In February 1970, Billboard announced that Creed Taylor had launched his own CTI Records label – effectively concluding a “special production deal” with A&M Records. The article proclaimed that Taylor was set to introduce three new records: seventeen-year-old Kathy McCord’s eponymous folk record, Hubert Laws’ Crying Song1 and Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay – all recorded around the time Taylor was still recording albums for A&M.2

The new label’s premiere single release was set to be Hubert Laws’ cover of the Beatles’ “Let it Be,” released almost simultaneously with the Fab Four’s recording in March 1970. Other early recordings for the label included the rock group Flow, featuring future Eagles guitarist Don Felder, Dave Frishberg’s Oklahoma Toad and one-off rock singles (not produced by Taylor) for Hack Bartholomew, Sampson & Delilah and John Martine.

Billy Vera, a partner in one of Creed Taylor’s publishing firms, was said to be recording for the label, but nothing ever came of it (George Benson covered Vera’s “Good Morning Blues” onI Got a Woman and Some Blues and it was the singer-songwriter who introduced Taylor to his sister, Kathy McCord).

Taylor’s departure from A&M was certainly sudden and, despite the producer’s claim of an amicable parting, probably acrimonious. According to Taylor, “Herb [Alpert] started making suggestions.” Telling Devin Leonard: “I told myself, ‘You gotta get out of this situation.’ It got to the point where I was being inundated with stuff I didn’t approve of. (…) What was I, some third-rate record producer? So I split. Believe me. Herb is not a pushy guy. It wasn’t a matter of him telling me what to do. It was all this suggesting.”3

Still, A&M seemed none-too happy that their star jazz producer – for whom they lavished with whatever he wanted – was gone; Taylor was that rare behind-the-scenes guy who had actual name-brand value and repeated popular success, who also gave the label a much-needed air of authentic jazz respectability.

Whatever happened, several seemingly retaliatory efforts ensued. Gula Matari and Tide had the CTI logo stripped from their covers. Stonebone was briefly issued only in Japan (something that probably occurred before the parting of the ways), while Taylor-produced albums by George Benson, Tamba 4 and Herbie Mann (which may have not been recorded) went totally unreleased (The Benson record was eventually issued in 1984, while the Tamba 4 disc was issued in 2019).

Other things were changing for A&M as well. Herb Alpert’s own popularity started waning a bit by 1970, his Tijuana Brass hits well in his past. Rock audiences wanted something a little hipper than The Sandpipers and the Baja Marimba Band, too. Relief, however, was right around the corner. In April 1969, A&M signed The Carpenters, whose many hits would see the record label through the seventies.

The label also began signing British rock bands, leading to the huge success of Peter Frampton in the mid-1970s and Supertramp’s Grammy-winning Breakfast in America in 1979. A&M, while issuing the odd jazz record every now and then – John Snyder’s A&M-distributed Horizon label brought albums by Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck-Paul Desmond, Jim Hall and Charlie Haden in the mid-seventies while additional discs by Stan Getz, Don Cherry and Sun Ra came about in the eighties – decidedly shifted their emphasis toward more rock and Top 40 fare.

Later in the decade, the label achieved crossover success far exceeding the A&M/CTI venture with Chuck Mangione’s Top Five hit “Feels So Good” (1978) and Herb Alpert’s million-selling number-one “Rise” (1979) – both among the last instrumentals, apart from film or TV themes, to chart as popular hits.

A&M reissued its CTI titles sporadically over the years, concentrating especially on such fan favorites and acknowledged classics as Wave and Walking in Space. In 1984, A&M reissued 16 of the CTI titles in its Audio Master Plus Series, adding two compilations and the previously unissued I Got A Woman and Some Blues.

In 1987, A&M began issuing a number of its jazz CDs in then-innovative digipak packages, including 12 CTI titles such as Wave, Shape of Things to Come, From the Hot Afternoon, Glory of Love, Courage, Tell It Like It Is, A Day in the Life and Down Here on the Ground – all mastered by John Snyder and Rudy Van Gelder. These and a few additional CTI titles (Gula Matari, Israel and Calling Out Loud) were issued at the same time in Japan. Traditional CD releases of Wave and Walking in Space followed in later years as well as CD releases of I Got A Woman and Some Blues, From the Hot Afternoon and Tide, the latter two with bonus tracks.

Creed Taylor moved on, crafting his very own CTI – with an updated, now iconic logo – refining and aligning the records with his vision, his unique ear and his way of presenting jazz to the masses. Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay immediately hit a chord with record buyers in 1970 and, for Taylor, set the direction for which he’d take the label.

As characterized by historian Stuart Nicholson in his definitive Jazz Rock: A History, “There was an intentional uniformity about CTI Records that served a purpose. Despite the adventurous histories of its artists, the CTI label was a guarantee of smooth, listener-friendly jazz.”4

Nevertheless, Taylor single-handedly made stars out of Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, Hubert Laws and, later, Deodato and Bob James. Upon leaving CTI, all went on to highly lucrative contracts at other labels – a feat accomplished by precious few in the jazz world. Don Sebesky (and Bob James, among others) went on to arrange many CTI dates and while critics dismissed the records as “overly arranged” and saccharinely “sweetened,” fans and music buyers lapped up the records in quantities no other label at the time could match.

Indeed, most once-thriving jazz labels – such as Prestige, Cadet, Groove Merchant, even Blue Note and Impulse – tried so hard matching “the CTI sound” that they burnt out and ingloriously vanished from the scene in a haze of forgotten fusion. Taylor also launched such CTI subsidiaries as the soul-jazz oriented Kudu (1971-78), where he made stars of Grover Washington, Jr., Hank Crawford, Johnny Hammond and Esther Phillips, as well as Salvation (1972-75) and the short-lived Three Brothers (1973), brief home to singer Lou “Lightnin’ Strikes” Christie.

Creed Taylor inspired any number of people he was involved with to do what he did. It goes without saying that none did it quite the way he had. Herbie Mann was first, with his Embryo label (1970-71). Then came labels from such former employees as CTI production assistant John Snyder (the A&M-distributed Horizon, 1976-77, then, Artists House, 1978-81) and CTI sales & marketing representative Vic Chirumbolo (Versatile, 1977-80) – with both benefitting from some of CTI’s musical talent as well.

Bob James left CTI to form his own Tappan Zee Records (1977-84). Joining James at Tappan Zee were former CTI talent manager Peter Paul and publicity director and future Grammy Award-winning producer Didier Deutsch. Quincy Jones, who recorded one album for his own Symbolic Records label in 1970 (The Adventurers), later launched his Qwest label in 1979, kicking it off with former CTI All Star George Benson’s massive hit Give Me the Night.

But perhaps the best and best known of the CTI spin-offs is Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen’s GRP Records. Grusin, who had arranged CTI albums for Grover Washington, Jr., Art Farmer and Patti Austin, started his label at Arista in 1978, going independent in 1982. By the 1990s, GRP was the predominant mass-market jazz label, finding particular success with then-popular “smooth jazz,” crossover music that evolved from what CTI developed many years earlier. GRP maintained consistently high standards (George Benson was on the label for a period), yet the music sounded more “manufactured” than CTI, whose allegiance was always first and foremost to jazz, and, consequently, much of the GRP catalog has dated rather badly in comparison.

Financial difficulties beleaguered the CTI label from 1974 to its ultimate collapse in 1983. Creed Taylor briefly resurfaced the following year with several records on his own Greenestreet label (the records – by Les McCann, Claudio Roditi, Jack Wilkins and Roger Kellaway – were issued as CTI Records in Japan).

Finally, a legal settlement helped restore CTI in 1990, just in time for the CD age, and Taylor issued a number of fine discs by Dizzy Gillespie, Larry Coryell, Charles Fambrough and others. Unfortunately, the second-wave CTI discs never caught on,5 lost in a post-fusion scrum between the re-treading traditionalists, led at the time by Wynton Marsalis (who makes a surprise appearance on the 1981 CTI Fuse One disc Silk) and his cadre, and the instantly-dated radio-candy of the populists, most of whom were heard on GRP.

Then too, this was a time when a quality label like Musicmasters, where former CTI All-Stars Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws and Stanley Turrentine all waxed worthy efforts, couldn’t do much to stand out or survive. After several years of inactivity, the final release in the CTI catalog was the CTI Jazz All-Star Band’s Montreux Jazz Festival 2009, a concert performance featuring Hubert Laws, Randy Brecker, Airto and Jeff “Tain” Watts.

Even those reluctant to accept CTI were forced to concede that Creed Taylor did it best. “[T]he outstanding examples of superior fusion,” said critic Leonard Feather, “were those produced under the guidance of Creed Taylor.” 6 As far back as 1969, writer Gene Lees wrote that “Creed loves jazz and believes in it. He thinks, as I do, that it’s on the verge of a big new explosion into popularity.”7

That prediction came true – and it happened because of Creed Taylor. Not since its heyday a generation or two before, had jazz experienced such a renaissance. By the 80s, jazz became divisive – with very different divisions than it experienced in the 60s – and, again, lost much of its popularity. It’s still that way today, Producers like Creed Taylor come along in the pop world every few years, keeping the music fresh and growing. With many jazz artists serving as their own producer these days, it’s unlikely jazz will ever see someone like Creed Taylor again.

“Purists who prefer the raw to the cooked,” wrote Ken Emerson in his magnificent Brill Building book Always Magic in the Air, “and deplore accommodation and domestication forget that the greatest American music is seldom pure. A product of mixed races and mixed motives (making noise, making art, making money), American culture is by its very nature impure, ‘sophisticated’ in the original meaning of the word: mixed and adulterated.”8

Creed Taylor’s genius was knowing there was no line separating artistry from commerce. One affirms the other. His was “product” in both senses of the word: the preconceived result and the consumable item. Any star can shine – but it needs the right sky to be properly appreciated. Creed Taylor was that star-maker. Like a painter, he signed each of his works, making it perfectly clear that the final product, whoever the star, was truly his conception. His responsibility. His artistic statement.

“Creed was my absolute favorite jazz producer, period,” said Herb Alpert in the 2022 documentary Creed Taylor: The Music Came First. “He had something magical. He knew how to take an artist and get the most out of them. He just knew what to do. I mean he was just special because he was not listening to the beat of the week. He wasn’t that type of a producer who wanted to see what was on the radio and how can I get on the top ten. He wasn’t thinking that way. He was deep; he was listening behind the scenes. He was listening to the real, real stuff. Because of that, he produced some extraordinary, extraordinary records, and some of my favorites.”

Half a century after the legendary Creed Taylor founded it, CTI has evolved into a musical legacy; some of the finest creative music ever recorded. Not only was “the CTI sound” the sound of jazz through the last decades of the 20th century, it also restored a popularity and mass appeal the music hadn’t known since the days of the big bands.

While popular jazz, or jazz that’s popular, has rarely found favor or approval among critics, many of the CTI records, especially its most successful, are critical successes that have come to be acknowledged as artistic achievements. Creed Taylor made stars of so many jazz artists – some of the finest the art has ever known – and, unlike nearly every other jazz producer, helped the artists match their wealth of talent with a financial prosperity very few others in jazz could imagine.

The birthplace of this remarkable canon is right here in these thirty recordings made between 1967 and 1970.

Douglas Payne

The author wishes to thank and extend his heartfelt gratitude to Arnaldo DeSouteiro, Marc Myers and John McCombe for their inspiration, contributions, suggestions and ideas to this text. A great thanks to RVG researcher Dan Skea, who made so much of my original discography possible in the first place. My thanks especially to Diane Toma, who, as always, made it possible for me to do any of this. And, of course, thank you to the late, great Creed Taylor – for the music and for so much more that means so much to all of us.

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Endnotes:

  1. The A&M recording logs indicate that catalog number SP 3026, which was never used, was assigned to Hubert Laws. That number was probably intended for Crying Song. According to Creed Taylor, the producer himself licensed the recording from A&M for CTI. It’s uncertain whether that’s all there is to the story. ↩︎
  2. “Taylor Bows Label – In Deal with King,” Billboard, February 28, 1970, p. 34. ↩︎
  3. Leonard, Devin “Record Auteur,” Wax Poetics, Issue 34, 2009, p. 82. The interview can be read here (accessed May 1, 2026). ↩︎
  4. Nicholson, Stuart, Jazz Rock: A History (Schirmer Books, New York. 1998), p. 209. Nicholson’s faint praise isn’t necessarily critical – indeed Creed Taylor could have penned this as a mission statement – though he does regard the commercialism of labels like CTI as the harbinger of death in jazz-rock’s true potential (the popularity of disco helped too). The book notes only Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life and Quincy Jones’ Walking in Space from this series, while paying a bit more attention to Jones’ “overlooked Gula Matari” whose title track “stands the test of time somewhat better than the cover of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’” ↩︎
  5. It’s interesting to note that the updated CTI logo was never as prominent on the nineties-era CD jackets as it was on the CTI LPs of the seventies. This may reflect the producer’s uncertainty with how time-locked his particular label might have become: “The sound of seventies jazz” wouldn’t have sold much music in the nineties. ↩︎
  6. Leonard Feather, “JAZZ: The Superior Fusion of Creed Taylor” (Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1988): http://articles.latimes.com/1988-01-31/entertainment/ca-39594_1_creed-taylor (accessed May 1, 2026). ↩︎
  7. Gene Lees, “Creed Taylor: Music-Business Maverick,” High Fidelity, May 1969, p. 116. ↩︎
  8. Emerson, Ken, Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era (Viking, 2005), pp. xv-xvi. ↩︎