Producer of new and archival recordings, radio presenter, writer, researcher, discographer, co-founder of Mosaic Records (which he ran for over forty years), winner of three Grammys and a Downbeat Lifetime Achievement in Recording award, Michael Cuscuna passed away on Saturday, April 20, Record Store Day. He was 75 and is survived by his wife Lisa, his children Max and Lauren, Max’s wife Jackie, and two grandchildren, Nicolas and Penelope Cuscuna.

Born in 1948 in Stamford, Connecticut, a suburb of New York where Mosaic Records is still based, Michael Cuscuna was interested in music from an early age. He started on the drums and later tried the flute, alto sax and tenor sax, and by age 14 he was already taking trains to Manhattan and lodging himself in the peanut gallery at Birdland. There, among others, he heard Art Blakey and the Messengers around the time when they recorded Cedar Walton’s “Mosaic.” As Cuscuna himself explained, “It’s the stuff that gets to you between about 12 and 25 that stays with you for life.”

Stung by music, and knowing he would not make it as a performer, he looked for other ways to enter the business. While still in school, he worked in a local record shop. In college, he did one year of a Business degree before realising that it wouldn’t equip him to run a small record label, so he switched to English. He ran shows on college radio, and by the time he was 26, he had already produced two albums for Buddy Guy, as well as Bonnie Raitt’s sophomore effort, Give it Up. He also wrote for Downbeat magazine, where in 1972 he reviewed four early ECM ‘import’ LPs (#1008-1011) welcoming the label to the US: “ECM is a brave little record company [which] must be congratulated on an outstanding beginning.”

In the 1970s, after a stint at Atlantic Records, where he produced an unlikely album with Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz and Anthony Braxton, and which he left because it was becoming “more and more corporate”, Cuscuna was behind a series of significant avant-garde albums at Arista Records. He spent long hours mining and taking notes at the vaults of the Blue Note label, then dormant. When Capitol Records rejected Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie’s proposal to revive it, they took one of their ideas – the possibility of compiling box sets in the same vein as those Columbia had released in the 1960s – and ran with it. They founded a boutique label which would print, and directly sell, limited runs of definitive, carefully curated collections of music: Mosaic Records.

Their first release, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, a 4-LP set from 1983, was the only solution Cuscuna could devise to release about 25 minutes of previously unissued Monk he’d found in the vaults. He put it together with the listener’s perspective in mind: consistent sequencing, generous liner notes providing context, and as much discographical information as was available. Thus, he defined the standard the label follows 41 years and 277 sets later.

That monumental catalogue, encompassing the whole vast spectrum of jazz, would be enough to make Cuscuna a giant of the cleaning, fixing and polishing of this sonic history, but he also worked on the Impulse! archive from 1975. There, he compiled The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, released via CD in the 1990s (first on GRP, then Universal), the reissue of all of Miles Davis’s recordings for Columbia in thematic sets (also in the 1990s and 2000s), and the multiple campaigns of Blue Note releases, comprising more than 100 unissued sessions and hundreds of issued ones. These were accompanied by the immortal iconography of Francis Wolff, whose photo archive Cuscuna owned until recently. For the generations of listeners this side of Martin Williams’ The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz from 1973, there is surely no one more influential than Cuscuna in our perception of the jazz canon. 

As mindful as Cuscuna was of the importance of preservation of archives and hard data – he co-authored the definitive Blue Note discography – he was not an archivist, but a curator. As a producer of new records, he would remind artists they didn’t have to fill up CDs with music and, generally, he took it upon himself to make artistic calls on the value of the music and was not keen on releasing every sound available. In fact, he consistently refused to release sessions known to be extant in Blue Note’s vaults, much to the disappointment of hardcore fans. At the same time, a number of Mosaic sets can be taken as corrections to previous releases of the same music, like The Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945-1947), which came out soon after a botched 2-CD compilation by Sony, or the recent repackaging of available Blue Note recordings: sets by Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Sonny Clark, whose recent editions by the parent label have been criticised in some quarters for their remastering.

For the last 25 years, I corresponded with Cuscuna on a number of matters, from minute sound quality issues in sets to questions about discography, or advice about some article or other, and he always took time to provide an answer to the best of his ability. We met once in person, for lunch at Mosaic’s local, the Crab Shell in Stamford, and he was a hoot: asked not long ago about retirement, he retorted “No, and do what? I am blind as a bat, I can’t do any sports, and I am too old to do drugs. What the hell am I going to do?”

Cuscuna will be missed, especially at a time when reissues on musical value – as opposed to ‘name’ value – are on the wane, and archives are largely owned as assets not for public release, banishing the music to non-existence.

Still, his legacy will remain for a long time for everyone to listen.

Fernando Ortiz de Urbina is a jazz historian and commentator, and contributes regularly to Spanish-language podcast Club de Jazz.

The post Michael Cuscuna (1948-2024) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Even though he would make his name in New York City, Taylor came from the unlikely background of farm life in the middle of Virginia, bluegrass territory in terms of music, from which he was lured away to jazz through radio. He learned to play the trumpet and read music, and after two years in the Army during the Korean War, he enrolled at Duke University to study medicine and ended with a degree in psychology—not inconvenient for his future career—and the determination to make it as a producer, a job he knew nothing about.

Taylor’s knack for jazz, business savvy, networking ability and conviction made him a success almost from the beginning. As he arrived in New York in 1953, he persuaded the owner of struggling label Bethlehem Records to abandon the 78 RPM record for the 10-inch LP and let him record singer Chris Connor as a duet with pianist Ellis Larkins. It worked, and Taylor never looked back.

For the following twenty-odd years, at Bethlehem, ABC-Paramount, Impulse!, Verve, A&M, and finally his own CTI and Kudu, Taylor was a commercial success. His productions, although musically diverse, showed common traits: exquisite sound, attention to graphic design, from Burt Goldblatt’s covers for Bethlehem, to the black/orange spines of Impulse! gatefolds and the lush colours of CTI sleeves, his knack for naming every single musician present, including string sections, and closing album credits with a stamp of his signature.

Those credits, as well as the leading names on the album covers, show Taylor’s long-standing affinity with, and staunch loyalty to, certain musicians and sound engineers. Both Kai Winding and Urbie Green, great trombonists but hardly household names today, led albums on three or more labels with Taylor at the helm. Pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly were regulars too, be it as leaders or as sidemen. Wes Montgomery greatly benefited from his association with the producer, ended only by his untimely death, as did the notoriously difficult Stan Getz. In both cases, Taylor produced not only big-selling crossover albums—jazzed-up pop songs with strings for Montgomery, bossa nova for Getz—, but also artistic milestones like Montgomery’s Smokin’ at the Half Note, a stepping stone for all jazz guitar players this side of 1965, or Focus, a carte blanche exercise of sax and strings much closer to Bartók than to Mantovani.

The overwhelming success of The Girl of Ipanema may have stirred Taylor towards more ambitious commercial goals. His productions for Herb Alpert’s A&M label – for whom he was working when he started his own imprint CTI, later to become an independent label – maintain all that care for execution, sound and visuals, but certainly veer explicitly towards popular appeal, something that may have bothered some fans, but hardly any of the artists making a living from those records.

His work at A&M, then at CTI and Kudu, regularly receives a lot of attention, and justly so, given its popularity at the time, be it Deodato’s reading of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra or Grover Washington’s Mr. Magic, but those commercial hits, unlikely in the years of disco and jazz-fusion, shouldn’t obscure the artistic magnitude of Taylor’s work and his ear for talent in straight-ahead jazz.

Take This Is How I Feel About Jazz, Quincy Jones’s debut as a leader in 1956, at age 23, a Taylor production at ABC-Paramount: it is a half-forgotten jewel from a particularly dense period of jazz in terms of excellence. Also from 1956 and produced by Taylor at the label were records not to be overlooked by bassist Oscar Pettiford—another close friend— as leader or sideman, including two volumes of Lucky Thompson featuring Oscar Pettiford (reissued on CD as Tricotism) with its astounding sax-guitar-bass trios.

It was at ABC where Taylor earned enough clout to start a jazz imprint, Impulse!, where he only produced the first six LPs before he went to Verve (just sold by Norman Granz to MGM). Those include Oliver Nelson’s masterpiece The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Out of the Cool by Gil Evans—who would return to Taylor on Verve with his own The Individualism of Gil Evans and his arrangements for Kenny Burrell’s Guitar Forms—, and John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. Having seen Coltrane perform at the Village Vanguard several times, Taylor had signed him for the new label and produced his debut there, which set the course for the rest of Coltrane’s musical life and a run of seminal albums.

Creed Bane Taylor V. Born Lynchburg, Virginia, US, 13 May 1929,. Died Winkelhaid, Bavaria, Germany 22 August 2022.

Fernando Ortiz de Urbina (@fer_urbina on Twitter) is a jazz historian and commentator, and contributes regularly to Spanish-language podcast Club de Jazz.

The post Creed Taylor (1929-2022). first appeared on UK Jazz News.