In the days when records spun at 78 revolutions a minute, there was one label that you couldn't miss, even when it was speeding round the turntable. The flying V of Verve records was unmistakable, as were the discs themselves - recordings of the very finest jazz artists given the same respect and treatment as orchestras and soloists performing classical music.
Verve's founder and inspiration was Norman Granz, who died on November 22nd aged 83. His outlook was summed up in the totem he adopted for himself: "I insisted that my musicians were to be treated with the same respect as Leonard Bernstein or Jascha Heifetz, because they were just as good - both as men and as musicians." It was due in no small way to him that artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and Count Basie became household names.
He was a man with an overriding musical and moral philosophy: when you listened to jazz, you should do it in comfort - and in the company of whoever wants to sit next to you. Thus, two canons in American music were crashed to the ground. For Norman Granz wanted jazz to be heard calmly, either at home or in a concert hall.
Jazz in a concert hall? The idea was revolutionary. Everyone knew that you listened to jazz in smoky clubs, fighting for a seat and a table on a spot of the floor that wasn't taken up with gyrating couples. And those couples were, of course, black. Either that or white. But not both together.
His two intentions - bringing respect to jazz and eschewing racial prejudice - found their fruition in the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts (or JATP as they were known to aficionados), and did so right from the beginning. The first concert, in 1944, was a benefit for Hispanic youths who had been jailed in the "zoot suit" riots in Los Angeles.
He felt that the young, poverty-stricken men had been wrongly treated, and was going to put all his talents and abilities to righting the injustice. He took an equally determined stand on behalf of other, much better-heeled, people whom he felt were being ill-treated simply because of their race.
The concerts were launched at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, but eventually went all over the US and Canada, and crossed the Atlantic to Britain. The formula was always the same: people sat in the comfort of a concert hall and behaved themselves. They listened to music presented by people like Nat King Cole, J. J. Johnson and Benny Carter. They didn't perform with the musicians as they sat, enthusiastically but quietly. And black people sat side by side with whites. Norman Granz refused to hold events in any venue that operated a colour bar. That was the way he was brought up - to respect people and their music.
In 1955, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet were arrested at a Norman Granz gig, playing a game of craps backstage. The stakes were only a dollar, but it was enough for the Houston police to demonstrate their prejudices. Norman Granz protested, only to be charged with running the game himself. He could have got away with a small fine, but decided to fight the charges. It cost him $2,000 - a huge amount for the time - to successfully clear his friends' names.
Norman Granz was born into a Los Angeles family of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and educated at the University of California, an institution that pioneered respect for music not always considered quite decent. After wartime military service in the US army air corps, he became a film editor at MGM, where he first met music people.
JATP was the obvious precursor to Verve records, which he launched in the same year that the concerts began. Indeed, always the shrewdest of businessmen, he introduced the idea of recording concerts for commercial use; no one had previously thought of recording anyone away from a studio, or in a concert hall at which there was no audience. The JATP series was so successful that other jazz greats - including Oscar Peterson, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Krupa and Billie Holiday - soon joined his stable.
With the birth of the LP, Verve came into its own, as did its artists. Ella Fitzgerald's famous Songbook albums of the 1950s, which included the music of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin, were given the same treatment as the work of pop artists of the day, and the sales figures reflected the success of the promotion.
When Norman Granz sold Verve to MGM records, he started the Pablo label, taking onto it much of the work to which he had retained the rights, including, for instance, that of Art Tatum.
He also made a series of film shorts, the best known of which was Jamming The Blues, featuring Artie Shaw and Jimmy Dorsey. His biggest coup was probably making the first commercial recording of Duke Ellington's The Queen's Suite in 1959.
In 1994, Verve marked the label's 50th anniversary with a release of many of its outstanding recordings.
Norman Granz is survived by his wife, Greta.
Norman Granz: born 1918; died, November 2001