Creed Taylor Produced

I’ve written in length about the CTI All-Stars back some 4 1/2 years ago, perhaps the first big supergroup of the modern era. This post, though, is about their 1972 concert recording, released by a then-vanishing Creed Taylor, Inc. in 1977. What it is, how it came about, and why you may never see it reissued in the USA again.

The concert opened with perhaps one of the weirdest moments of the 1970s as far as jazz commentary goes, the esteemed Leonard Feather, artist, commentator, journalist, producer announced:

I dedicated a whole post about it back at this time last year ^[1]http://ctproduced.com/on-this-day-if-jazz-is-dead/ and posted a follow-up about it from Doug Payne and how it linked back to a quote from Gabor Szabo in 1967 ^[2]http://ctproduced.com/jazz-is-deadnot/ – Leonard Feather had also used “If jazz is dead” in his syndicated review of the 1971 CTI All-Stars concert. Don’t take those links; instead, stick with me while we look at these recordings and the lesser-known history around them. There is, understandably, a lot of confusion about this 3-volume release; it’s time to put that to bed.

I am again indebted to Doug Payne for the background and for taking the time to put the story together in such an elegant way. It’s a long read, but hopefully NOT TLDR. To guide you along, here is the 1972 CTI All-Star Summer Jazz concert from Festival de Chateauvallon in August 1972 ^[3]Note as uploaded to the FM Radio Archive the playlist is an incomplete set and contains tracks from the early set as well as tracks from the late set. It’s worth noting that the performances … Continue reading and 3x CD Set, both are unofficial. The 3x CD set includes the Jackie & Roy, plus Airto tracks discussed. I’ve added this to discogs and it can be found here https://www.discogs.com/release/34948694-CTI-All-Stars-Festival-De-Ch%C3%A2teauvallon-1972.)). The concert, in it’s 2x CD Set versions is streamed here from the FM Radio Archive Collection, curated by Kim Paris. Other concerts are available ^[4]https://archive.org/details/fmradioarchive?query=cti+all+stars. Press play and read-on. “Let’s Keep The Groove Going”.

The Curious Case of “CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl”

by Doug Payne (https://dougpayne.com/ – Sound Insights)

These were among the very first CTI albums I ever purchased. It was early 1978 and I was only 14 years old. But I had developed an obsession with Bob James, after hearing an older friend’s copies of the pianist and arranger’s BJ4 (also CTI) and Heads (both 1977).

Seeing James’s name on the covers of the three Hollywood Bowl records made them appealing to me. But it was the price that really hooked me: each was only 99 cents. And there were loads of them available – all completely sealed and unused. The slit – or corner cut – on the records’ covers meant they were “cut outs,” or records that were now being discontinued.

These particular discs, however, had only been issued several months earlier, in July 1977, and here they were now already getting removed from the catalog. I was too young to understand or care much about it; I was just happy to have the music, even though James himself is barely noticeable throughout.

The three discs chronicled a single-night’s concert at the Hollywood Bowl, captured exactly five years earlier, by an aggregate unofficially known as the CTI All-Stars, a collection of jazz players – all leaders in their own right – recording at the time for CTI Records and its subsidiary Kudu label.

Along with James (who is named dead last), these discs list the contributions of such luminaries and heavyweights as Hubert Laws, Grover Washington, Jr., Stanley Turrentine, Deodato, Milt Jackson, Johnny Hammond, Joe Farrell, George Benson, Hank Crawford, Freddie Hubbard, Airto, Esther Phillips, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette. 

ctproduced.com’s Mark Cathcart has expertly written on the CTI All-Stars, notably in a superbly detailed history of the various aggregates in “The Story of the CTI-All Stars Live” and “On This Day: “If Jazz Is Dead,” a reflection on the three discs under review here. 

But there is much more to CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl than what is generally known. To be clear, though, this is not a review. The music, to this CTI lover, is great and always fun to listen to: indeed, “Funkfathers” has always been one of my personal favorite CTI moments. 

This essay is meant to shine a light on the making – and breaking – of the notable concoction that is CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl.

II. Rewind Back to 1972

After the success of the CTI All Stars’ July 1971 Hollywood Palladium concert and California Concert, the double-disc set chronicling the event and issued about six months later, producer Creed Taylor directed his talent manager, Peter Paul, to stage more concerts. 

The concerts were, of course, modeled on the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” performances producer Norman Granz (1918-2001) staged and moderated in the fifties and early sixties. But no other major jazz label had the audacity or the wealth of talent – and Taylor’s remarkably consistent vision of approach – to launch anything like it since.

“The opportunity to see and hear great jazz artists has been extremely limited,” Taylor told Cashbox magazine on May 20, 1972. “We’ve created a new stage and hope to expand it to properly showcase their individual and collective talents.”

The concerts also went a long way toward helping CTI move more product. “Those CTI All-Stars tours,” said bassist Ron Carter in Dan Ouellette’s Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes, “is one of the reasons why CTI was so successful. People got to see the musicians like George [Benson], Deodato, Hubert [Laws] and Billy [Cobham] that they heard on records.” And after the concerts, people went out and bought more CTI records.

In early 1972, Paul quickly set up the label’s “Winter Jazz” package in four cities in the American Midwest: Cincinnati (Feb. 24), Cleveland (Feb. 25), Chicago (Feb. 26) and Detroit (Feb. 27).  The Chicago and Detroit dates turned out to be complete sellouts. 

The 1972 “Summer Jazz” series kicked off at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum (later known as The Theater at Madison Square Garden, and since 2023, as “Hulu Theater”) on June 30. There were also CTI All Stars events scheduled in Europe later that summer. The only one that was definitively recorded was the August 20 concert in Munich, billed as “CTI Olympic Jazz,” in deference to the notorious Munich 1972 Summer Olympics, commencing the following week. 

III. An Evening at the Hollywood Bowl 

For the next “California concert,” the venue was changed from the 5,000-seat Palladium – easily 50 to 100 times the size of a typical jazz gig – to the 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl. The four-hour program was presented on July 30, featuring all the stars noted above and recent CTI signees Jackie & Roy, who’d recorded with Creed Taylor as far back as the fifties. 

Apparently, at least one record of the concert was being planned for release. Peter Paul told Billboard magazine on July 29, 1972, “that the success of California Concert, recorded last year at the Hollywood Palladium, prompted the new bowl [sic] recording.” 

Although the performers apparently satisfied, entertained and engaged the near-capacity crowd, the reviews weren’t exactly stellar.

“The excitement of blues, hard driving big band sounds and the delicacy of the human voice,” wrote Eliot Tiegel in a strangely anodyne review in the August 19, 1972, Billboard, “all gelled together in a four-hour program from the basic 12-man lineup[,] which energized the crowd and extolled the virtues of jazz techniques.”

Lance Williams, in the August 1, 1972, Los Angeles Times was a bit more direct: “For the second straight year, the event followed a specific format: Live performances of previously recorded material by a collection of jazz ‘all-stars’ designed to provoke instant crowd empathy, and from the boom mikes in evidence, future albums.”

While Tiegel felt Jackie and Roy “made their first appearance in many years a happy one,” Williams thought the duo’s two numbers “floated like a cement bathing suit.” Both Tiegel and Williams agreed that percussionist Airto was a little too out-there.

Whether it was the middling reviews or other priorities, the Hollywood Bowl recording(s) did not get an immediate release, after all. 

Indeed, Taylor was busy expanding the CTI business – launching two new subsidiary labels and partnering with the Swedish Metronome label – as well as supervising a slew of new recordings by Esther Phillips, Hank Crawford, Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell, Johnny Hammond and, most notably, Deodato’s CTI debut, Prelude.

When Deodato’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” – recorded only a month and a half after the Hollywood Bowl concert – broke out as a worldwide hit in early 1973, Taylor seemed to forget  about the Hollywood Bowl recordings altogether. The Deodato hit helped fund the label’s pursuits, as well as its excesses, for the next several years. 

But declining sales, shifting tastes in music and monumentally bad business decisions of hubristic proportions helped bring the party to a painful end. 

IV. Fast Forward to 1977

Five short years after the Hollywood Bowl recordings, CTI Records was struggling – badly. Of the artists captured at the 1972 California concert, only two – Hank Crawford and Grover Washington, Jr. – were still with the label. But barely and in name only.

Badly in debt – and largely unable to pay its bills – not to mention besieged by a bevy of lawsuits, CTI needed a hit. While the label had a surprise chart success the year before with Esther Phillips’s disco cover of Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” it wasn’t nearly enough. By 1977, even Phillips had moved on.

For an instant hit, CTI looked not forward but backward, at one of the CTI All-Star dates from its own recent past. Most of the CTI All-Star concert performances between 1972 and 1976 were recorded by the label. But it’s unclear what made the 1972 Hollywood Bowl concert stand out to producer Creed Taylor. 

Perhaps it was the starriest of the bunch. Maybe, musically, it was the meatiest. Possibly it was the easiest one to clean up and get out. It may well have been just the first in a series of CTI All-Star concert events planned for release. 

Whatever made the 1972 Hollywood Bowl concert the one to release, it is necessary for us to jump ahead in time a few decades to properly continue the story.

V. Behind the Musical Curtain

Since launching my CTI discography in 2000 ^[5]https://www.dougpayne.com/cti.htm, I have learned that CTI records were as much about musical artistry as they were about studio wizardry. Or, what happens behind the curtain. For decades, producer Creed Taylor worked closely with engineer Rudy Van Gelder to craft a signature sound which would persuade the average record buyer that jazz could be interesting, or of more than merely passing value.

While those studio innovators took many of their secrets to the grave, other veterans of the CTI universe have occasionally stepped forward to offer some of what they witnessed of the magic-making happening just beyond those studio doors. 

One such veteran is drummer Terry Silverlight. Some twenty years ago, the drummer – who spent his early years touring and recording with his brother, the great keyboard player and fusion pioneer Barry Miles, and had, since, become a veteran of the New York City studio scene himself – reached out to share a revelation.

Silverlight told me that he was one of the drummers on CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl. As he explained, he was recruited in 1977 to replace Jack DeJohnette’s part on the Hollywood Bowl track “Rock Steady.” Electric bassist Gary King had already been recorded, replacing upright bassist Ron Carter’s part on the song. It was Silverlight’s understanding that both King and drummer Steve Gadd did the overdubs on the remainder of the tracks that were issued on the three volumes.

The surprise here, for me, was not so much that participating musicians went uncredited on any given record. That happened all the time in those days. What was striking is that the legendary recording engineer Wally Heider’s (1922-89) original recording was deficient in any way. 

Heider, after all, captured The Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965, as well as The Doors in 1968. Two months after the CTI All-Stars event, Heider recorded Joe Cocker at the outdoor venue as well. Wally Heider was one guy who knew how to capture a recording at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Added to which, it’s hard to fathom what might have been lacking in the performances of such consummate pros as Ron Carter or Jack DeJohnette. Was it Heider’s recording, the rhythm section’s performance, or, maybe, something else altogether? 

Perhaps, the producer was wary of the way these particular performances could have appealed to listeners in a very “diff’rent” musical landscape only five years later. 

VI. Mixing Bowl, Part 1

Creed Taylor drafted David Matthews, then CTI’s in-house arranger, to supervise some or all of the May 1977 mixing sessions at Electric Lady Studios. According to Terry Silverlight, Gary King was brought in to replace Ron Carter’s bass while drummer Steve Gadd was brought in to replace Jack DeJohnette’s parts. (Matthews did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Silverlight was called in – probably at Matthew’s request and with King’s approval – to replace Gadd only for “Rock Steady,” on a day the other drummer was unavailable. As a first-call session player during this period, Gadd was actively working on Steely Dan’s Grammy Hall of Fame album Aja, among other recordings, at the time. 

In reaching out to Terry again recently, I was delighted that he was willing to share memories of his sole Bowl session with me. “[I]t was finished in about an hour,” he said. “Gary King had already recorded his part on electric bass. Creed Taylor wasn’t present, so it was just me, Dave [Matthews], the main engineer [David Palmer] and assistant engineer.” He continued:

“As soon as I had the drums and headphone mix tweaked, they pressed the record button, running the track minus Jack DeJohnette’s drums. I realized immediately that there was no count off. So, I asked them to roll the very start of the track a couple of times, so I could learn the distance between when someone in the audience coughed and the ensemble began to play. That was my count off. It took a couple of tries, but when I got it right, I continued to play a groove I felt best fit the track. 

“Dave [Matthews] had given me a heads up that midway through the track Jack DeJohnette took a few unaccompanied eight-bar drum solos. I assumed they were in time, but there was no click for me to reference and Jack’s part was muted, so I heard none of his drums. Just silence. When these spaces occurred, I had to fill in with my own solo, hoping I’d come back on the downbeat synced exactly with the rest of the band. I have no idea how it managed to work out on [the] first try, but somehow every time I came back to time after one of my solos, I was locked with the band’s entrance. 

“This was one continuous take from the beginning of the song until the end, without stopping. When the take was finished, Dave said ‘it’s perfect and the session’s over.’ One take, no punch-ins.”

Silverlight was captured only one other time with Gary King, on the Fania All Stars’s Spanish Fever (1978). But, decades later, became a long-time fixture in David Matthews’s storied Manhattan Jazz Orchestra, recording a cool baker’s dozen of discs together.

Nearly two decades after “Rock Steady,” Terry Silverlight worked directly with Creed Taylor on the CTI disc Thus Spoke Z – Evolution (1996), programming and playing keyboards on the disc’s “Nightshade” and co-writing (!) and co-producing (!) “The Meeting” with Taylor himself.  

“[Creed Taylor] was a joy to work with,” Silverlight recounted, “[he] had great ideas and encouraged me to creatively go with my muse. I never mentioned a word to him about the Hollywood Bowl session I played on!”

VII. Mixing Bowl, Part 2

The original four-hour Hollywood Bowl program was edited down to about two hours of music, spread out over three discs. Likely left on the cutting room floor were any of the songs that already factored on the earlier California Concert LP. Also missing are the free-ish “mini-set” by Joe Farrell – who is credited on the record sleeves – and the two songs featuring Jackie & Roy. 

The first of the three discs, the so-called Live One, includes the concert opener “Grits Bowl,” credited here to Hank Crawford, but likely penned, instead, by Eumir Deodato, with features for Hammond, Crawford, Washington, Benson, and probably Deodato; “Inner City Blues/What’s Going On,” featuring Washington; “California Dreaming,” featuring Benson; and “First Light,” featuring Hubbard.

Live Two includes “Blues Force,” incorrectly credited to Stanley Turrentine (it is actually Milt Jackson’s “The Revs”) with features for Jackson, and Turrentine; “Rock Steady,” featuring Hammond, Benson, and Washington; “Theme from Love Story/Pavane/Fire and Rain,” featuring Laws, and James; and “People Make the World Go Round,” featuring Hubbard. 

(“People” was a cover originally intended for a studio album by the trumpeter, but first appeared on Jackson’s 1973 CTI debut Sunflower, also with Hubbard – the trumpeter’s own studio version was later issued on a post-contractual set of outtakes.)

Live Three includes “Funkfathers,” again incorrectly credited to Stanley Turrentine (it is actually Weldon Irvine’s “Sister Sanctified”) with features for Turrentine, and Benson; “Cherry,” featuring Jackson, and Turrentine; “Bowl Full O’Blues,” (a.k.a. “Uncle Funky”), featuring Benson, Crawford, Hubbard, and Hammond; “Cherry Red,” featuring Phillips, and Benson; and “God Bless the Child,” featuring Phillips, and Benson.

Of course, any of the bass or drum solos heard on these discs are likely not at all the work of Carter or DeJohnette, but those of King and Gadd or Silverlight.  

Oddly, but notably, edited out entirely here is any and all of Airto’s vocal or percussive interjections. It seems these were a point of contention at the original concert. So, they’re just altogether gone here (both Airto and flautist Hubert Laws would return in 2009 for the final hurrah of the CTI All-Stars).

Most curiously of all, though, is that the highlight of the concert, “Theme from 2001” (a.k.a. “Also Sprach Zarathustra”) – a piece adapted by Bob James especially for the CTI All-Star concerts and, here, a feature for Grover Washington, Jr. – was left off the records altogether. 

VIII. CTI Summer Jazz in the Summer of Feels So Good 

All three discs were issued in the summer of 1977, when the easy-going, proto-smooth jazz of “Feels So Good,” by jazz trumpeter Chuck Mangione (1940-2025), was riding high atop the pop charts. Former CTI All-Star George Benson’s second (!) Platinum selling disc on Warner Bros., In Flight, was also capturing jazz and non-jazz listeners as well.

That is all to say that the Hollywood Bowl discs were a little out of touch by the time they finally appeared. Nobody wanted to hear jazz like that anymore. All of a sudden, the once-trendsetting CTI found itself catching up, although it never really did.

The music-biz press, however, was mostly positive: “These three albums,” reported Billboard in its August 13, 1977, issue, “were recorded five years ago but have lost none of their original magic. This truly is an all-star aggregation, with Deodato, George Benson, Milt Jackson and Esther Phillips among the standout performers. The sound quality…is quite good throughout.”

But there was never any acknowledgement from the jazz press – in 1972 or 1977. DownBeat neither covered the concert nor the records five years later: an acknowledgement of sorts, whatever anyone thinks of the discs, that this music didn’t matter much.

IX. A Bowlful of Legal Blues 

The “smoothing” of jazz – led by the previous year’s success of former CTI All-Star George Benson’s Breezin’ – and an unwillingness at the time to look backward, likely kept listeners from appreciating the Hollywood Bowl records. 

The relative lack of attention the records received probably also kept the original songwriters of the mistitled tracks from suing for copyright infringement: the rights of the newly-named songs went to Char-Liz Music, one of Creed Taylor’s own publishing companies. 

(There is likely no malice behind the mistitled tracks. If Matthews was in charge of the mixing, it’s possible he knew nothing of the original titles.)

But all of that became moot on September 20, 1977, when Bob James filed a ”show cause order” in New York State Supreme Court, temporarily halting the manufacture and distribution of the three CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl records.

A “show cause order” directs the defendants – in this case, both CTI Records and Creed Taylor himself – to appear in court and explain why a certain action shouldn’t be taken. Here, Taylor would have been required to prove that he had the right to release this music, all performed by living artists, most of whom were then under contract to various other labels.

According to James, as reported in the October 8, 1977, issue of Billboard, the three LPs constituted “a flagrant misappropriation of my personal and artistic musical services and a violation of my civil rights.” 

James further contended that his 1972 performance “was inferior in quality” to his then-present work and represented “a threat to the success” of his forthcoming Tappan Zee debut, Heads, released several months later.

A few months earlier, James had won a significant victory, when Columbia Records – where James had served as an A&R director since 1975, producing notable hits for Paul Simon, Kenny Loggins, Neil Diamond and jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson – bought out the remainder of James’s CTI contract. 

That deal gave the CTI operation some much-needed cash and freed James from CTI altogether. Columbia, in addition to securing James as a recording artist, also offered the seeming polymath musician his own label, Tappan Zee, an entity clearly modeled on what made CTI successful earlier in the decade. 

Tappan Zee, however, never proved to be as ambitious, successful or long-lived as CTI, but the label yielded some of the best and most artistically-satisfying records James ever recorded.

X. Epilogue

The September 1977 suit was ultimately found in Bob James’s favor. Not only did James succeed in permanently preventing the production and distribution of all three Hollywood Bowl discs, he also secured the ownership rights to all four of his solo CTI discs (he now owns the rights to all of his subsequent solo albums, as well). 

Existing Hollywood Bowl and Bob James discs that were pressed were immediately “remaindered,” or, “cut out” of the catalog and distributed to discount record stores for quick sale. 

Several years later, Columbia Records (now Sony Music) ended up in control of the CTI catalog produced between 1969 and 1983. The corporation’s reticence to produce legally-questionable product, like the Hollywood Bowl discs and David Matthews’s 1977 CTI release Dune – that’s another story – means they will probably never again issue or license out these discs. 

(Licensing is what most of the music majors do these days, as they no longer deal in “catalog” product lines.)

And because Sony is an international entity, the discs are also unlikely to get a release anywhere outside of the United States – with Japan being the sole exception to the rule. 

The Japanese rights to most of the CTI records (not on A&M) have long belonged exclusively to King Records. King, which is not obligated to follow the directives of the American courts, has, however, reissued the bulk of the CTI catalog, including the Hollywood Bowl discs, multiple times over the years.

Indeed, King combined all three of the Hollywood Bowl discs on a 2-CD set issued on three separate occasions, in 1991, 2003 and 2017. King also issued all three of the recordings as individual sets, once in 2014 and as recently as March 2025.

Postscript: About the Cover

The three CTI Summer Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl albums all feature the exact same artwork and typography, with the color of each LP’s frame changing to indicate the various volumes: a goldish-brown for volume one, a silver-gray for volume two and an olive for volume three. All three are a trio of très seventies suburban-kitchen chic.

The photography is the work of renowned Japanese photographer and designer Katsuji Abe (1929-2008), who was known professionally as K. Abe (or, here, as K’Abe). Abe had previously provided liner photos for such CTI albums as Kenny Burrell’s God Bless the Child, Hubert Laws’s Morning Song, Freddie Hubbard’s Sky Dive and Milt Jackson’s Sunflower.

According to producer, historian and CTI expert Arnaldo DeSouteiro, Creed Taylor always admired Abe’s “straight-to-the-point pics” and felt they were a nice contrast to Pete Turner’s more colorful abstracts.

Abe was also responsible for the design and photography of a Japanese-only set called Double Deluxe (1970), a compilation of the 1967-70 Taylor productions for the A&M label. There, the liner photographs featured rarely-seen in-studio shots of the artists and Taylor at work.

Here, Abe’s cover image is a striking nighttime shot of stage right at the Hollywood Bowl, focusing on the omnipresent American flag (the California state flag flies on the other side of the shell-like arc of the performance space). 

The back cover features individual shots of each of the players in performance, while the liner gatefold features a wonderful widescreen photo from that very stage, during the daylight hours, looking out on to the considerably-sized audience. 

Given that the three Hollywood Bowl discs were all issued five years after the fact, one has to marvel at Creed Taylor’s files. It must be a treasure trove of amazing jazz memorabilia.

UPDATES:
Sept. 1st, 2025 12:30pm – updated discogs links and revised language on playlist