Before Rock, There Was Jazz: Tom Wilson and Transition Records

Transition Records merits a mark in music history for two reasons. It was the first label to record two of modern jazz’s most adventurous artists—charismatic bandleader Sun Ra and the pianist Cecil Taylor—and its founder and producer was Tom Wilson, a young, African-American political science/economics Harvard graduate who would go on to helm some of the most landmark rock records of the 1960s. It was Wilson who put a rock backing to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” it was Wilson who signed Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground to MGM/Verve with promises of artistic freedom that were fulfilled when he produced their debut albums, and it was Wilson who worked with Bob Dylan on classic LPs such as Bringing It All Back Home, culminating in Dylan’s breakthrough “Like a Rolling Stone” single.

But Wilson, an amateur trombonist and native of Waco, Texas, had gotten his start in the music business as a jazz lover, inspired by his involvement with the Harvard New Jazz Society and radio station WHRB. After graduating from Harvard Wilson eventually borrowed $900 to start up his own record label, Transition, and continued to finance it in part by teaching courses on jazz at several Boston-area colleges. From 1955 to 1957 he would record up-and-coming jazz artists such as Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Herb Pomeroy, and Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor.

In addition to his promotion of Ra and Taylor, Wilson helped document both hardbop and avant-garde aspects of Boston’s thriving jazz scene. He was an African-American trailblazer in jazz and rock production, and his Transition label is an early entry in the annals of what would come to be known in the music business as “D.I.Y.” (Do It Yourself).

Read more about Transition founder Tom Wilson.

View a discography of Transition Records.

Listen to previous Night Lights programs about Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor in the 1950s.

(Photo of Tom Wilson with Bob Dylan by Don Hunstein.)

(Transition album covers from the Birka Jazz Archive.)

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