Jazz Articles

Grant Green: The Main Attraction

by Arnaldo DeSouteiro
October 30, 2025

During his brilliant career as one of the best producers in the music history, Creed Taylor (born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on May 13, 1929) has worked with some of world's greatest guitarists: from Barry Galbraith (1919-1983) and Mundell Lowe, who took part in the Creed Taylor Orchestra albums (Lonelyville, Shock!, Ping Pang Pong) for ABC-Paramount in the late Fifties, to smooth jazz virtuoso Steve Laury, who was signed to CTI in 1995. In between, Creed produced memorable albums ...

Johnny "Hammond" Smith: Wild Horses Rock Steady

by Arnaldo DeSouteiro
November 3, 2024

Born John Robert Smith on December 16, 1933 (in Louisville, KY), formerly known as Johnny Hammond Smith, and later as Johnnny Hammond, one of the all-time best jazz organists passed away on June 4, 1997, in Chicago, Illinois. For some of his early fans, some of the best albums he recorded were done for Prestige in the Sixties. A younger generation, who grew up listening to the hip-hop influenced jazz sounds of the 1990s, prefers Johnny's over-produced sessions for Milestone ...

CTI Acid Jazz Grooves by Various Artists

by Arnaldo DeSouteiro
June 19, 2024

The CD you are holding in your hands is a very special compilation. It's the celebration of CTI as one of the most “sampled" labels on Earth! For the past ten years, many CTI tracks have been cut up, sampled, scratched and looped to create new songs for a new audience. Many of the selections on this album (all of them produced by Creed Taylor and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder) represented the basic inspiration and major influence in the ...

Freddie Hubbard: Straight Life (40th Anniversary Edition)

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
May 20, 2012

CTI Records reissued trumpeter Freddie Hubbard's November 1970 date, Straight Life, in 2011. As with some of the other reissues in this series (see John Kelman's in-depth discussion of some of the more important of these), its availability on compact disc has been spotty. Straight Life is a good--if not great--record, and it's good to have it back in circulation.The album is pretty simple. Two numbers--the relatively fast title track and Weldon Irvine's slower-grooving “Mr. Clean"--are long modal-funk ...

Freddie Hubbard: Straight Life

by Matt Leskovic
August 8, 2007

Creed Taylor's genre-bending CTI Records held the precarious position as the dominant jazz label during the 1970s--the decade during which the music “died. CTI was a contradiction in itself; it had as much to do with the promotion of straight-ahead, hard-swinging jazz as with spawning smoothed-out, easy-listening records that bordered on muzak. For every album as classy as Jim Hall's Concierto (CTI, 1975) there is a dud like Bob James's BJ4 (CTI, 1977), which comes perilously close to disco. The ...

Nina Simone: Baltimore

by Jim Santella
March 7, 2005

Nina Simone was called “The High Priestess of Soul." We remember her for the eclectic approach she applied to pop music and the emotion she poured into her music every time out. While Baltimore wasn't among her most memorable projects, it does offer a clear picture of the artist's spirit. This reissue provides an opportunity for collectors to secure a sampling of her lesser-known material.

Folk, pop, reggae, and gospel all come together on one program where Simone ...

Deodato: Deodato 2

by David Rickert
July 16, 2002

The surprise success of “Also Sprach Zarathrustra” on Prelude prompted Deodato to quickly follow with Deodato 2, a record that closely followed the template of his first number one hit. Deodato knew there was a lot of money to be made courting the rock audience, and there’s little on this record that could safely be called jazz. However, this record still stands up remarkably well today, unlike some of the other keyboard-driven records from the era. This time “Rhapsody in ...

George Benson: Bad Benson

by David Rickert
July 11, 2002

Some tunes are so sacred that any attempt to cover them can only result in failure. Yet George Benson makes this mistake twice on Bad Benson ; the band can’t quite manage a groove in 5/4 on Brubeck’s “Take Five” and once again falter with a horrid disco version of Ellington’s “Take The ‘A’ Train” complete with fake train whistles. Creed Taylor should have offered rebates to anyone that could listen to these numbers more than once without wincing. However, ...

Freddie Hubbard: Red Clay

by David Rickert
July 11, 2002

Like Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard's best work was always in the service of others until he signed with Creed Taylor's CTI label. He then released a trio of albums that represents his crowning achievement as a leader. Red Clay finds him in the company of Herbie Hancock, who played a large part in defining jazz fusion, as well as heavyweights like Ron Carter, Joe Henderson, and Lenny White. The title track kicks off the record with a funky ...

Antonio Carlos Jobim: Stone Flower

by David Rickert
May 6, 2002

Jobim has been described as the Gershwin of Brazilian music, which is an apt title for a man who contributed so many original songs to the jazz repertoire, adding a few standards along the way. Those who were inspired to follow his work after “The Girl From Ipanema” may have picked up Wave, his most well-known solo record, but may have overlooked Stone Flower, a markedly better effort. The drippy strings on the former record brought out the quiet romanticism ...