Results for "Creed Taylor"

Creed Taylor

Creed Taylor revolutionized the respectability and popularity of jazz with CTI Records. In fact, some of the most significant jazz of the last half of the 20th century has been fashioned under Taylor's guidance and supervision. Taylor has been especially influential in the packaging of music. His records are as much art to see as they are to hear. With heavy, glossy, gatefold covers featuring stark design and striking photography, his records have the sound and feel of something bearing unusual class and great quality. After earning a degree in psychology in the early 1950s, Taylor played trumpet in clubs around Virginia Beach

Impulse! Records: An Alternative Top 20 Zeitgeist Seizing Albums

By CHRIS MAY

There can be little argument that a jazz label ever captured a zeitgeist more completely than Impulse! did during its original 1960s incarnation. In the US, the fight back against white racism was cresting, opposition to the Vietnam war was growing, outrage over the assassinations of figures of hope such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King ...

Jazz & Film: An Alternative Top 20 Soundtrack Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Jazz and the movies have a shared history stretching back almost a hundred years. The relationship came into its own in the US in the mid twentieth century. Elia Kazan's 1950 movie Panic In The Streets is an early example of how film makers used jazz-based soundtracks to enhance drama and atmosphere and create ambiances of ...

Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman Records: Ten High Altitude Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Bob Thiele is best remembered for his years as the artistic director and house producer of Impulse!. He took over from founder producer Creed Taylor in 1961 and stayed with the label until 1969, when he left to run his own Flying Dutchman Records. Thiele's tenure at Impulse! was its most glorious period, when Thiele curated ...

Drummers as Bandleaders: An Alternative Top Ten Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Drummers have been key members of every band which has changed the course of jazz history, from Max Roach with Charlie Parker to Elvin Jones with John Coltrane and onwards. Yet drummers have been the leaders of a surprisingly small proportion of landmark bands themselves. Chick Webb in the 1920s was the first of the few. ...

Larry Tamanini: Front & Center

By CHRIS M. SLAWECKI

jny: Philadelphia leaves such deep and wide fingerprints on guitarist Larry Tamanini's Front and Center that he could list the city in its credits. Tamanini emerged on the Philadelphia jazz scene in the late 1990s, studying privately under Philly jazz guitar legends Dennis Sandole and Pat Martino, whose cerebral yet soulful sound sometimes echoes ...

Nate Najar with the John Toomey Trio at Attucks Theatre

By MARK ROBBINS

In 1961, under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, jazz/classical guitarist Charlie Byrd toured South America. This trip proved to be fortuitous for both Byrd and North America for it introduced Byrd to the Brazilian Bossa Nova. Back in the states Byrd played Bossa Nova tapes for Stan Getz who then convinced producer Creed Taylor ...

Bob James Trio: Expresso

By DAN MCCLENAGHAN

Bob James wrote “Angela," the theme song to the popular late-1970s/early 1980s television show, Taxi, a feather in the cap that introduced his sound to millions of listeners who might not ever slip a jazz CD into the stereo. For those with an ear and a love of jazz, he is probably most familiar for his ...

Gary McFarland: The In Sound & Soft Samba

By ROB CALDWELL

Arranger, vibraphonist and singer Gary McFarland is regarded as one of the major purveyors of orchestral jazz--a type of jazz which had its heyday in the 1960s, but which is not heard as much anymore. A fine line separates orchestral jazz from the dreaded “easy listening" tag. A line so fine, they're often one and the ...