| |
Jack Urlwin — casual drummer and founder of Peak Records .....
Jack Urlwin was the son of a wealthy electrical wholesaling and manufacturing family from the Waltham area of Christchurch and in his mid-30s, he was an amateur songwriter with aspirations. By 1957 he'd already had some 20 songs listed with APRA. APRA listings in those days required that they were available on sheet music. The New Zealand Listener was told that he had gone overboard for music when he was introduced to jazz during the last war".
He left the family business in the mid-1950s to create an advertising agency in the city, however, he passionately wanted to play jazz (being highly regarded drummer in his leisure time), and also to record other local jazz musicians. Pulling together funds from like-minded friends, he formed Peak Records, which he named after Mitre Peak in Fiordland. The Christchurch Press reported that the company was interested in listening to any person who was convinced he or she is as good as an overseas counterpart ..... The first releases were all local recordings by the likes of Pat Vincent and The Chuck Fowler Quartet. None sold huge quantities, but Jack had bigger ambitions for the label.
In 1960 he travelled to the UK and the USA picking up a raft of record labels includingEpic, Okeh, Cadence and King (as well as its Bethlehem jazz subsidiary). Peak was the first label to release James Brown in NZ (from King) and the label did exceptionally well distributing Epic, a branch of the giant New York-based CBS empire (as was Okeh).
Early Peak records were distributed via local dealers but around 1960 he signed a distribution deal with Philips, who were then establishing a national network, and this gave Peak a New Zealand wide presence. As part of this deal, Peak provided the South Island part of Philips' network briefly. Bored with the music business and wanting to return to his first passion, jazz, Urlwin sold the rights to Epic and the other labels to His Master's Voice (New Zealand) Limited in 1966, winding his own label down with the final releases in early 1967. In 1970 the company Peak Records Limited was renamed Urlwin International Marketing Limited as Jack moved on to other businesses including the importation and manufacture of blank cassettes. He died in 2006, but his name is remembered in The Jack Urlwin Jazz Scholarship awarded yearly by Christchurch Polytech's Jazz School from a fund established by Urlwin, with one of the first recipients being Oakley Grenell, the son of South Island country legend, John Grenell. |
|
·
Last Name
