Creed Taylor’s production output for the new label was notably slower than his output at Verve, where he was putting out five or six albums a month. There is a sense that Taylor’s time was now consumed with more demanding roles, including contracting, recording, packaging and promotion – roles others performed at Verve.

One also suspects the lush and lavish productions – as they were often characterized by fans and critics alike – were a great deal more expensive than what A&M may have been used to and may have required a little more time to fund. In the end, the production deal yielded nearly 30 titles over three years – about what Taylor would have put out in the past over five or six months.

From the very beginning, though, there is a sense that Taylor knew exactly what it was he wanted and how to go about getting it.

“Most record men today take dim-witted and half-educated young musicians and try to do complicated things with them,” wrote Gene Lees two years after CTI debuted. “Creed does exactly the opposite: he takes brilliantly skilled musicians and has them do comparatively simple things. He uses jazz musicians to play popular music. This has caused his records to be vaguely denigrated by the superhip, who miss the point that he’s raising the level of pop music, not lowering that of jazz. And by making superior artists known to the public, he has both informed the younger generation of real musical values and made it possible for these musicians to make a good living.”1

Taylor had already started work on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave and Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life as he was finishing his final Verve albums in May and June 1967. Taylor’s first sessions for Herbie Mann’s Glory of Love commenced in July, while Tamba 4’s American debut, We and the Sea, was laid down over a few days in September. By the Fall of 1967, “Tayco Sound” had become CTI, for Creed Taylor, Incorporated, and the first two A&M/CTI albums made their auspicious debut.

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Endnotes:

  1. Gene Lees, “Music-Business Maverick,” High Fidelity, May 1969. ↩︎