Lester Koenig

Although never a card-carrying communist himself, Koenig was blacklisted because he refused to name names. The result was that he unable to work in the film business. He began producing jazz records on Commodore Records with some of the best West Coast musicians of that time, among them Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman, whom he was the first to record. Pepper writes about Koenig's decency in his memoir, "Straight Life."::ilprofessore1