Ross Russell

Ross Moody Russell (March 18, 1909, Los Angeles – January 31, 2000, Palm Springs) was an American jazz producer and author. He was the founder of Dial Records.

Russell wrote pulp fiction in the 1930s. His heroes were Dashiell Hammett and, especially, Raymond Chandler, on whom he wrote an unfinished study. He also worked as a reporter, at one point writing on Luis Russell while on tour. He was in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. He served in the North Atlantic and was shipwrecked on Novaya Zemlya far above the Arctic Circle. His accounts of this episode appeared in Life magazine and two other periodicals. Later, he had long duty in the South Pacific. After the War he set up his own record store, the Tempo Music Shop, in Hollywood. In 1946 he founded Dial Records in order to record Charlie Parker, who was in Los Angeles at the time. He also recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Earl Coleman. Russell saved all of the alternate takes he did, which made vault releases of his material particularly rich for jazz aficionados. Dial also was the first record company in the US to record the music of Arnold Schoenberg and other modern masters, such as Béla Bartók and John Cage. He shut Dial down in 1949 and spent several years away from jazz music as owner of a golf course and other pursuits.

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