Creed Taylor Produced

It’s fairly well-known that Creed’s production techniques were not universally liked. Creed himself knew that and was often quite dismissive of critics in general. I’ve often quoted Creed himself on this, as early as 1963 he said:

Later Taylor would also say about the 1972 CTI All-Stars tour: “If we break even or lose money on this venture, we’ve gotten our artists out there in front of people who are really devoted fans of this music. These people don’t have a scholastic interest in the music; they really care about its entertainment value.” The reference to “scholastic interest” was a veiled dig at jazz music critics who had started to complain about CTI productions ^[1]http://ctproduced.com/the-story-of-the-cti-all-stars-live/.

It goes without saying that Creed Taylor’s production and use of arrangers and orchestration alienated a lot of jazz fans, both then and now. It also goes without saying that the man who produced some 600 albums produced a few duds. Some were musicians who didn’t gel in the studio; others were arrangements that didn’t work out; and a few were just a bad idea. There were more than a few “one and done” records that I’ll tackle at some point, especially while Creed was producing for ABC Paramount, but also, surprisingly, at Verve.

The article I’ve transcribed today for the record came from the June 1975 issue of Penthouse. Written by Steve Ditlea ^[2]Ditlea didn’t have many credits and bylines in the traditional music press, he was though described as “a veteran writer of the music trade, published a “Home Computer Software … Continue reading ^[3]https://steveditlea.com/stories , it appeared with a second article about reggae by Vernon Gibbs – they were spread over two pages in the magazine’s SOUNDS column, subtitled as “Supermarket Jazz.” Ditlea’s piece includes observations and comments from both Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine and Creed Taylor, which is what made it worth reproducing here.

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 any errors that are found in the original, if any. An image of the original article is included at the end.

Back in the days when the Beatles and Motown owned the pop charts, jazzmen would openly express their scorn for both rock and soul. “I thought it was sad, uncultured music, nowhere as sophisticated as jazz,” recalls trumpet player Freddie Hubbard. True believers in the jazz muse just tightened their belts a notch and went on playing in smoky clubs, recording for a small, hard-core audience. Once in a while a jazz tune would land on the Top 40 chart by fluke, but over the years even the most melodic and “commercial” players were driving Chevies while rock stars zipped by them in chauffeured limousines.

Then along came Miles Davis. His experiments with electric funk from 1972 (Bitches Brew) to the present (Get Up With It) created a cadre of jazz players fluent in nonjazz technique. Sidemen John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Billy Cobham, and Wayne Shorter went on to reconcile jazz with rock. And Herbie Hancock—a keyboardist who had first played electric piano on Davis’s Miles in the Sky— with his own album Headhunters, synthesized his way to sales of a million copies, a figure few rockers ever attain.

Suddenly, it looks like the jazzmen’s lean years are over. Of the hundred best-selling albums in the country, at least a half-dozen are jazz titles. The impact of jazz is even more dramatic on the soul charts, where as many as a third of the top LP’s are by jazz artists. Crossover became a popular term in the record industry as rigid stylistic boundaries fell by the wayside. Working at crossover from different directions, Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder, the Blackbyrds and Kool and the Gang, Stanley Turrentine and Barry White are fusing contemporary jazz and R & B into a single, vital, black pop-music idiom. Jazz purists are always the first to cry “sell-out,” but even tolerant jazz buffs have to admit that their favorite players are compromising their music for the sake of mass appeal.

While the music industry promotes the recent trend to jazz, what people are actually buying is a product so diluted by heavy strings and a dance beat that the jazz elements have been assimilated into a very commercial pop-music idiom. Take a soulful but technically uninspired sax player like Stanley Turrentine. His Pieces of Dreams album (Fantasy) was an instant hit, thanks to its funky Muzak settings ala Barry White, Hollywood strings and all —courtesy of White’s own arranger, Gene Page. And what you have is a supposed jazz artist playing Barry King-of-the-Muzak White cocktail music. “I’ve been out here for twenty-five years,” says Turrentine, the man who replaced John Coltrane in Earl Bostic’s band in 53. “I just want lots of people to hear my music. I want to make records that will sell to everybody!”

Veteran horn player Donald Byrd has no patience for critics of Black Byrd and Stepping into Tomorrow (United Artists), his recent ventures into orchestrated funk—produced by former Jackson Five musical arrangers Larry and Fonce Mizell. “Critics are the worst musical bigots!” exclaims Byrd. ” ’What do you call it?’ they keep asking. I call it music. By the time they get around to naming it, I’m getting out of it.”

Freddie Hubbard had commercial intentions when he recorded High Energy (Columbia) and included a pair of Stevie Wonder tunes. The LP sold three times as many copies as Hubbard’s previous discs. An acknowledged master of the trumpet solo, Hubbard no longer has qualms about pop music. “Now that I’ve realized that I can play,” he explains, “it doesn’t matter too much what I play—as long as it’s good.”

Some jazz enthusiasts question the quality of Hubbard s brand of pop. Often, the thin line between art and commerce gets blurred. Big crossover albums, like The Baddest Turrentine, The Baddest Hubbard, and Turrentine’s The Sugar Man, are samplers of the glossy “jazz sound” produced by CTI Records, the most prosperous of the independent jazz labels. Hubbard credits company head Creed Taylor with making him a saleable recording artist, but he finds fault with the lush arrangements he had to play behind. According to Hubbard, “Creed moved the music into supermarket jazz. We just started playing to make money.” Not in total disagreement Taylor contends, “I make records because I like to hear artists in a certain way. I’m in business to sell records.” Motown’s recent agreement to distribute CTI albums attests to Taylor’s commercial clout.

The modification of jazz by pop has even made the formerly cherished name “jazz” an obstacle in a jazzman’s career—at least those musicians with an eye on the pop charts. After nineteen years as “The Jazz Crusaders,” the members of the grits-and-grease acoustic combo decided to add some electricity to their music. They also changed their name to “The Crusaders.” Five albums and a few personnel changes later, the jazzless Crusaders are riding high on the charts with Southern Comfort. Says drummer Stix Hooper: “By dropping the word jazz, even though we’re playing some of the same kind of music, we’re getting a broader audience.” Hooper is pragmatic about abandoning jazz’s spontaneous improvisation “which doesn’t immediately involve the untrained listener. It just wasn’t that happy marriage that happens in music—like rock where you have a beat and you get hit across the head and you get it.”

A danceable beat has caught the attention of some jazz musicians trying to garner a new, larger audience through the disco market. Last year’s biggest disco hits included Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and a rocking tune entitled “The Bottle,” by poet Gil Scott-Heron. Sensing a profitable market, record company executives quickly took note. Clive Davis signed Scott-Heron as the first act on his newly formed Arista label. Atlantic Records blitzed the discos with Herbie Mann’s peppery, though derivative, “Hijack” on Discotheque and sax player Eddie Harris’s timely R&B-style vocal, “I Need Some Money.”

Disco crossovers have helped to double jazz albums’ sales in the last three years. But after watching jazz record sales fluctuate as wildly as the stock market, jazz producer Creed Taylor sounds a cautionary note. “The disco market may already be saturated,” he says, even though CTI is releasing a disco anthology. Remember “The Girl From Ipanema”? “There’s nothing left of the bossa nova,” regrets Taylor. “It was done in by the major labels and Muzak.”

By Steve Ditlea

— ENDS —

Many of the albums Taylor produced between 1970-1992 are as relevant as today as they were then; many do not include the orchestration which jazz critics most often complained about; and the critics and reviewers completely overlooked Freddie Hubbard’s 1973 album “First Light” which went on to win a Grammy award for “Best Jazz performance by a group” ^[4]On This Day: First Light GRAMMY Award – Creed Taylor Produced (ctproduced.com).