Status Inactive Country of origin U.S. Founder Milt Gabler Defunct 1954 | Genre Jazz Location New York City Date founded 1938 | |
 | ||
Billie holiday strange fruit commodore records 1939
Commodore Records was an American independent record label known for producing Dixieland jazz and swing. It is also remembered for releasing Billie Holiday's hit "Strange Fruit".
Contents
History
Commodore Records was founded in the spring of 1938 by Harlem-born Milt Gabler, who in 1926 had founded the Commodore Music Shop in Manhattan at 136 East 42nd Street (diagonally across the street from the Commodore Hotel), and from 1938–41 with a branch at 46 West 52nd Street, an address commemorated in Chu Berry's song "Forty-six, West Fifty-two".
The bulk of Commodore's issues were Dixieland (Eddie Condon, Wild Bill Davison) and swing (Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines). Commodore's biggest hit was "Strange Fruit" (backed with "Fine and Mellow") by Billie Holiday. The label was most active from 1939 to 1946 when it recorded many of the biggest names in jazz.
Commodore was one of the first labels to list the full personnel of bands on the label.
As with his United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA) label, Gabler arranged for recording and pressing to be done by the American Record Corporation (ARC), then Reeves Transcription Services and Decca Records. Both Commodore and UHCA used various matrix number series depending on the location of the session's recording.
After World War II, Gabler worked for Decca. His Commodore label was later used by Decca for reissuing jazz recordings. In the early 1960s, a series of Commodore albums was compiled by Gabler and released on Mainstream Records.
In the late 1980s Mosaic Records issued Commodore's complete recordings on three box sets (LP).
On the Sept. 7, 2016 episode of comedian Marc Maron's WTF? podcast, comedian and actor Billy Crystal gave numerous details and anecdotes about the founding of the record label and music store (founded by his maternal grandfather and uncle Milt Gabler and later involving Crystal's father, Jack).