Ross Russell (jazz)

record store, the Tempo Music Shop, in Hollywood. In 1946, he formed Dial Records in order to record Charlie Parker, who was in Los Angeles at the time.^[1] He also recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Earl Coleman. Russell retained all the alternate takes recorded, which sometimes made releases of his material particularly extensive. Dial also was the first record company in the US to record the music of Arnold Schoenberg and other modern masters, such as Béla Bartók and John Cage. He shut Dial down in 1949^{[citation needed]} and spent several years away from jazz music as owner of a golf course

nonfiction book, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, and two years later his biography Bird Lives! was published. Bird Lives! was criticized for its factual inaccuracies; some of the details Russell relates were shown to be fictional.^[2] Russell also wrote articles for jazz magazines and taught at the University of California and Palomar College. His large collection of records, books, periodicals, manuscripts, correspondence, interviews, and other materials was sold to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. After retirement he lived variously in the California desert, South Africa, Spain, and Niland, California, on the Salton Sea. He was writing another book on bebop at the time of his death in 2000. He was married five times and had four children. He was buried at the Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California