Remembering Creed Taylor

[JSngry]

The first Pablos weren't even distributed by RCA. It was strictly a Granz thing, and there was a definite aura of conisseur-ness to them.

But Granz did what Granz did - flooded the market with more product than all but the most devoted could keep up with. I know that at some point I just stopped caring, you know, Basie Jam 37, who cares?

With distance comes a time to catch your breath and co back to catch up at your own pace, and ok, yeah, Basie Jam 56ight have been pretty rote BUT it's got Hancoal Donuts on it and THAT is always a treat! 

6 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

High-touch, hands-on production, i.e., Creed Taylor is slick.  Hands-off production, i.e., Alfred Lion is not slick. 

If you think that Alfred Lion was not extremely slick, you have not been paying attention. 

[Big Beat Steve]

1 minute ago, JSngry said:

... I know that at some point I just stopped caring, you know, Basie Jam 37, who cares?

With distance comes a time to catch your breath and co back to catch up at your own pace, and ok, yeah, Basie Jam 56ight have been pretty rote BUT it's got Hancoal Donuts on it and THAT is always a treat! 

Particularly if you can pick them up dirt cheap second (or third) hand ...

[JSngry]

You can never overpay for a record with Hancoal Donuts on it!

But good news - you never have to!!!! 

[HutchFan]

11 minutes ago, JSngry said:

If you think that Alfred Lion was not extremely slick, you have not been paying attention. 

I guess this is what I get for answering your rhetorical question with a straight-forward answer.

OK  You win.

 

[JSngry]

No, seriously. Lion:

1. Paid rehearsals 

2. Schving 

3. Tightly controlled studio sound 

4. Tightly controlled graphics

5. Personally oversaw the mastering of his records, singlehandedly creating and maintaining "The Blue Note Sound" 

6. Better fade out skills than anybody except maybe Brian Wilson 

7. Publishing! 

8. Indulged artists on their term as long as they were his terms 

Alfred Lion was extremely slick, and that is nothing but a compliment. And in terms of having a vision for a product and then creating it and maintaining it, him and Creed Taylor were a lot more similar than they were different 

Some people maybe like records that create the illusion that they're not product. Alfred Lion was a master at making records that created that illusion. Creed Taylor gave that illusion the finger in no uncertain terms. But, at least until things went bad, I feel pretty confident in saying that there was more overall coasting on Lion's Blue Note than on Creed Taylor's records (and there wasn't that much on Lion's).

Taylor made movies. Lion directed theatre. But none of it is real. If you think it is, find a club anywhere in the world that sounds like an Alfred Lion record.

Or even better, find a piano that soundsike a RVG piano. That sounds does not exist in the natural world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rabshakeh]

48 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Pablo definitely was in the upper price brackets of jazz LPS over here in the 70s too, and they did look stark and austere in a "prestige" way to me. Maybe a bit like Mosaics came across later on (though of course the Pablos never were THAT upmarket). 
70s latter-day recordings of 50s jazz heros were not my cuppa in the 70s and ealry 80s (student funds were limited and main preferences elsewhere) so I did not buy them in any quantities until quite a bit later but their price when new certainly had an effect too.

That's interesting. I always assumed they were cheap, because that's how they look. Not my favourite covers but at least it's a unified look and vibe.

[JSngry]

The biggest  difference between Alfred Lion and Creed Taylor is that Lion quit while he was ahead. Taylor didn't. 

[danasgoodstuff]

7 minutes ago, JSngry said:

No, seriously. Lion:

1. Paid rehearsals 

2. Schving 

3. Tightly controlled studio sound 

4. Tightly controlled graphics

5. Personally oversaw the mastering of his records, singlehandedly creating and maintaining "The Blue Note Sound" 

6. Better fade out skills than anybody except maybe Brian Wilson 

7. Publishing! 

8. Indulged artists on their term as long as they were his terms 

Alfred Lion was extremely slick, and that is nothing but a compliment. And in terms of having a vision for a product and then creating it and maintaining it, him and Creed Taylor were a lot more similar than they were different 

Some people maybe like records that create the illusion that they're not product. Alfred Lion was a master at making records that created that illusion. Creed Taylor gave that illusion the finger in no uncertain terms. But, at least until things went bad, I feel pretty confident in saying that there was more overall coasting on Lion's Blue Note than on Creed Taylor's records (and there wasn't that much on Lion's).

Taylor made movies. Lion directed theatre. But none of it is real. If you think it is, find a club anywhere in the world that sounds like an Alfred Lion record.

Or even better, find a piano that soundsike a RVG piano. That sounds does not exist in the natural world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's one way to look at it.  A simpler way is that Afred & Francis consistently gave me something I enjoyed listening to and wanted to find more of, Creed Taylor (CTI & elsewhere) not nearly so much.

Edited September 1, 2022 by danasgoodstuff

[HutchFan]

3 minutes ago, JSngry said:

No, seriously. Lion:

1. Paid rehearsals 

2. Schving 

3. Tightly controlled studio sound 

4. Tightly controlled graphics

5. Personally oversaw the mastering of his records, singlehandedly creating and maintaining "The Blue Note Sound" 

6. Better fade out skills than anybody except maybe Brian Wilson 

7. Publishing! 

8. Indulged artists on their term as long as they were his terms 

Alfred Lion was extremely slick, and that is nothing but a compliment. And in terms of having a vision for a product and then creating it and maintaining it, him and Creed Taylor were a lot more similar than they were different 

Some people maybe like records that create the illusion that they're not product. Alfred Lion was a master at making records that created that illusion. Creed Taylor gave that illusion the finger in no uncertain terms. But, at least until things went bad, I feel pretty confident in saying that there was more overall coasting on Lion's Blue Note than on Creed Taylor's records (and there wasn't that much on Lion's).

Taylor made movies. Lion directed theatre. But none of it is real. If you think it is, find a club anywhere in the world that sounds like an Alfred Lion record.

Or even better, find a piano that soundsike a RVG piano. That sounds does not exist in the natural world. 

I get it.  Lion was slick in the best sense of the word.

But I know that you understand that the meaning of the word slick is shifty.  It depends on the context -- just like the words "bad" or "nasty" or "sick." 

All of these words can be very positive or very negative, depending on how they're used.

 

[JSngry]

On 1974, this was a damn near arresting cover. Nothing about it sought to create the illusion that it was anything other than what it was - a death record. 

[Peter Friedman]

57 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

You know what he means, Jim.

High-touch, hands-on production, i.e., Creed Taylor is slick.  Hands-off production, i.e., Alfred Lion is not slick.

In the context that Peter used it, it's derogatory.  In other contexts, it's a compliment.

 

Alfred and Francis produced recordings aimed primarily at "serious" jazz listeners.

Many of Creed Taylor's CTI productions were aimed at a wider commercial market. Some  were geared for people who were not "into" jazz, but wanted some  music that gave off a "hip" feeling to themselves and their friends and family.

I am not saying that what Creed Taylor did with the more commercially oriented albums was bad. Rather, it had little ,if any appeal to me.  I wanted, for the most part, to listen to straight ahead swinging jazz such as what I found on Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary  and a number of other labels( including Pablo). 

 

[JSngry]

Or this 1975 one of Duke, months away from his death, a stark reminder that yes, he was gone, and that wow, he really was OLD.

Ray Brown looks like a teenager by comparison.

The early-mid 70s were not a time of contemplating mortality. It was usually a time in jazz where death was a bit of a shock. And to their credit, whatever else Pablo did, they never shied away from the fact that people got old, sometimes very old, and sometimes so old that death was just around the corner. 

[JSngry]

32 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

Alfred and Francis produced recordings aimed primarily at "serious" jazz listeners.

I would suggest comparing Lion's output to Wolff's. The latter focused on funky organ jazz that hardly was aimed at these "serious" jazz listeners. 

Also, Wolff got a sound out of RVG that was a LOT closer to CTI than to Lion's Blue Note. This is the sound  of Red Clay, space waiting to be filled.

Besides, "serious" jazz listeners, just who the hell is that? The people who bought the Jimmy Smith and Lou Donaldson records or the people who bought the Andrew Hill records? The people who had a grasp of the musical specifics or the people who just dug the vibe and nothing else? 

It's a mythology, that's what it is. The only people they were making records for were the people they hoped would buy them. Of course they had standards, but if you only bought one jazz record a year and it was a 3 Sounds record, I seriously doubt that they cared if you were a connoisseur of subtle piano trio architecture or just wanted some  music that gave off a "hip" feeling to themselves and their friends and family. 

I think that CTI gets a bad rap, at times a hostile rap, for doing exactly what they set out to do and doing it extremely well and, god forbid,  successfully. 

I'll throw this out there too - a lot of the best CTI/Sebesky stuff was made with the small group recorded first, and then Sebesky wrote the orchestra in and around that. No, that's not a documentation, live theatre approach, but it is a perfectly legitimate approach to making both music and a record. At it's best, it's imaginative and engaging. At it's worst, it's totally disposable. And in between, hey, whatever works for you.

In that regard it is no different than anything else in life.

Anything. 

[danasgoodstuff]

1 hour ago, Peter Friedman said:

Alfred and Francis produced recordings aimed primarily at "serious" jazz listeners.

Many of Creed Taylor's CTI productions were aimed at a wider commercial market. Some  were geared for people who were not "into" jazz, but wanted some  music that gave off a "hip" feeling to themselves and their friends and family.

I am not saying that what Creed Taylor did with the more commercially oriented albums was bad. Rather, it had little ,if any appeal to me.  I wanted, for the most part, to listen to straight ahead swinging jazz such as what I found on Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary  and a number of other labels( including Pablo). 

 

I'm as big a fan of Alfred & Francis era BN as anyone and have mixed feelings about CTI, but there's something off about this analysis.  Something beyond it just being too broad, which it certainly is.  There's a sweet spot in terms of producer input, but it varies from project to project.  My preference for BN Turrentine and Hubbard over CTI product by the same players only a few years later may have more to do with where those guys were in their artistic and personal lives and where the world at large was than with production choices, or some weird mix of all of the above.

[Rabshakeh]

Slickness can signify in two ways, I guess.

People often complain about Blue Note post-Sidewinder having a formula. It's only half the story (sadly, no Grachan Moncur boogaloo grinders out there).  But certainly, a lot of Blue Note records from that era are quite 'formulaic', and sometimes can feel like so much product.

On the other hand, the production choices are much more noticeable on CTI's records than Blue Note's or Prestige's or even Mr Taylor's productions at Verve. Much more noticeable and much more noticeably expensive. 

On a record-by-record level, CTI is surely the "slicker" sounding product, even if Messrs Lion and Wolff, arguably, had their own slick approach to business.

[HutchFan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I think that CTI gets a bad rap, at times a hostile rap, for doing exactly what they set out to do and doing it extremely well and, god forbid,  successfully. 

I agree 100% with that statement.

 

[Peter Friedman]

31 minutes ago, danasgoodstuff said:

I'm as big a fan of Alfred & Francis era BN as anyone and have mixed feelings about CTI, but there's something off about this analysis.  Something beyond it just being too broad, which it certainly is.  There's a sweet spot in terms of producer input, but it varies from project to project.  My preference for BN Turrentine and Hubbard over CTI product by the same players only a few years later may have more to do with where those guys were in their artistic and personal lives and where the world at large was than with production choices, or some weird mix of all of the above.

Yes, I was making some broad based generalizations, which I maintain are correct. But read carefully my words designed to point out that not every single album from either Lion/Wolf or Taylor fit the model perfectly. There were certainly exceptions to the core focus of both Lion & Wolf and Creed Taylor's CTI productions. That is why I do have a small number of CTI albums on my shelves.

I am guessing (no hard data here), that for the most part, those with large comprehensive  collections of Blue Note albums on their shelves are unlikely to have large collections of Creed Taylors CTI albums on their shelves. And vice-versa. A number of good friends of mine would serve as good examples.

 This is a generalization, and there will be some exceptions.

 

 

[danasgoodstuff]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

I think that CTI gets a bad rap, at times a hostile rap, for doing exactly what they set out to do and doing it extremely well and, god forbid,  successfully. 

Until they didn't any more, and that seems to have happened fairly quickly.  Business considerations like switching distributors no doubt factored in, that and the attention that entailed which left less band width for other concerns.  And I would certainly agree that Francis was not interchangeable with Alfred, but almost nothing on BN from any period sounds like CTI to me.  Not even the heavily orchestrated stuff.

[HutchFan]

3 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

On the other hand, the production choices are much more noticeable on CTI's records than Blue Note's or Prestige's or even Mr Taylor's productions at Verve. Much more noticeable and much more noticeably expensive. 

I'm wondering...

Why is "noticeable production" even a problem?  A heavier hand when it comes to production isn't necessarily bad -- especially if the producer knows what he/she is doing.

Don't Mess with Mr. T sounds as much like a soul record as it does a jazz record -- and a lot of that has to do with the production.  I like that about it.  Bitches Brew is a studio artifact.  What we hear when we spin the vinyl didn't happen in the studio as we're hearing it.  I like that about it.

Purists may prefer production that strives for "sounds-like-you're-hearing-it-in-the-club" approach.  And that's perfectly fine. Totally, 100% A-OK.  But it's just a choice, like any other artistic choice.  It's not good vs bad.  It's A vs B.  

I think we should call things preferences or conventions when that's all they are. There's nothing inherently virtuous or serious or better about non-electrified instruments and minimalist production values.  Even if most of the music that I love follows that path.

IMO. 

 

[mjzee]

4 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

I'm wondering...

Why is "noticeable production" even a problem?  A heavier hand when it comes to production isn't necessarily bad -- especially if the producer knows what he/she is doing.

Don't Mess with Mr. T sounds as much like a soul record as it does a jazz record -- and a lot of that has to do with the production.  I like that about it.  Bitches Brew is a studio artifact.  What we hear when we spin the vinyl didn't happen in the studio as we're hearing it.  I like that about it.

Purists may prefer production that strives for "sounds-like-you're-hearing-it-in-the-club" approach.  And that's perfectly fine. Totally, 100% A-OK.  But it's just a choice, like any other artistic choice.  It's not good vs bad.  It's A vs B.  

I think we should call things preferences or conventions when that's all they are. There's nothing inherently virtuous or serious or better about non-electrified instruments and minimalist production values.  Even if most of the music that I love follows that path.

IMO. 

 

This is all true, as far as it goes.  But the producer can become as important, or more important than, the date's leader or the other musicians.  They all affect the sound, but increasing the producer's value skews the vision of the final product, the record, towards the producer.  And that's important for us, the consumer (for whom, presumably, the record is being made).  

I think it's safe to say that most board members like records that reflect the musicians' sensibilities and output, with the producer more there to document the recording date and have some input.

Where this is really important can be seen as time went on.  Creed Taylor was an intelligent man steeped in music, and CTI records reflected that.  But how about Larry Mizell?  Whoever produced those bland but popular Turrentine albums on Fantasy, and even worse, on Elektra?  Virtually everything released on GRP?  Those awful albums Freddie Hubbard released on Columbia?  The production (as in "product") quotient went way up, and musical value went way down.

[JSngry]

Freddie's records on Columbia were only sometimes uninspired, never awful, and in the case of The Love Connection, sone of his absolutely best playing on record.

Truth be told, many "serious jazz listeners" are serious fans, period, and can't hear past the surface. That's why so damn many "jazz records" sound the same.

I don't begrudge anybody any of that, but if you can't hear, say, Stanley Turrentine playing brilliantly on a CTI record, then you aren't hearing the music, you're hearing the record. And vice-versa.

That's why I rate Creed Taylor as totally legit, he could aim at both targets equally well. 

[JSngry]

30 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

Don't Mess with Mr. T sounds as much like a soul record as it does a jazz record ... 

Ok. I'll bite - what soul records does it sound like? Past the title cut?

Do people still listen to the Trouble Man record?

The Mizell gang, otoh, actually produced soul records, hit soul records no less. Both before and after Blue Note hit that New Note.

Personally, I have more personally-indispensable Marvin Gaye records than I do Donald Byrd records, not even close.

Perhaps I am not a serious jazz listener. If this is what that means, then I gladly accept the verdict! 

[JSngry]

55 minutes ago, danasgoodstuff said:

Until they didn't any more, and that seems to have happened fairly quickly.  Business considerations like switching distributors no doubt factored in, that and the attention that entailed which left less band width for other concerns.

It wasn't even that complicated.

He lost his A-Team of talent and didn't have any kind of bench. I saw it happen in real time. One after the other they all got bigger deals with bigger labels. I think Freddie might have been the first, but pretty soon, Stanley, Laws, Benson, Deodato, hell, even Bob James were all gone.

I have no idea if the money got funny after that or not, but the guy seemed to let that knock him down to where he couldn't get back up. Spurts here and there, but no traction, and some downright misfires, suck jobs.

Am I the only one who doesn't at all get Seawind? I take it that they're supposed to have been amazing, and Jerry Hey certainly has a most impressive resume, but the band itself? Not for me, thank you.

The Urbie Green record with the uglyass bumble bee is actually quite nice, a good one. So why weren't there more like that.

The dude just lost his mojo. 

[Teasing the Korean]

5 hours ago, JSngry said:

I need somebody to define "slickness" for me, please. And why it's by definition a bad thing. When I grew up, "slick" was usually a compliment. 

I need somebody to define "over-produced."  What is over-produced for one person is simply produced for another. 

I get the feeling that certain jazz listeners resent the idea that one iota of advance thought or planning went into a jazz album, as opposed to the musicians showing up, calling tunes, and blowing for 8 choruses apiece.  Records such as this peacefully coexist on my modular LP shelving unit alongside CTI albums.  There's room for both extremes, and everything between.  

6 hours ago, jazzbo said:

And covers are a minor consideration for me. 

A very prominent classical music critic once told a professional musician friend of mine that he could review an album based on the cover art alone.  And I get it.  

Edited September 1, 2022 by Teasing the Korean

[danasgoodstuff]

1 minute ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I need somebody to define "over-produced."  What is over-produced for one person is simply produced for another. 

I get the feeling that certain jazz listeners resent the idea that one iota of advance thought or planning went into a jazz album, as opposed to the musicians showing up, calling tunes, and blowing for 8 choruses apiece.  Records such as this peacefully coexist on my modular LP shelving unit alongside CTI albums.  There's room for both extremes, and everything between.  

Indeed, the thing is to find ways to not just slide along the curve but move things off the curve, if that makes any sense.