In the Brooklyn home of Novelist Sholem (The Nazarene) Asch, jazz was forbidden because it was bordello music; cowboy ballads were allowed. One of his three sons, Moe (for Moses) Asch, 40, has become the nation's No. 1 recorder of out-of-the-way jazz, cowboy music and such exotic items as Paris street noises during the liberation, and little-heard Russian operas.
Last week Moe Asch hit the market with ten albums (under the new label of Disc) which included such typically offbeat items as Trinidad Calypsos by "Lord (Rum & Coca-Cola) Invader," new "sinful" songs by the Negro ex-convict Leadbelly, a newly famed jazz trio playing Harlem blues and a Creole lullaby, Mandolinist Bess Lomax singing Careless Love ("Now my apron strings won't pin"), four French Resistance writers reading their own poems and editorials.
Asch, whose studio is a cluttered room in Manhattan's drab WFVD building, has almost a fear of hits, and he brushes off commercial jazz as if it were an unmentionable disease. Unlike most record companies, which have lavished their scarce shellac on surefire songs, Asch frequently stops making an album just when it is selling well, so he can put out something else—which may or may not sell. He has put out about 40 albums in the past three years, hopes to issue another 40 this year.
Asch calls his albums "basic music" to distinguish them from popular swing or the Gene Autry-Bob Wills (TIME, Feb. 11) kind of folk music. Said he: "Ours get down to the musical roots. Very often a basic song like Buffalo Gals ["Can't you come out tonight?"] becomes a hit, but I'm not interested in individual hits. To me a catalogue of folk expression is the most important thing."
Moe Asch, born in Warsaw, brought up in Brooklyn, schooled in Germany, once installed sound equipment in burlesque houses and Yiddish theaters on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first recording (in 1939) was In the Beginning, his father's Bible stories for children. He released it under the label "Asch Records," then recorded Leadbelly's songs of bad men and worse women.
Next came folk singers Josh (One Meat Ball) White, Burl (Blue Tail Fly) Ives and Woody (Ballads from the Dust Bowl) Guthrie, and jazz purists like Pianist Mary Lou Williams and Saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and guitar-strumming Balladeer Richard Dyer-Bennet, singing Elizabethan love lyrics. His best sellers: Burl Ives, and an album of American country dances.
As soon as he can, Asch hopes to record folk music from the southern Soviet republics of Tadjik and Azerbaijan, Greece, Hungary, South Africa and Haiti. Says he: "It's not very profitable, but it's steady."