Ross Russell; Charlie Parker Producer, Biographer

Ross Russell, 90, who recorded Charlie Parker on his Dial label in the 1940s, served briefly as the troubled saxophonist’s manager and later wrote a biography of the musician. Born in Los Angeles, Russell graduated from UCLA in the early 1930s with an English degree. He later studied broadcasting, picked up his Federal Communications Commission license and worked as a free-lance writer of pulp detective stories. During World War II he joined the merchant marine as a radio operator. After his discharge, he opened Tempo Music, a jazz record store, in Los Angeles. When Parker came to town with Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet to play at Billy Berg’s nightclub, Russell decided to bring Parker into the studio to record. Those February 1946 sessions are considered some of Parker’s best work, but a subsequent session that July was disastrous for Parker, then strung out on heroin and alcohol. From that session came a tortured version of the ballad “Lover Man,” which Russell later released. Parker suffered an emotional collapse after the controversial session and was sent to Camarillo State Hospital for six months. Russell and Parker parted ways when the musician moved to New York soon after his release from Camarillo. Russell abandoned the record business in the mid-1950s and took a number of odd jobs. He ran a golf course, became a writer and lecturer on jazz, wrote a novel, “The Sound,” about a jazz musician modeled after Parker, and then the biography of Parker, “Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker,” which was published in 1973. Russell sold the Dial catalog to Spotlite records in Britain in 1990. On Jan. 31 at a hospital in Palm Springs.