The story of CTI is the story of the man whose initials represent the label’s first two letters, Creed Taylor. Creed Taylor is one of the most significant producers in the history of jazz. Perhaps only a handful of others in his field are as well-known – or, perhaps, as notoriously successful – as Creed Taylor.
He was that rare breed able to combine a gift for capturing musical artistry – like only jazz producers John Hammond, Norman Granz, Alfred Lion, Bob Weinstock and Orrin Keepnews could – with an innate sense of communicating that artistry beyond a handful of devoted admirers. Spokesman and pitchman for what jazz could and should do, Taylor was every bit the cheerleader for its players and the resolute coach for winning their game. He made players stars and nearly single-handedly popularized an art that fell out of widespread favor decades before. None of Creed Taylor’s contemporaries – including such respected names as Richard Bock, Ozzie Cadena, Joel Dorn, Esmond Edwards, Sonny Lester and the Bobs Porter, Shad and Thiele – achieved such an unmatched blend of success beyond the cultish confines of jazz with the appreciable artistry of some of jazz’s greatest musicians.
Creed Taylor was born on May 13, 1929, in Bedford, Virginia, a rural part of the state about 30 miles west of Lynchburg. Despite being surrounded by country and bluegrass music, Taylor developed a keen interest in jazz, especially the big bands, after catching those hipper sounds on Symphony Sid’s radio show. Taylor’s love of Harry James and, later, Dizzy Gillespie, led him to play the trumpet in high school. He set his sights on playing in one of those big bands, especially Stan Kenton’s, but, as he told Waxpoetics’ Devin Leonard, “I decided shortly after I hit New York that I didn’t want to spend my life as a studio musician.”1
Taylor went off to college and studied psychology at Duke University. During those years, he served briefly in the Marines. While stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, Taylor would take weekend passes to visit Howard Rumsey’s famed Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach and catch West Coast all-stars like Shorty Rogers, Art Pepper, Charles Mingus and the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker quartet.
In 1954, Creed Taylor arrived in New York City, determined now to be a record producer. Inspired by Blue Note’s Alfred Lion and Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic records, Taylor still disapproved of the players’ long, rambling solos. “I thought the listener’s attention span was being stretched by interminable bass and drum solos,” Taylor told Marc Myers of JazzWax.com in 2008. “Any solo that went on forever, I thought, was the wrong way to try to make people like the music I loved. So, I decided that I would produce records that I liked, recorded the way I wanted to hear them.”
Taylor immediately went to the fledgling Bethlehem label and proposed his services. The label was co-founded by a drummer Taylor met at Duke University. At the time, the label was still producing the outmoded 78-RPM records when the 10-inch LP was coming into vogue. Taylor suggested they modernize a bit. He also suggested better promoting one of their singers, Chris Connor, by pulling her out of the big bands to feature her in more intimate settings that suited her style. The first of these recordings paired her with pianist Ellis Larkins’ trio and proved – after much work behind the scenes – to be a hit.
Bethlehem put Taylor to work. He produced an average of six albums a month, overseeing albums by Carmen McRae, Charlie Shavers, Jack Teagarden, Oscar Pettiford, Herbie Mann, Ruby Braff, Urbie Green, Don Elliott, Milt Hinton, Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson and others. Taylor often selected the sidemen for these dates while hanging out at nearby Charlie’s Tavern, where musicians on break from Birdland would meet and drink. Taylor began to craft albums with themes – as opposed to a random batch of songs – and worked closely with Bethlehem’s designer, Burt Goldblatt, to suggest covers matching the themes. For the covers, Taylor had Goldblatt add a high-gloss laminate, unusual for a jazz album of the time, to make an album’s cover shine from the shelves.
In 1955, Taylor read in Billboard magazine that ABC TV and Paramount Theaters had joined forces to form a record label. Believing his exposure would be greater at this new label, Taylor contacted president Sam Clark and asked for a job. Clark agreed and Taylor moved to ABC-Paramount Records. Along with fellow producers Don Costa and Sid Feller, Taylor was required to work on a variety of records outside of jazz, including pop, R&B, spoken word, sound effects, kids and novelty recordings and albums of, umm, drinking songs.
“I had to sneak [jazz] in,” Taylor told Myers. “I had to show them first that I could produce profitable albums of all music styles. Only then could I start concentrating more on jazz.” But even those non-jazz records employed the audible talents of many of New York’s greatest jazz players. Taylor’s earliest jazz albums at ABC-Paramount were Kenny Dorham and the Jazz Prophets (1956) and a savvy compilation boasting Taylor’s handling of an impressive number of top-shelf players, Know Your Jazz (1956). He recorded jazz albums at ABC-Paramount by Jimmy Raney, Quincy Jones, Don Elliott, Bobby Scott, Vinnie Burke, Zoot Sims, Billy Taylor, Candido, Jackie and Roy, Oscar Pettiford, Tony Scott, Lamberts, Hendricks and Ross and a number of records under the aegis of the Creed Taylor Orchestra, arranged by Kenyon Hopkins.
During this time, the 10-inch record evolved into the 12-inch record and many productions were being recorded in stereo. Creed Taylor, feeling trapped by ABC-Paramount’s presentation of jazz, went to his boss, ABC-Paramount VP Harry Levine, and proposed a jazz label. Levine, an ardent jazz supporter, agreed. “I told him,” Taylor told Myers, “we had to put out jazz records that looked great and stood out from the other records in the store.”
This was the start of Impulse Records. Taylor launched the now iconic label with six particularly strong records: Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson’s The Great Kai and J.J., Ray Charles’ Genius + Soul = Jazz, The Incredible Kai Winding Trombones, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool and John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. Ray Charles scored a hit with his “One Mint Julep” (boasting an arrangement by Quincy Jones) and more than a few of these albums became landmark jazz statements. The Impulse albums were marvels of first-class musicianship, recording (Rudy Van Gelder) and design (Robert Flynn). Each record came out encased in heavy, high-gloss gatefold sleeves, a first in jazz, rivaling the “class” previously afforded to only classical albums of the period. Impulse records stood out in the store and with their emblematic orange and black spines, stood out in their owners’ record collection, too.
Very soon thereafter, Creed Taylor got a call from the film studio MGM to head up their entire music division. MGM had recently acquired Verve Records from Norman Granz, with a line-up of artists including Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Anita O’Day and others. Taylor, faced with leading the recently created Impulse Records or working with his long-time heroes, particularly Getz, and getting even more exposure chose to head over to MGM. Beginning in 1961, Taylor sought to remake Verve with his own sensibilities – which differed greatly from Norman Granz – initially waxing three classics from Getz (Focus), Dizzy Gillespie (Perceptions) and Lee Konitz (Motion). Hits followed for Jimmy Smith (Bashin’), Kai Winding (“More”), Cal Tjader (Soul Sauce), Bill Evans (Conversations with Myself), Wes Montgomery (Bumpin’) and Walter Wanderley (“Summer Samba”).
Then, there was bossa nova. Following a phone call from guitarist Charlie Byrd in 1962, Taylor and Stan Getz went to Washington, DC, to record one of the earliest and most famed bossa nova albums of all time, Jazz Samba. The album, which spawned the hit “Desafinado,” launched the bossa nova craze of the early 1960s. Taylor recognized what he had on his hands and recorded scores of other bossa nova records thereafter, notably a quintet of fine Stan Getz albums, including the multi Grammy Award-winning Getz/Gilberto (1964) and definitive albums by bossa nova forefathers Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Taylor’s hit-making capability during his Verve years was additionally rewarded with a number of Grammy Awards, including wins for “Desafinado,” Bill Evans’s Conversations with Myself, “More” (from Kai Winding’s Soul Surfin’), “The Cat” (from Jimmy Smith’s The Cat), multiple awards for Getz/Gilberto (including the hit “The Girl From Ipanema”) and Wes Montgomery’s Goin’ Out of My Head.
- Creed Taylor, “Record Auteur,” interview by Devin Leonard, Waxpoetics No. 34, 2009, p. 78. ↩︎