JOEL DORN RETURNS WITH HYENA RECORDS
First Four Releases reissue hard-to-find Night Records recordings

Joel Dorn is back! Last time we heard from the intrepid producer he was releasing legendary Left Bank Society jam sessions as well as new work by Leon Parker and James “Blood” Ulmer on his Label M imprint and producing Jane Monheit’s Come Dream With Me album. Then, seemingly as quickly as it came, Label M was history. So what happened? Basically, the label lost its funding when its parent company, who had committed to subsidizing the label for three years while it grew into a self-sufficient enterprise, found itself unable to continue that funding. Easy come, easy go.

Hyena begins the latest installment of the Dorn saga on a high note by reissuing some recordings that Dorn released on the Night Records imprint during a particularly low point in his career. As the inner sleeve of each CD’s digipak relates, courtesy of Joel’s son Adam Dorn, “Flat on his back (in more ways than one) in his rust-colored bathrobe, with bill collectors, utility companies, and credit card companies chasing him, from his bed he made the 4 albums that are NIGHT RECORDS…NIGHT RECORDS is what my father describes as ‘scratching his way back to the middle.’ To me, they represent his scratching his way back to doing whatever he wanted creatively. Without NIGHT RECORDS, there would be none of his John Coltrane box sets, no 32 Records, and no albums with Jane Monheit.”

Dorn started off as a DJ in Philadelphia, and wrote to Atlantic Records' Nesuhi Ertegun regularly as a fan of Ertegun's production work. They became friends, and eventually Dorn was offered the opportunity to produce an album by the artist of his choice. His choice was Hubert Laws, a jazz flutist from Philadelphia. He continued to produce with Ertegun's guidance and over time rose to the level of Vice President. Over a period of 25 years Dorn produced classic albums featuring top jazz and R&B musicians as well as pop artists, including Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Max Roach, Herbie Mann, Yusef Lateef, and David (Fathead) Newman, Mose Allison, Roberta Flack, and Bette Midler. He stayed with Atlantic until 1974, earning four Grammys there: Record of the Year for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack, Jazz Record Of The Year for "Keith Jarrett and Gary Burton", and Best Original Cast Album for "The Me Nobody Knows." He then produced albums through his production company The Masked Announcer. Following a sabbatical and a brief stint promoting music for the World Wrestling Federation, Dorn began work on the compilations that would become the Night Records releases.

“These records were meant to be the soundtracks to documentaries that didn’t exist” says Dorn. “They’re the audio equivalent of auteur filmmaking.” Two of the discs, The Man Who Cried Fire by Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Les Is More by Les McCann are indeed put together like documentaries, with interview segments connecting the music and sometimes-incomplete performances. They capture the musicians in unusual settings or demonstrate qualities not always associated with their playing. The Cannonball Adderley set, Night Radio and Eddie Harris’ Tale of Two Cities are more straightforward nightclub performances, but they feature stage patter and other elements not normally heard on live recordings. “The beauty here is that none of the artists knew they were recording records during the taping of these shows” offers Dorn. “This is how the music actually went down.” Amen.

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