Rendezvous Records was Leon René’s third label, following Exclusive (1943/4) and Class (1951). It was established in Los Angeles in 1958 by René with his partners Rod Pierce and Gordon Wolf. The masters from Class Records were sold to Rendezvous, and many of the Class artists switched to the new label.
The artists roster included mainly White performers but there was a significant Black input to the company’s output. The Ernie Fields Orchestra was contracted as the label’s session band. Fields had gathered a strong team: René Hall on guitar, Earl Palmer on drums, Ernie Freeman on piano, Jimmy Wlikins on trombone, Oscar Estell on saxophone, Plas Johnson on tenor saxophone, Jazz pianist and arranger Rozelle Clayton, Red Callender on bass, and Jump Blues singerJo Evans plus Jazz singer Leora Davis.
Ernie Fields
Ernie Fields was born in Texas in 1904, but was raised in Oklahoma. By the end of the twenties, he was leading his own band. He played trombone and piano. He brought considerable experience to Rendezvous when he joined them in 1958, which no doubt helped him bring together an outstanding group of musicians. For around five years the Ernie Fields Orchestra played at Rendezvous sessions for a large group of artists, covering a wide range of styles. In 1959, the band released a single, “In The Mood”, which reached number four on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart and also charted in the UK, climbing to number thirteen on the Official UK Pop Singles Chart, selling over a million copies and receiving a gold disc. The track was played by Earl Palmer, Plas Johnson, and René Hall. These three musicians (plus a few friends, no doubt) later adopted a few different names, recording instrumental tunes credited as the Marketts, the Routers, or B. Bumble and the Stingers. Yes, “Nut Rocker” was the work of the Rendezvous session band!
The instrumental was based on the march from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Al Hazan replaced Ernie Freeman for the recording. The single reached number twenty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart and number one on the Official UK Pop Singles Chart in 1962.
When the company closed its doors in 1963, Ernie Fields retired. He died in 1997, aged ninety-two.
Earl Palmer was born in New Orleans in 1924 into a musical family. His father was a pianist, his mother a dancer. At the age of five, Palmer took to tap dancing! Around 1945, he enrolled at the Grunewald School of Music in New Orleans to study music, focussed on piano and percussion. By the late forties, he had joined Dave Bartholomew’s band, which brought the opportunity to play on sessions at Cosimo Matassa’s studio with Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Smiley Lewis, and many others.
In 1957, Palmer was amongst the group of New Orleans musicians who came to Los Angeles seeking work. At first he joined Aladdin Records, before becoming a member of the Wrecking Crew. For the next thirty years he played on hundreds of recordings for a staggering number of major acts. He can be heard on recordings by Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bobby Day, Larry Williams and B. B. King. In the field of Pop music, you can find him playing for Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, the Beach Boys, Neil Young, and the Byrds. He played Jazz with Count Basie, Dizzie Gillespie, and David Axelrod. As an illustration of the demand for his talent, the musicians’ union has calculated that he played on four hundred and fifty assignments in just one year (1967).
Earl Palmer died in California in 2008, eight years after his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Ernie Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922. He began playing locally at the age of thirteen and around 1939 joined his sister’s band, the Evelyn Freeman Swing Band. He played piano and saxophone and later added organ to his list of instruments. He was also arranging music for the Swing Band.
After the war, he studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree. The family then relocated to Los Angeles, which gave him the opportunity to complete a Masters degree in music composition at the University of Southern California. By 1951, he had formed his own orchestra, making several recordings at RCA Victor. In 1955 and 1956, the orchestra made further recordings at Mambo, Vita, Cash, and Money Records. Their Cash Records single “Jivin’ Around” went to number five on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart in 1956. Freeman also played on recordings for Aladdin, Specialty, Modern, and Imperial. He made several hit singles at the latter.
At the same time, Freeman set up a combo with Plas Johnson (tenor sax), Joe Comfort (bass), R.D. Martinez (drums), and guitarist Irving Ashby. They recorded “Your Kiss”/ “No, No Baby” with Carmen Davis and backed Sonny Woods on his recording of “I Promise”, both on the Middle-Tone label. They later backed the Voices, featuring Bobby Byrd and Earl Nelson from the Flames.
He switched to the Ernie Fields Orchestra in 1958.
When Rendezvous closed in 1963, Ernie freeman continued to work as a performer and session musician. His biggest successes came, however, as an arranger. He won two Grammys, the first for his arrangement of “Strangers in the Night” for Frank Sinatra, and the second for his string arrangements for Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Freeman died at home in Los Angeles in 1981.
René Hall was born in Louisiana in 1912. His talent for music was soon apparent; as a teenager he played guitar, bass, and banjo, and joined Papa Celestin’s New Orleans Jazz Band. He made his first recording in 1933, as a member of the New Orleans Rhythm Boys, and later joined the Ernie Fields Band. During the early 1940s, he wrote some arrangements for Dinah Washington and chalked up another string to his musical bow.
He started his own Jazz band in 1949, and moved to New York to find session work in the early fifties. While there, he recorded a few tracks for RCA Victor, which showed a move towards R&B.
In the mid-fifties, he moved to Los Angeles, where he recorded several singles for Specialty with his own orchestra and arranged and conducted the recording of “You Send Me” and “Summertime” by Sam Cooke in 1957. He also worked with Little Richard, Larry Williams and Don & Dewey, and then with Ritchie Valens in 1958, before concentrating on Sam Cooke’s recordings at Keen Records. By the end of 1959, Hall had been involved with a dozen charting singles.
His stint at Rendezvous gave him the opportunity to record another pair of instrumentals, “Moritat”/ “Adalene”, in 1959.
When Sam Cooke moved to RCA Victor, he made several recordings in New York, before returning to Los Angeles to work again with Hall, who arranged and conducted Cooke’s work from 1961 until Cooke’s death in 1964. Hall also worked on recording sessions for artists on Sam Cooke’s SAR label. When Cooke was killed, Hall took time out to recover from the shock of losing such a close associate. He filled his time by writing a book, an instructional manual on playing Rock guitar.
During the latter half of the sixties, Hall cut down on studio work to concentrate on arranging. He worked into the eighties, contributing to the work of Ray Charles, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, the Impressions, Lowell Fulson, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Bobby Womack, Marvin Gaye, and many more.
René Hall died in 1988, aged seventy-five. Few people in the music industry during his lifetime can match his achievements. Two contributions stand out.
First, Hall wrote a wonderful arrangement for Sam Cooke’s best song “A Change Is Gonna Come”, elevating it to a new level in popular music with the inclusion of kettle-drum and French horn alongside the strings. Then, nine years later, he arranged the four songs on side one of Marvin Gaye’s album “Let’s Get It On”, including the opening title track.
Hall’s arrangement played a significant role in making the song one of Motown’s biggest sellers, with world-wide sales of over four million copies.
Plas Johnson was born in 1931 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He took up the soprano saxophone in his teens and began playing in the New Orleans area as a duo with his brother Ray. He went on to play alto, tenor, and baritone sax too, plus clarinet and flute.
His first break came in 1951, when Blues singer Charles Brown signed him up to join his touring band. In 1954, Johnson moved to Los Angeles, where he soon found work as a session musician. He played with B.B. King and Johnny Otis, until sax player/producer Maxwell Davis brought him to Modern Records.
For around twenty years. Johnson played on sessions for a wide range of artists, including Peggy Lee, Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, and Bobby Vee. His best-known performance is probably as a member of Henry Mancini’s Orchestra. Johnson played the solo on “The Pink Panther Theme”.
Fans of R&B music will have heard Johnson playing too. He played on Larry Williams’ album “Heebie Jeebies” (1958). He worked with Sam Cooke on three seminal albums in the early sixties, “Twistin’ the Night Away” (1962), “Mr. Soul” (1963), and “Ain’t That Good News” (1964), along with René Hall. Sessions with Harmonica Slim followed. He joined Hall again in 1973 to play on Marvin Gaye’s album “Let’s Get It On”. Later in the seventies, Johnson worked with Minnie Riperton on her Epic album “Stay In Love” (1977). During the nineties, he contributed to several albums recorded by Aaron Neville. And there were many, many more examples of his wide-ranging talents.
In 2025, Jasmine Records issued a compilation album of some of Johnson’s early work, featuring several West Coast artists.
Red Callender was the professional name of George Sylvester Callender. He was born in Haynesville, Virginia, in 1916 (his father was from Barbados) and took up the string bass and the tuba! He moved to Los Angeles whilst still in his teens. He joined various Jazz bands during the forties, playing with Erroll Garner, Charlie Parker, Nat “King” Cole, Art Tatum, Buddy Colette, and many other well-known Jazz performers. He also formed his own trio and began songwriting and arranging.
After the war, Callender spent a few years playing in Hawaii, in order to continue working while the musicians’ union strike was in operation. On his return to Los Angeles, he worked as a session musician, quickly building an excellent reputation, and later joined the Wrecking Crew. He played on many sessions across a variety of genres, but he always maintained strong links with the Jazz community. When asked to estimate how many sessions he played on, he answered: “When I got to 5,000 sides in the mid-fifties, I stopped counting”!
He recorded at Black & White in 1949, with Howard McGhee, Lucky Thompson, Jack McVea, Irving Ashby, and Jimmy Bunn, before moving to Recorded in Hollywood to play on five singles, including two with Linda Haynes.
He was one of the stingers who recorded “Nut Rocker” at Rendezvous and he joined two of his fellow-stingers (René Hall and Plas Johnson) to work with Sam Cooke on “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Mr. Soul”.
He continued working for the next thirty years, his last performance coming on New Year’s Eve in 1991.
Red Callender died in Saugus, California, in March 1992, at the age of 76.
Selected Artists at Rendezvous
The René brothers had played a significant role in the development of R&B at their various labels, but at Rendezvous, Leon clearly took the view that market conditions favoured signing both White and Black artists to the new label. The artists listed below are Black artists whose work contributed to the development of R&B and Soul music at Rendezvous.
As noted above, the Ernie Fields Orchestra had a hit with “In The Mood” (an up-tempo dance tune co-written by Andy Razaf and Joseph C. Garland). Several more singles followed, in a similar style, including an instrumental version of the Joe Liggins’ hit “The Honeydripper”.
Johnny Moore and His New Blazers also cut an instrumental, “Bullfrog”, with an arrangement by René Hall.
René Hall recorded a version of Mack the Knife, the Brecht/Weill composition from the Threepenny Opera of 1928. Hall called his track “Moritat”, drawn from the German title. It was another instrumental track.
The Lions, a local trio,made one single at Rendezvous, a fast vocal harmony track entitled “The Feast Of The Beast”, which was written and produced by Jimmy McEachin.
The Lions
Bobby Day switched to Rendezvous, when Class Records was shut down. The new label issued six singles by Day between 1960 and 1962. Some are up-tempo R&B Rock & Roll songs, others are slow romantic ballads. “Over And Over”, written by Byrd, is typical of the Pop-orientated R&B of the Rendezvous output.
Eugene Church also switched from Class, but only made one single at Rendezvous. “Good News”/ “Polly” are both R&B dance tracks.
Googie René, Leon’s son, had also made several singles at Class. His three Rendezvous singles are R&B instrumentals.
B. Bumble & the Stingers were responsible for ten Rendezvous singles. The three session musicians from Louisiana, Rene Hall, Earl Palmer, and Plas Johnson, were at the core of the group, joined on various tracks by one or more of the following: Al Hazan, Ernie freeman, John A. Bird, Lou Josie, and R.C. Gamble Jr. As the members of the Ernie Fields orchestra did not want to tour, a new group was created to take the Stingers’ music on the road.
The best of the twenty tracks they recorded are “Nut Rocker” and “Bumble Boogie”, both from 1961.
Given the popularity of Doo-Wop songs during the Rendezvous years, it is no surprise that the label put out a series of songs in that style by a number of groups. The best are by the Gallahads and the Dyna-Sores.
The Gallahads, a vocal harmony group from Seattle, recorded tracks at Del-Fi, Donna and Rendezvous in California. Rendezvous released one single by the group in 1961, pairing a couple of sweet Doo-Wop ballads.
The Dyna-Sores had one single released by Rendezvous, “Alley-Oop”/ “Jungle Walk”, in 1960. The group’s members were H.B. Barnham, Ty Terrell Leonard, and Jimmy Norman (James Norman Scott). The first two were former members of the Robins, who had started out in 1949 in Los Angeles and were active until 1961. “Alley-Oop” reached number fifty-nine on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart, but was outshone by the version by the Hollywood Argyles, a White rockabilly group. Strangely, the B-side is an instrumental.
Wally Cox contributed a couple of well-sung Soul ballads in 1962, both of which he wrote. “Come On Home”. The songs show influences from Sam Cooke and point the way forward for music of Black origin.
Rendezvous closed its doors in 1963.
