Creed Taylor Produced

Today marks George Benson’s 83rd birthday; George was born March 22, 1943 ^[1]Richard S. Ginell. “George Benson: Biography & History”. AllMusic ^[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Benson. He more than earned his dues by the time he first went into the studio for his first album with Creed Taylor, recorded in August, September, and October of 1968.

Over the next nine years, Creed would produce some ten albums with George as lead; and dozens more with Benson as a co-star and sideman. That is, not counting the CTI All-Star live recordings ^[3]http://ctproduced.com/the-story-of-the-cti-all-stars-live/ ^[4]http://ctproduced.com/the-untold-story-of-cti-summer-jazz-recording-1972/. The problem was, by 1975, as Doug Payne puts it in a forthcoming deep dive into the end of CTI – “CTI was running low on momentum and cash.”

At this point, it doesn’t matter if the company, synonymous with its owner Creed Taylor, wasn’t paying royalties, not offering enough on contract renewals, or just not doing enough promotion. Artists were leaving as soon as they could. George signed for Warner Brothers, Breezin’ happened, and the rest is history.

In David Sutter’s forthcoming Backbeat Books biography on Creed Taylor, Sutter notes that Bob Krasnow, fresh at Warner Brothers “after leaving the label he founded with Tommy LiPuma, Blue Thumb Records,” having been rebuffed by Taylor, told Creed, “Well, if you don’t do this deal, you know what’s gonna happen? Warner will pick off your artists one by one.”

That came to pass, just not quite how Krasnow envisaged it. Lawsuits, countersuits, it all dragged on for another decade, including a trial that lasted six weeks and in which George Benson had to testify. It’s hard to imagine that didn’t have a big impact on how George saw his time with CTI; it had to!

Many of the interviews George gave during that period and later, including in his biography, don’t reflect either the development or the value that George and Creed generated together for each other and the other artists on the roster.

Included here is a 1977 article that features George Benson at the peak of his career. Both Breezin’ and In-Flight had been released, just out was Everything Must Change as a single and the movie Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest was being hailed as “the soundtrack album of the year.” ^[5]New York Amsterdam News Sat, Jun 11, 1977 ·Page 28.

Among my research notes and collections is this 1977 interview with George Benson by the late Stan Mieses. Mieses was a freelance journalist, Atlantic publicity man, and one-time associate editor of “The Record,” an early 1980s music magazine. The article was syndicated and appeared in many newspapers in mid-1977, with Mieses listed in some as an NEA columnist. What is really interesting in the three copies of the article that I have is that they all end differently. Obviously, a twist by the local editor to fit the space available and in an era when Mieses himself would never have known, unlike today.

While researching this post and Mieses’ article, I became aware that it was originally sourced from the UK Melody Maker weekly magazine, which attributed it to Stanley Mieses. It included this opening paragraph, which wasn’t included in any of the US publications.

In total I was able to find more than a dozen newspapers which carried the article starting June 1st, 1977 – after which it appeared of dozens of other city and regional newspapers. The same picture, seen below, was used to illustrate the article including the last known publication. ^[6]The Daily Progress, Charlottesville(Virginia)
Sat, Jun 18, 1977 ·Page 30.

It’s worth noting, that the June 1st 1977 issue of the The Scarborough Mirror(Scarborough, Ontario, Canada), on page-44 included a review of the Eric Gale CBS Album Ginseng Woman by Peter Donato. It included this “Ginseng Woman is his first solo album for CBS and is quite a departure from his earlier one on CTI. Gale opts for a more accessible jazz style, not as watered down as George Benson.” Ouch.

Happy Birthday George – Mr Supership! ^[7]Again, it’s worth noting that Mieses original article in the Melody Maker included the following: “They attempted a single, “Supership,” that bombed in England, and was never … Continue reading ^[8]https://dougpayne.com/revisiting-supership-george-bad-benson-1975/

Here is Stan Miesys’ June 1st article as it appeared in the Galesburg Register-Mail, Galesburg Illinois. The article is reproduced in full and as accurately as I could. It may contain transcription or punctuation errors not found in the original. No other changes or corrections have been made. I have noted errors that are found in the original. The newspaper page with the article appears at the end, along with a note of the alternate endings and the newspapers they appeared in.

It’s no secret that George Benson is doing remarkably well these days and will never have to play in a jazz basement again. His last two albums, “Breezin’” and “In Flight,” are bona fide hits, and George Benson is now a card-carrying star. He was recently the centerpiece of an unusual billing that his manager and a New York promoter worked up called “Benson X Four.”

George’s range of musical interests includes a solo jam with fellow guitarists Les Paul, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Gabor Szabo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a duo with singer Minnie Riperton at the Palladium; an evening with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Benson’s first outing with a theatrical troupe; and a finale with some funky jazz masters, including Grover Washington Jr.

ORIGINALLY, the idea was to showcase Benson’s records on different nights; a “White Rabbit” night, “Breezin’,” “In Flight,” and a fourth jam session, but George and his manager reasoned that promotion of his old records would not receive 100 percent support from his new record company, Warner Brothers. So, the idea was scrapped in favor of a more broad-based exposure.

That’s the way this artist is thinking these days. At last, he’s making big money for the company, and they’re being very nice to him. He’d like to keep it that way. If Benson labored with his “dream band” (Tatum, Chambers, Jo Jones, Clifford Brown), he might not draw flies. He labors no more.

Can you blame him? “A man of my years has the capability of doing things more sophisticated than most of what you hear on AM radio,” he said, summing up his current ambition succinctly.

GEORGE BENSON has paid his dues. He’s learned the ropes of playing for a living from the bottom up. But the kind of music he prefers isn’t doomed to eternal dues-paying, certainly not by the player. Benson had a lot of faith that his music would someday reach a mass market audience. “When Wes Montgomery died,” he recalled, “I became a hot jazz item. There weren’t too many players with my attitude, you see. There was a vacuum. I was willing to combine music. There were jazz players who wouldn’t play anything but jazz, rock players who weren’t able to play anything but rock, and in between there was me, who wasn’t too proud not to play jazz, with more knowledge (I read that: chops) than the players—I saw a way to build a career.”

Let’s backtrack for a moment. George was a ripe 19 when Jack McDuff’s band rolled into his hometown of Pittsburgh one night in 1963. McDuff’s guitar player was leaving the band. Benson brashly auditioned and made an agreement on the spot with McDuff. George lasted two and a half years with Brother Jack and says now that the bulk of his guitar playing growth came in this period.

“I couldn’t play improvisations worth a damn when I first joined up, I didn’t know harmony, I had no chops. But I knew how to enhance the group sound, and Jack liked the way I accompanied him. I made him sound good.” ^[9]In the original Melody Maker article the following was included “Then onto the Palm Cafe on 125th Street in Harlem, the club owner’s other place. George had one album on Prestige under … Continue reading ^[10]Interesting here Mieses includes the note that Benson’s Columbia albums had been cut-out a.k.a steeply discounted; The June 2nd, 1977 edition of the New York Daily News included a full page … Continue reading

LATER, after several neglected albums, Benson signed with Creed Taylor, who had produced Wes Montgomery’s most commercial efforts on A&M Records. He was also the man who popularized bossa nova, Getz-style, on that same label. Benson’s first recording with Creed Taylor was “The Other Side of Abbey Road,” which was, at least from a packaging point of view, the first concerted effort to break Benson across the board. “We never knew what it was like to sell jazz records,” said Benson. “The only one who really did was Miles (Davis). We put ourselves in the hands of a producer with a popular track record. ^[11]It’s worth noting that “Abbey Road was not the first Taylor produced album. The sessions for that were in late 1969, almost a year earlier Benson was in the studio for the sessions that … Continue reading

“Some diehards think it’s a perfect crime, but to me, Creed Taylor’s concept (which evolved into CTI Records) was a move in the right direction. Why work, work, work, and not get paid? True, at CTI we constantly battled with creativity and making money at the same time, but he took us out of a category and made us appeal to a lot of people.”

Eventually, after “White Rabbit” made a name for Benson in the pop market ^[12]newspaper copy says “top market”, things began to drift too far out into the mass mess for him. “He (Taylor) wasn’t dwelling on the creative side, only what was effective with the public.”

TWO YEARS later, Benson signed with Warner Brothers, where he found his new producer, Tommy Lipuma. Five years earlier, Lipuma had heard him sing by a fluke, in a San Francisco nightclub. Lipuma filed it for future reference, while he fielded songs for Benson that would not fall lyrically below the sophistication of his guitar playing. “If you don’t,” Benson explained, “you derive the fact that I’m trying to sell records only.”

Right now, that’s no problem. He’s just returned from a successful tour of Japan, and performed his tour – de – force in New York.

[Other versions of the article, including the Suffolk(Virginia) News-Herald went on to say: “You see I now realize I’m dealing with a corporate giant in Warner Brothers. I want to do something that takes advantage of that situation without taking away from what I can do musically. “I don’t want to make records for the history books. I don’t want to hear, ‘Oh, that guy’s the greatest.’ I just want the guy on the street to say, ‘Hey, I like that.’”]

UPDATES:
March 23, 2026 4pm – Fixed Chobham > Cobham – Thanks finniasjones