Pacific Jazz Records
American record label
Pacific Jazz Records was an American record company and label based in Los Angeles, best known for cool jazz or West coast jazz. It was founded in 1952 by producer Richard Bock (1927–1988) and drummer Roy Harte (1924–2003). Harte, in 1954, also co-founded Nocturne Records with jazz bassist Harry Babasin (1921–1988).
Some of the musicians who recorded for Pacific Jazz included Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Joe Pass, Gerald Wilson, the Jazz Crusaders, Don Ellis, Clare Fischer, Jim Hall, Groove Holmes, Les McCann, Wes Montgomery, and Art Pepper.
In 1957, Pacific Jazz Records changed its name to World Pacific Records to expand into a full-line label, with the Pacific Jazz imprint retained for jazz releases.
In 1958 Richard Bock and World Pacific were instrumental in introducing Indian traditional music to the West via Ravi Shankar, who also recorded for World Pacific.
Bock sold the label to Liberty Records in 1965, although he remained as an adviser until 1970. Liberty was merged into and discontinued by United Artists Records in 1971; UA in turn was bought by EMI in 1979. Mosaic reissued some Pacific Jazz material in the late 1980s, as did Blue Note when it gained control of the catalog in the 1990s.
Releases from Pacific Jazz Records are distributed digitally on streaming platforms through Universal Music Group.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Pacific Jazz Records” as american record label. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american record label. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1516254. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1927, 1988 and 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pacific Jazz Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.