Careers
After living for a period in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Bihari family moved to Los Angeles in 1941. Jules got a job servicing and operating jukeboxes in the Watts district, and found difficulty in locating and stocking the blues records his customers wanted to hear.
With his younger brothers Saul and Joe, he decided to set up a new label, Modern Records, in 1945. The brothers built Modern into a major blues and R&B label, their first success coming with "Swingin' the Boogie" by Hadda Brooks. They bought a pressing plant, and divided tasks among them equally, with Jules responsible for talent spotting and recording, Saul for manufacturing, and Lester for distribution. Joe worked with Ike Turner as a talent scout in the Memphis area, discovering Johnny "Guitar" Watson among others.
In the early 1950s the Biharis launched several subsidiaries: RPM Records, Flair Records and Meteor Records, which was set up in Memphis in 1952 and was headed by Lester Bihari. Successful artists on the Biharis' labels included B.B. King, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lowell Fulson, Rufus Thomas and Charlie Feathers.
The companies always remained small and personally run. B.B. King has said that he always felt the brothers were accessible: "The company was never bigger than the artist. I could always talk to them."
Later they launched more subsidiaries: Crown Records featuring artists like Johnny Cole, Vic Damone, Trini Lopez with Johnny Torres, Jerry Cole, Dave Clark Five, and United/Superior Records. In the sixties they launched a subsidiary Yuletide Records, which specialized in Christmas records (mostly with Johnny Cole and the Robert Evans Chorus).
In the mid 1960s Modern Records went bankrupt and stopped operating, but the catalogue went with the management into what would become Kent Records. After the deaths of Saul, Lester and Jules Bihari, the labels' back catalogue was licensed to Ace Records (UK) in the mid 1980s, and then later purchased by them during the '90s.
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