For Maestro Carter’s birthday this year, I have an April 1964 article written by Don Heckman and published in Down Beat magazine’s April 9th, 1964 issue. Heckman was a longtime Down Beat contributor and Los Angeles Times jazz critic. Mr. Carter is more than generous with his time; he regularly holds Zoom calls that Reddit users would know as AMAs […]
On This Day: CTI Chart Takeover
In 1973, Creed Taylor, Inc. dominated the Jazz charts with multiple albums, including Deodato’s “Prelude” and Grover Washington Jr.’s “Soul Box.” Jazz sales surged, influenced by CTI’s success. Prominent events included Ron Carter’s West Coast concerts and the release of notable albums like Esther Phillips’ “Black-Eyed Blues.” John Rosica assumed full marketing responsibilities at CTI.
Happy Birthday Maestro Carter!
On Ron Carter’s 87th birthday, the author shared a recording from NPR’s “Jazz Night in America” and a Mixcloud link featuring an hour of Carter’s remarkable tracks. Also, a supplemental playlist is available.
#roncarter
Event: Ron Carter’s Golden Striker Trio Live and Online (free)
The ever excellent Maestro Ron Carter has an excellent social media and newsletter team. In today’s email they announced a live performance on December 10th, at 3pm EST. In-person is sold out, but attendance via Livestream is available and free. I was lucky enough to see Sir Ron and Russell Malone (guitar) and Mulgrew Miller (piano) earlier this year at […]
Jazz Revolutions In Denver
As I write, I’m on the Flatirons Flyer bus from Boulder to Denver. I’m heading to the last Friday Lunch Bunch: Purnell Steen and the Five Points Ambassadors at the Dazzle Bar’s Building location. The Baur’s location was always a temporary home, albeit one that lasted 6-years for Dazzle. Now they are ready to move into their new location at […]
Ron Carter Birthday!
May 4th marks Maestro Carter’s 86th birthday. I’m delighted to see Ron is mobile again after having back problems for sometime. I’m even happier to see that Ron will be finally appearing at Dazzle in Denver, some 3-years after I originally had tickets. I’ve written many times about Ron, including a number of mixes. This year I have two reference […]
All Things Ron Carter
Even before the pandemic was over Sir Ron had been busy. Ron does regular member only zoom calls, which are both instructive and entertaining. If you don’t get emails from Ron’s team, I can recommend signing-up at https://roncarterjazz.com you can also get a 15% coupon for merch’ and ever-increasing catalogue of material. This post though is to summarize a big […]
Ron Carter “from the magazine rack”
This post is to celebrate Ron Carter’s 85th birthday. In previous years I’ve done a mix of tracks[1]Celebrating Ron Carter – Creed Taylor Produced (ctproduced.com), a “fourfer”[2]Happy Birthday – Ron Carter – Creed Taylor Produced (ctproduced.com) and other celebrations. This year I thought I’d dig through my magazine rack and see what I could find. As well as details on […]
The 24 Preludes of Roland Hanna
One of the lesser-known recording artists in the Creed Taylor pantheon is Sir Roland Hanna. Hanna was pianist on arguably the greatest of all CTI jazz tracks, Jim Hall’s “Concierto”. This post is to debut my fantasy Record Store Day 2022 release, “The 24 Preludes Of Roland Hanna”. The post includes the Preludes, immediately below; a video of Roland Hanna […]
Grammys: Two Drummers, A Bass Player And A Trumpeter
Best Wishes to Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Gadd and Randy Brecker at this Sunday’s 64th GRAMMY awards. While Ron was the only artist to record a leader album produced by Creed Taylor, with both CTI and KUDU albums, Jack, Steve and Randy were just as integral to the success of the artists, albums and labels. For the 64th awards, […]
Celebrating Ron Carter
It’s Ron’s birthday, here is my post from last year, which has both the four-fer mix and the Youtube video I created from one of Ron’s laserdiscs. That post contains detail about Ron and his career, the original post for the laserdisc has a great tribute video about Ron Carter, the man. This year I thought I’d do a more […]
Stonebone – Finally!
If you don’t have a copy, press play and read on, it’s a 1:52 sampler of the album tracks I’m delighted to have an exclusive long form review from CTI and Jazz Historian Doug Payne. I’m lucky to have been able to rip a copy of this album from a loaner a couple of years ago. It’s amazing. I’m heading […]
One Night With Blue Note
Strictly not a Creed Taylor produced effort, but a tribute to Blue Note founders, Alfred Lion, Max Margulis, and Francis Wolff. Notwithstanding that, the recordings here were recovered from laserdiscs, and feature many artists, both leaders and sidemen that were signed to, or performed for CTI, including Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Kenny Burrell, Grover Washington Jr, and many more. As […]
CTI Artists on TV
Enjoy two great live performances from artists from CTI. Both comes from VHS tapes I managed to buy from ebay. I was hoping to avoid getting into converting VHS tapes, as they are often more trouble than they are worth. On the full length video of the 1976 awards, George Benson performs his hit “Breezin’” but his years of work […]
Live at the Village Vanguard
Label: Laser Vision – MJ122-15FLFormat: Laserdisc, 12″, Single Sided, Stereo, NTSC, CLVCountry: JapanReleased: 1983Genre:Jazz Another in the laserdisc series, again not produced by Creed Taylor, but featuring artists that earned their “chops” performing, writing, and recording with Creed, so of particular interest. Interestingly, when I was offered this laserdisc, I was unaware it existed. It wasn’t listed on discogs until […]
Ron Carter Live
[I made a mistake and declared March 4th Ron Carter’s birthday, it wasn’t, it’s today, May 4th.] To mark Ron’s birthday, I’ve restored a laserdisc of performances played live by Ron Carter. Before we get to that, enjoy this short 2012 tribute to Ron. When I started filling out my Creed Taylor collection, I had no special appreciation for jazz […]