"In 2011, African-American-owned record labels are not news. Motown is the best-known example, and New Orleans has had No Limit and Cash Money Records. In 1961, the notion of African-Americans owning a record label was a radical one, but it was Harold Battiste’s vision. AFO (All For One) Records was not only Black-owned but a collective—more unusual still—and it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
In person today, Battiste’s gentle temperament makes him seem like an unlikely radical. Health concerns have slowed him some, but his autobiography Unfinished Blues and interviews he has given throughout his career show him to be a humble man, self-effacing about his accomplishments. Reflecting on 50 years of AFO, he says, “I’m impressed now that it has existed for 50 years. I think that that is success for what we started out as, to last as long as we have in this environment. To look at it in retrospect, there were no black companies at all. The record companies that were around, like Minit and Instant, about four or five back then, they’re not here now.”
The idea had been germinating for several years. Battiste had produced such sessions as Art Neville’s “Cha Dooky Doo,” Jerry Byrne’s “Lights Out,” and Larry Williams “Bad Boy” for Specialty. He had been a producer and talent scout talent for $150/week and a quarter percent royalty on everything that was produced. He had also become a member of the Nation of Islam and was aware of how little money the Black musicians who played on records made, even when such records sold huge quantities. Battiste writes in Unfinished Blues, “I’d been listening to speeches from the eligible Elijah Muhammad, messages that often spoke to the need for our people to create wealth through ownership. It seemed that every ethnic group was identified with a product or service that they owned and controlled, and it seemed that the product generally attributed to us was music: jazz, blues, R&B, gospel.”
After incorporating, things started to fall into place for AFO. Juggy Murray, owner of Sue Records in New York, had called up Battiste looking for an A&R man in New Orleans. When Murray found out what AFO was, he caught a plane to New Orleans and agreed to finance the production and distribution of AFO’s records nationally. Battiste was surprised to find out Murray was a black man when he met him, but that fit well into his overall philosophy.
Lastie and Battiste auditioned artists. Jessie Hill, Lastie’s nephew, brought a 19-year-old singer named Barbara George and a guitar player named Prince La La to audition. Prince La La, a.k.a. Lawrence Nelson, was the younger brother of Walter “Papoose” Nelson, a well-known guitarist who had played with Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. George couldn’t get the hang of the rhythm of Nelson’s “She Put the Hurt on Me,” so they let Nelson record that and combined lyrics she had written to the chords of the gospel tune “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” and came up with “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More).”
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| AFO Executives |
a new trend of trumpet or cornet solos. Chuck Badie says, “That solo that Harold wrote for Melvin? I was told that Miles Davis heard it and said, ‘Who the fuck is that?’”
When Barbara George traveled to New York to play at the Apollo, things started to unravel. George wanted to buy out her contract with AFO because she and Juggy Murray had started a relationship. Murray had bought her a Cadillac and a mink coat, “using her royalty money to do it,” said Battiste in an interview with Charles Gillet. Battiste and Lastie tried to convince her to stay with them, but to no avail. George left, and her first hit became her last. Murray was never able to get anything else going with her.
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| Tami Lynn & Harold Battiste |
AFO also recorded several jazz sessions that were some of the first non-traditional jazz recordings in New Orleans and some of the only New Orleans non-traditional jazz recordings from the 1960s. These include the American Jazz Quintet’s In the Beginning, the AFO Executives with Tami Lynn’s Compendium, and Ellis Marsalis Quartet’s Monkey Puzzle. All of these recordings have a New Orleans flavor, but they also are of the time in the same way that records released by more famous jazz labels such as Blue Note, Impulse, and Prestige were. Of these, only Monkey Puzzle and Compendium were released then. Battiste recalls, “I wanted to record some of the cats who were playing jazz, who would never be widely known and might lose that thing they had…I didn’t care if those records sold, but they should be recorded for posterity.”
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| Harold with Red Tyler |
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| Harold Battiste. Photo by Greg Miles |
With all that activity, AFO Records took an extended hiatus. In the next decades, Battiste put out records in the AFO vein, including a duo record with Melvin Lastie and the jazz recordings of the American Jazz Quintet, Ellis Marsalis Quintet, and the AFO Executives with Tami Lynn in 1976. Other gigs and sessions followed, including work with the Fifth Dimension, concerts with New Orleans expatriate musicians in Los Angeles’ Club Lingerie in 1984, and occasional trips back to New Orleans. When UNO decided to start a jazz studies program in 1989 with Ellis Marsalis at the head, Battiste came back to New Orleans permanently.
AFO Records has a substantial legacy. “I Know” is still played and sung across the planet, and several of the other AFO R&B singles have become favorites of Northern Soul and Deep Soul fans. Jazz compositions such as “Nevermore,” and “Nigeria,” James Black’s tunes “Magnolia Triangle,” “Monkey Puzzle,” “Dee Wee,” and Ellis Marsalis’ “Swinging at the Haven” and “12’s It” have become New Orleans’ jazz standards.
AFO’s latest release is a compilation of Batiste’s performances over the years called The Sound of Harold’s Horn. It’s a sound we hear little these days because health issues limit Battiste’s playing. It presents his musical voice, just as Unfinished Blues tells the story of a sensitive, hard-working musician who is responsible for several careers that were established at expense of his own.
“I read a proof of the book and said, ‘Damn, I didn’t realize that I had done all this stuff,’ Battiste says.”But I didn’t go looking for it. It all found me.”" David Kunian, Offbeat Magazine
Mr. Battiste passed away June 19th, 2015
