Results for "Creed Taylor"

Creed Taylor

Born: May 13, 1929

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. He relocated to New York and secured a venerable post as head of artists and repertoire at Bethlehem Records. He produced a wide variety of jazz for Bethlehem before he took a higher profile position with ABC Paramount during the late fifties. At ABC, he produced some jazz and a great many more vocal recordings that enjoyed popular success. ABC also issued several records at the time under Taylor's name (Ping Pang Pong and Lonelyville) with music and orchestral guidance by the great film and TV composer Kenyon Hopkins, one of Taylor's first "house" arrangers.

Eddie Daniels: To Milton With Love

by Artur Moral
February 14, 2026

Even in a field as conducive to covers as jazz, it is unusual to find a complete reinterpretation of an album with all its tracks in their original order. Interestingly, 2025 has seen several releases of this type, some widely known and deservedly acclaimed, like Branford Marsalis' Belonging (Blue Note Records, 2025), which pays homage to ...

Lucy Southern: Lucy Southern

by Dan McClenaghan
April 18, 2025

California-born Lucy Southern, now based in France, is on a jazz journey that took her to Poland for the Seifert Competition. A wee-hours party ensued, a good time that rolled to the break of day. At one point, Southern and Michal Urbaniak, the Polish violinist, convened one-on-one to talk music. Urbaniak told Southern that he liked ...

Freddie Hubbard: On Fire: Live At The Blue Morocco

by Dan McClenaghan
April 14, 2025

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (1938 -2008) began his professional jazz journey in 1960 as a full-blooded hard bopper, recording his first album in that year for Blue Note Records, Open Sesame. Much of the ensuing decade saw him in several Blue Note outings under his own name and as a side man. He also recorded sets for ...

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 ...

Impex's Getz/Gilberto; Plus a Chat With Abey Fonn

March 11, 2024

This month marks the 60th anniversary of Getz/Gilberto's release by Verve Records. The revolutionary bossa nova album recorded in 1963 and produced by Creed Taylor—with the inclusion of Astrud Gilberto singing The Girl From Ipanema and Corcovado—turned the infectious Brazilian beat into a global phenomenon with the young-adult market. In America, the Beatles and other British ...

Bob James: Jazz Hands

by Dan McClenaghan
February 8, 2024

Let us groove into a H.G. Wells mode and ride a time machine back to 1979 and revisit One On One (Tappan Zee), pianist Bob James' collaboration with guitarist Earl Klugh. The disc won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. It was a polished production, full of catchy rhythms and bright, memorable melodies--music that ...

Celebrating The Third Story at 10 with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran

by Leo Sidran
February 4, 2024

Ten years ago, on a bit of a whim, I invited bassist Will Lee to come over to my home studio in Brooklyn to do an interview with me for a new project I was starting: a podcast. A year or two earlier, my friend had turned me on to Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and I ...

Summer In The City - The Soul Jazz Grooves Of Quincy Jones

By Quincy Jones

Label: Verve Records
Released: 2023

Leo Sidran: Conversation Artist

by Ludovico Granvassu
September 5, 2023

For music lovers, listening to music is often not only about the music. An album is much more than a vessel of beautiful chords, notes and lyrics. It offers mission statements, “how to" manuals, and blueprints for life strategies. Each song a trap-door it is impossible not to sneak into, in search for insights on how ...