, and the most nascent styles of jazz to come out of New Orleans.

“He did OK when he was alive, nothing phenomenal. When he died I figured ‘well, he’s not here anymore, people are gonna get it now.’ Not only did it not happen, he practically disappeared from the radar screen. So about fifteen years ago I started something called the Rahsaanaissance. And I just said I’m gonna bust my balls to make sure people hear him and slowly but surely over the last ten, twelve years we’ve raised people’s awareness level of him, and he’s much more accepted by the critical community and by the general jazz population than he was.” Dorn has released a variety of Kirk material, including multiple CD sets (the 32 Records releases Dog Years in the Fourth Ring and Aces Back to Back) and live sets (Label M’s Here Comes the Whistle Man and Hyena’s The Man Who Cried Fire). Hyena has just released the phenomenal Rahsaan Roland Kirk Compliments of the Mysterious Phantom recorded at the Backdoor in San Diego on November 5, 1974. “This is as close as you’re gonna get to knowing what it was like to go into a club and see him” Dorn asserts. “And I think people who love him are gonna love this, and I think that part of that hip-hop crowd, the Tribe Called Quest kinda kids, Roots kinda kids, I think they’re gonna dig it. Little by little we’re making progress with Rahsaan. And, ultimately, at a certain point, people are gonna get it.”

Dorn has always worked with artists who excited him rather than those who played whatever sound was popular at the time. Rahsaan, Yusef Lateef, Bette Midler, Leon Redbone, the Nevilles—none of these artists were the prevailing flavor of the moment when Dorn started working with them. “Basically,” he says, “I capture what people do. I don’t tell them what to play. When I talk about these records, I know that I’m the producer on them, but I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the artist. So if I say I think a record’s terrific I don’t mean ‘listen to my drum sound or my snappy edits.’”

Dorn’s most recent production job is on the new Telarc release, Friday Night Special from singer Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer. The album is a bit of a tribute to the great organ/tenor bands of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (featuring organist Joey DeFrancesco and saxophonist Houston Person) and evokes the atmosphere of a late nightclub set. It’s clearly an era that Dorn remembers fondly:

“Let me tell you something, pal…that was as good as this shit gets. You go in there on a Friday night in the summer, you know, you smoke a joint in the car on the way down, then you have four or five of those cheap nightclub drinks that, you know, take the buzz up…and if Duff or Stanley and Shirley, or Groove Homes, or any of those people were there…Oh-ho! You know…it was spectacular. It was unbelievable. And it was good time music. You know, one of the drags with jazz now is that it ain’t fun. When you would go into a club when I was a kid…” he stops mid-sentence.

“I hate to sound like one of those guys who say ‘Oh, Hershey Bars tasted better during WWII, you know…but you go catch Cannon or Horace or Rahsaan or even Miles, who was as far from entertaining as anybody could be, or Trane, who was certainly not an entertainer…you’d go in there, man, and the room would be filled with electricity…Everybody would be excited ‘cause there was new cats comin’. Blakey always had new guys. Mingus always had a new cat…Cannon, Horace…they all had new guys. These sidemen would come out and explode! And it wasn’t just with jazz. You had Ray Charles and Little Richard and all those guys. Little Richard would come out and some guy would take a tenor solo like Lee Allen or something, and he would blow the fuckin’ roof off the place. It wasn’t this whole thing where tickets cost $114 and parking’s $37.50, and you go in and there’s smoke machines and lights and all that shit…it was a different thing.”

Dorn’s enthusiasm is completely infectious, and his memories of those performances in dark, smoke-filled clubs reveals something else: jazz and other forms of popular music, including funk, soul, and R&B, all intermingled freely in that time before what Dorn calls the “pigeonhole patrol” arrived on the scene to inform all of us just what could and what could not legitimately called jazz. Hopefully we all learned something from the very dull period of retreading the past that ensued.

“When I was a kid, you go see Kool and the Gang, you got a jazz concert, a pop concert, and an R&B concert all in one set. Those bands were incredible. Bobby Bland would come to town with that band?? Ohhhh…you go catch Bobby or B.B. when he had the old bands, you know…When Ray Charles came to town when I was a kid…when Ray Charles had the seven piece band, with Hank (Crawford) and (David) Fathead (Newman) and Marcus Belgrave and Edgar Willis and Bruno Carr and the original Raylettes, Margie and them…you never saw anything like that in your life. EVER. And they played for two hours. By the time they got to “What I Say” you needed to take a shower…you were fuckin’ wasted from this shit. And I ain’t feelin’ that now.”

“Take away the smoke machines and the laser beams and the light show…gimmee somebody that can stand up there and just do it. I’m still lookin’ for that shit. And I’ll go down looking for that…I’ll sink with that ship.”

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