Every artist has to be concerned with the business of making art. The two issues go hand in hand. In 1988, Kitty Margolis had suffered a back injury and was lying in bed one day wondering about the future and about what ultimately she would be known for if she didn’t make it through her impending surgery.
“I hadn’t made a record yet, and I knew I wanted to,” she says. “But in those years there wasn’t much jazz being recorded by the major companies, and almost none by women.” She also had heard how it is for artists with the big recording companies. Not a lot of respect. Very little artistic control. The artist does not own the master recordings and therefore can’t get to them if the record company does not want her to. Shoddy accounting practices. “I didn’t much care for all that, and so I was worried that I’d never be able to make a record.”
Kitty ponders the memory a moment.
“But the radio station KJAZ here in the Bay Area had recorded a gig I’d done at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco ... live, direct to two-track tape.”
Kitty folds her hands before her, studying them. She seems to lose herself for a moment.
“You know, the live album is the truth,” she says. “And suddenly I realized that I did have a record, and it was already in the can. But even so, there was still the whole issue of the record industry and my dislike of it. I wasn’t sure what to do.”
Kitty lowers her head, a kind of dramatization of the quandary she felt she was in at the time.
“But there was Betty Carter,” she says.
Carter was a singer with a long and distinguished career, famous for her revolutionary musical inventiveness.
“I was very hip to her music then, and she had had her own indie record company for years. Bet-Car Records, before she got signed to Verve in her sixties. So when I got better, I called Madeline Eastman, who is such a fine singer and a close friend of mine. We’d had a small production company called Mad-Kat, and I told her that I wanted to found a record company, called Mad-Kat Records, and would that be okay with her? She said ‘yes’ right away, ‘and I want to record on the label, too,’ she said. And we did it. And that recording that KJAZ had made was my first LP.”
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