Behind Apple Cheeks Is ‘Mr. Relentless’ : John Anello Jr. Pushes Hard to Make County’s Only Full-Service Jazz Label a Success

At first glance, John Anello Jr. would never fulfill anyone’s vision of a recording company mini-mogul. Baby-faced, apple-cheeked and slight of stature, this guitarist, composer and businessman has an unassuming appearance that offers little evidence of his nickname, “Mr. Relentless”--until he begins to talk. Then, in a choppy stream of nonstop sentences peppered with laughs, asides and mimicry, it all becomes clear. Anello is a man whose energy level only knows one setting: high.

As the proprietor, producer, promoter, sometime-artist and chief cook and bottle washer for Cexton Records, Orange County’s only full-service jazz record company, Anello learned very early on that he either does it himself, or it doesn’t get done.

And what he has done since forming the label in 1983 includes performing, recording and promoting a couple of his own albums plus releasing seven albums by other acts he has signed. In 1989 alone, Cexton released six albums, and there are more to come before the year is out.

“We’re not like some of the older, more established labels that just release albums and let them go,” Anello, 35, said last week during a conversation in the Harbor Boulevard offices of Cexton in Costa Mesa. “We are kicking serious buns on promotion, because we have to. I can’t buy my way in. I’m not Warners. I can’t buy the front cover of Billboard. I can’t even buy the back cover of Billboard. I can’t throw the big Hollywood parties.

“So what I do every day is I come in here at 6 or 7 in the morning, get on the phone and call all over the country until the end of the day. That, plus a flurry of press releases, plus just being in people’s faces is what does the job.

“That’s why my engineer started calling me ‘Mr. Relentless.’ Because if somebody won’t take my call the first time, I’ll call them until I get to them. Or I’ll mail them or I’ll send roses, or I’ll do whatever I have to do. But sooner or later, I’ll get to them.”

Anello’s persistence was apparent early in his career, when, after failing to reach the president of a major record company, he showed up wearing a uniform and carrying a pizza box. Explaining that he was delivering lunch, he bluffed his way to the executive’s inner sanctum and opened the pizza box to reveal the master recording he was trying to sell.

Despite his persistence, however, Anello struck out. Like so many other young performers he was unable to persuade a major label to take a chance on him. To the hyperactive Anello, the next step was obvious; he’d put out his own record.

If he had followed the familiar costly path of other neophyte artists, he would have released the album--at considerable personal cost--sold a few here and there at concerts, and given the majority of copies away to friends and relatives. But Anello had his own way of doing things.

He produced a first-rate album, “For A Dancer,” in 1983 for an out-of-pocket cost of $8,000. It had a cover shot by a photographer whose work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, a high-quality pressing and a polyvinyl sleeve--all the stuff of a quality product. The next step was to sell it.

“It wasn’t easy,” Anello laughed. “I sold it out of the back of my truck, I hustled distributors, I tried direct mail . . . everything, you name it, just to get the album out there.”

Anello’s perseverance paid off. The album hit Billboard’s jazz chart at No. 28 and climbed into the Top 20--an amazing performance in today’s market for a self-produced and self-distributed recording.

“It did so well,” he explained, “that people began to call me and ask about more product. So I knew I had to do a second album. I did that one--’Jackson Street Beat’ (in 1985)--the same way, and it did even better. It got more airplay and did well overseas, especially in Japan. And I was doing all this while I was still working a full schedule as a junior high school music teacher.

“But this time things were different. When I did my first album, everybody asked for more. When I did my second album I realized that if I was going to have a real record company, I had to release product not just by me, but by other people too.

“The alternative was to sell my masters and my mailing lists and so forth to another, bigger label, and I didn’t want to do that. So I decided to stop teaching full time and go head first into the record business.”

He estimates that Cexton has shipped more than 50,000 albums and has had sales of “more than a couple hundred thousand dollars” since starting the label. But he says the gains--the financial, not the personal--come slowly. “It’s still a day-by-day existence. At the end of each month I look and see if there’s any money left over, and if there is, we put it into another project.”

Anello, born in Newark, N.J., is the son of an alto saxophonist and educator, John Anello Sr., who was active in the New York and New Jersey music scene in the ‘50s and ‘60s. When his father was offered a teaching job in Orange County in the late ‘60s, the family moved West. Anello Sr. eventually wound up in an executive job at Disneyland and Anello Jr. graduated with a music degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Anello feels that his high-energy personal style traces directly to growing up on the East Coast in a vigorous Italian neighborhood.

“I guess I’ve been influenced by a combination of the American work ethic and the Italian sense of family,” he mused. “It’s that constant driving that’s so much a part of the back-East mentality. I get frustrated by the fact that I sometimes get more done in a day than some people do in a week.

“And I suppose another part of it is just my own personal drive. I always had to work twice as hard for half as much. In school, I never got easy grades. I got good grades, but I had to work for them, and when I didn’t, I got bad grades. And I was never really popular, so whatever popularity I had, I had to work for it.

“When I started playing gigs, I was never the first musician picked. I always had to work hard to get any attention at all. But I learned that I could do something about it. I discovered that when I get the momentum up, I’m like a steamship--don’t get in my way.”

Anello’s momentum has carried Cexton to an extremely active year. Six CDs have been released in 1989, with more to follow. The performers are, for the most part, true to Anello’s belief in straight-ahead, mainstream jazz.

“My goal,” he said, “is for Cexton to be a true mainstream label, a be-bop label, a live-jazz label, very much in the style of Blue Note Records in the 1950s and ‘60s.”

The one difference: Blue Note’s roster was dominated by black jazz performers. Cexton’s, at the moment, has none. When asked about it, Anello expressed some uneasiness about his monochromatic lineup.

“It concerns me a lot,” he said, “but it’s certainly not by choice. When I started adding artists, I was picking from tapes by performers I’d never seen. Some I met by phone, but I had no knowledge of who I was getting. So, partially, it was coincidental.

“The other part of it is that, of the tapes I got from black artists--and I didn’t get a lot--most were R&B.; One black jazz artist I was interested in was already under contract with another record company. . . . We are now talking seriously to four or five black artists, one of whom has already agreed to come on board. Basically everything’s done except the ink on the contract to have his music in the catalogue by next year.”

All plans are, of course, contingent upon Cexton’s continued financial good health. At the moment, things look bright. The overhead is low, sales are up and good word of mouth about the upstart little jazz record company from the wilds of Orange County is beginning to spread.

Anello is typically upbeat. Workaholic he may be, but he does his best to balance the heavy business schedule with the relaxation of a regular Sunday pasta party at his home. “I try to hang on to a sense of family,” he said, “by bringing the people I work with into my own family. The Sunday pastas are a way of bringing us all together--musicians, friends, business acquaintances, my wife (Susan Marie), my little girl (Marie Christine) and me. The funny thing is that I’m probably the only one who’s Italian at the pastas. But if there’s anything that’s been passed on to me that I can share with my friends, it’s my music and my pasta.”

As if wary that the image of the paterfamilias might sully his reputation as a hard-driven overachiever, Anello suddenly remembered he had some urgent phone calls to make.

With that, “Mr. Relentless” was already pushing buttons on his telephone.

“The truth is,” he said, “that for me nothing’s ever good enough or fast enough. So as soon as I finish something, the first thing that comes into my mind is ‘What am I going to do next? What’s the next project?’ I don’t think I could function any other way.”