Results for "CTI Records"

CTI Records

Creed Taylor Productions, Part 1

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 2, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 The place in jazz history held by Creed Taylor is impeccable, stylish, and essential. He produced some of the best music for some of the best labels dedicated to jazz, then formed his own label and with meticulous preparation and his musician's ear kept on making great jazz ...

Creed Taylor Productions, Part 2

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 3, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 The place in jazz history held by Creed Taylor is impeccable, stylish, and essential. He produced some of the best music for some of the best labels dedicated to jazz, then formed his own label and with meticulous preparation and his musician's ear kept on making great jazz ...

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.

CTI Records: Ten Tasty Albums With No Added Sugar (Almost)

by Chris May
September 17, 2020

Few jazz producers divide opinion as much as Creed Taylor. He is a hero to many and a villain to as many more. His fans love him for his high production values. His detractors accuse him of dumbing jazz down with excessively sweetened orchestrations and other sales-oriented compromises. Nowhere is the dispute more heated than over ...

J.J. and Kai: Stonebone

February 19, 2019

In 1967, Creed Taylor launched CTI Records as a subsidiary of the A&M label. Creed had just left Verve, where he headed the jazz label and pioneered new concepts in young-adult jazz, including covers with abstract color photography and jazz interpretations of pop-rock and pop-soul radio hits. In New York, Creed had complete autonomy over CTI. ...

Pete Turner (1934-2017)

September 21, 2017

Pete Turner, a commercial photographer who befriended jazz producer Creed Taylor early in his career in the late 1950s and whose richly saturated color images were used on album covers by Creed when he was at ABC-Paramount, Impulse, Verve, A&M and, most notably, CTI, died Sept. 18. Turner was 83. Pete's iconic images were featured on ...

Straight Life (40th Anniversary Edition)

By Freddie Hubbard

Label: CTI Records
Released: 2012
Track listing: Straight Life; Mr. Clean; Here's That Rainy Day.

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 ...

Festival De Lugano 1985

By Astrud Gilberto

Label: CTI Records
Released: 2010