Ozzie Cadena RIP (RR)
funky16corners
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April 21, 2008Ozzie Cadena, 83, Producer for Jazz Musicians, Dies By BEN RATLIFFOzzie Cadena, a record producer of jazz and gospel music from the 1950s to the 1970s for the Savoy and Prestige labels, and later a promoter and booster of jazz in Los Angeles, died on April 9 in Torrance, Calif. He was 83 and lived in Redondo Beach, Calif. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Gloria Cadena. From 1954 to 1959, Mr. Cadena was an in-house producer and A&R scout for Savoy, a small but influential label based in Newark, N.J., and helped arrange for dozens of important sessions, including ones by Charles Mingus, Little Jimmy Scott, Yusef Lateef, Milt Jackson, Marion Williams, the Ward Singers and Shirley Caesar. He also produced the first albums by Cannonball Adderley and the J. J. Johnson-Kai Winding double-trombone group. Oscar Cadena was born in Oklahoma City and reared in Newark. He worked at the Radio Record Shop in downtown Newark, owned by Herman Lubinsky, who was also the owner of Savoy Records. His first session as a producer for Savoy was with Winding and Johnson, and thereafter he became an in-house producer and A&R man for the label. During that time he worked closely with the drummer Kenny Clarke, who rounded up various groups of musicians for one-shot recording dates and acted as a kind of facilitator to the label, and with the famous engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who recorded Mr. Cadena???s sessions at his studio in New Jersey.In 1962 he replaced Esmond Edwards as head of A&R at Prestige, in New York, and took over that label???s new recordings for two periods ??? one starting in 1962, the other starting in 1972 ??? helping direct it toward organ groups and soul-jazz, recording artists like Shirley Scott, Jack McDuff and Red Holloway. In the early ???60s, he also started his own record label, Choice, which released albums by Charles Earland, the duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and the Sunset Travelers, among others. Mr. Cadena owned record stores in New Jersey, including L???Intrigue, in Newark, which also booked live jam sessions, and the Grab-Bag, in New Brunswick.Mr. Cadena moved to Hermosa Beach, Calif., in 1974. From the 1980s on, he promoted jazz in the Los Angeles area, in settings that included the Hyatt on Sunset and the Lighthouse Cafe, a historic ???50s-era club in Hermosa Beach. In addition to his wife, who still books jazz at the Lighthouse, Mr. Cadena???s survivors include his sisters Victoria Schear and Beatrice Festagallo, both of Union, N.J.; his sons Dez Cadena (briefly a singer for the punk band Black Flag, and currently a guitarist in the Misfits and Osaka Popstar) of Newark, and Pru Cadena of Madison, N.J.; his daughter, Lori Cadena of Redondo Beach; and two grandsons.
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I never made the connection before I saw it in the obit.