Obituary for the great jazz producer Creed Taylor – Kultur

It all started with a phone call from Charlie Byrd. Creed Taylor was executive producer for jazz label Verve Records when the jazz guitarist played him this new music, which he had brought back from a tour of Brazil. Her name was bossa nova. And because Taylor loved what he heard, he flexed his talent for matching the right musicians with the right sounds and packaging. Right in terms of the market. Because when bossa nova, with its lascivious rhythms and cultivated exotic sounds, made both jazz and pop dance in the years that followed, then the musical vision of a man, who had started out as a jazz trumpeter himself, soon stood behind it but realized that his talent was possibly more behind than on the stage: as a string puller, producer and label maker, Creed Taylor became a unique brand. A trickster who broke up the jazz allotment culture with soul, funk and easy listening flavors. Who created a highly successful crossover sound with artists such as Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Herbie Mann and Grover Washington. And who left his mark even in the hip-hop annals. Who doesn’t know Bob James’ “Nautilus” or Grover Washington’s “Hydra” or “Mister Magic” as a sample of A Tribe Called Quest to Amy Winehouse?

But it doesn’t matter what Creed Taylor touched: whether he brought John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Impulse! in the early 1960s. Records, he was to help George Benson break through on his own label CTI a few years later, prepared Herbie Hancock, Milt Jackson and Ron Carter for pop, or also produced classics like “From A Whisper To A Scream” with the fantastic soul singer Esther Phillips – he always remained above all the godfather of bossa nova. He brought together Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz for “Jazz Samba” in 1962. Recorded in a few hours in a black church in Washington DC, the album shot to the top of the pop charts thanks to songs like “Desafinado”. One million copies sold! And that for a jazz album! Two years later, Taylor went one better: The album “Getz/Gilberto”, which he produced in 1964, stayed in the Billboard charts for almost two years, received four Grammys and enriched mankind with what is probably the most covered album after “Yesterday” by the Beatles Song of pop history: “The Girl From Ipanema”. Taylor had had the courage to enrich the melancholic melody with the singing of Astrud Gilberto, the musically untrained wife of Brazilian guitarist Joao Gilberto – which then made up the broken charm of the hit.

When Taylor started, he had no prior training – but he brought a lot of enthusiasm

“I wanted to make musicians sound good for people who have no prior knowledge of jazz or improvised music,” the producer explained his credo. As a white farmer’s son, he grew up in the segregated south of Virginia, but at the age of ten he was fascinated by the big band sounds that the radio played to him. With no prior training, but with a great deal of enthusiasm, he got a job as a producer at the Bethlehem Records label in the early 1950s. In 1956 he moved to ABC-Paramount, where he launched one of the most important imprints in jazz history: Impulse! Not only did he sign John Coltrane – “A Love Supreme”, “Africa Brass” and “Crescent” – later appeared on the label. Taylor also made the album cover—thick cardboard, laminated covers with artistic photographs—part of a total work of art. A line he later maintained with Verve or his own label CTI. Jazz owes more than just hits to the shy and introverted maker. But above all a face open to the world and art. Creed Taylor died Tuesday of complications from a heart attack. He was 93 years old.