Giorgio Gomelsky

Giorgio Sergio Alessando Gomelsky (28 February 1934 – 13 January 2016) was a filmmaker, impresario, music manager, songwriter (as Oscar Rasputin) and record producer. He was born in Georgia, grew up in Switzerland, and later lived in the United Kingdom and the United States.

He owned the Crawdaddy Club in London where The Rolling Stones were the house band, and he was involved with their early management. He hired The Yardbirds as a replacement and managed them. He was also their producer from the beginning through 1966. In 1967, he started Marmalade Records (distributed by Polydor), which featured Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and the Trinity, Blossom Toes, and early recordings by Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who became 10cc. The label closed in 1969. Gomelsky was also instrumental in the careers of Soft Machine, Daevid Allen and Gong, Magma and Material.

Early years

Gomelsky was born in Tiflis (modern day Tbilisi), Georgia. His father was a medical doctor, and his mother was from Monte Carlo. The family left in 1938 and via Syria, Egypt, and Italy, in 1944 settled in Switzerland, the country where his father had trained.

Gomelsky discovered jazz at the age of 10, while living in Italy. One Sunday he was caught out by the 4pm German curfew, so he stayed in the house of friends. Exploring their attic he discovered a gramophone and some jazz records. As a symbol of defiance he and his friends took to occasionally briefly blasting the music out of the window. Fortunately they were never caught. After the liberation, eventually black GIs arrived and furthered his jazz education.

He attended a Benedictine school in Ascona, near Locarno, Switzerland. With the war over, he was able to pool resources with friends to start a record collection. By 1946, the Voice of America, the USA's international non-military radio broadcasting service, had been established and Gomelsky was exposed to be-bop via the ''Cool City'' program on VOA. (In 1964, his father having died and left him some money, Gomelsky would return to Ascona and stage a jazz festival in a local airfield.)

He attended a progressive private school, the School of Humanity run by Paul Gehheb, in the mountains of Switzerland. While on vacation, with friends, he travelled around Europe by bicycle. In post-war Germany, they found a thriving cellar-jazz scene in towns like Düsseldorf. They visited Milan, and pedalled all the way to Paris to see Charlie Parker perform at the Salon de Jazz.

His mother was a hat designer. Her father had worked for the Société des Bains de Mer (the casino operator) in Monte Carlo, a popular resort for the British, and so she spoke English and became an anglophile, with a particular love of English literature. Thus her employer, Claude Saint-Cyr of Paris, sent her to run her atelier in London. She would send her Swiss schoolboy son the English music paper '' Melody Maker'' on a weekly basis, from which Gomelsky learned English and also became familiar with the British jazz scene.

There was still at this time limited opportunity to hear new jazz in Europe, apart from Willis Conover on VOA. There was an Italian jazz radio show; Flavio Ambrosetti's show on Swiss Radio ran just 20 minutes a week; there was Charles Delaunay jazz show on Europe 1 in Paris; and Charlie Fox on the BBC
...