From October 15 to November 15, 1968, A&M celebrated “Creed Taylor Month”1 by promoting its star producer’s now quantifiable product and issuing four brand new CTI productions: Wes Montgomery’s posthumous Road Song, Richard Barbary’s Soul Machine, Tamiko Jones’s I’ll Be Anything for You and Tamba 4’s Samba Blim.
Taylor’s recent acquisition of Paul Desmond, fresh from his long stint in The Dave Brubeck Quartet, was all part of the revelry, too. A&M rarely promoted its CTI productions apart from its own releases – the exception being Wes Montgomery – but the label now devoted attention to what had developed into a significant body of idiosyncratic work. A trade ad showcased the first nine A&M/CTI titles (A Day in the Life through Trust in Me) under the simple rubric Jazzicals,2 a word coined by Charles Mingus to convey the combination of “both old and new classical forms as well as old and new jazz forms” – an apt enough description of these Creed Taylor productions, despite having little in common with what Mingus was trying to do.
“I have a wonderful working relationship with Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert at A&M,” Taylor said at the time. “When I want to do something, I simply call them and it gets done. No channels, no obstacles to worry about.” Taylor added, “what I like about A&M is that the name means so much now and yet the album catalog is small enough so that my packages get the proper attention.”3
A&M seemed to believe that Taylor was providing the label with an aura of jazz authenticity (something Herb Alpert was never able to do) while still reaping the rewards of successful crossovers, most notably with Wes Montgomery. The Taylor-blitz recalled the 1961 batch introduction of four Taylor-produced titles that launched Impulse as a major force in modern jazz.
The A&M event also announced Creed Taylor’s CTI imprint as the next big thing, though the presence of the Brazilians, Richard Barbary and Tamiko Jones suggested that Taylor was no longer interested in appealing exclusively to jazz tastes.
An article in Billboard proclaiming “Creed Taylor Month” also indicated that CTI would later record Quincy Jones and Milton Nascimento (which it did) as well as Wille Bobo and Marcos Valle (which, if it happened, was never released)4 while an article that month in Record World announced that Taylor was working on a “Johnny Mandel album featuring music from northern Brazil” that never materialized.5
Endnotes:
- “Taylor Month: Oct. 15-Nov. 15 At A&M: Big Promo Slated,” Billboard, October 5, 1968, p. 4. ↩︎
- “Jazzicals,” DownBeat, October, 17, 1968. The Mingus neologism is defined in the liner notes to the Charles Mingus/John La Porta album Jazzical Moods, Vol. 2 (Period SLP-1111, 1955). ↩︎
- Creed Taylor, “Creed Taylor Multi-Faceted,” interview by Dave Finkle, Record World, October 21, 1967, p. 89. ↩︎
- “A&M Marking Taylor Month,” Billboard, October 26, 1968, p. 3. ↩︎
- Finkle, 1967, p. 89. ↩︎