Late 1940s, near a small town in Virginia, USA. At midnight in a country house, a teenager takes a pocket radio with him to bed and picks up on its transmitter a signal coming from the heart of a big city. The show’s host’s voice vividly describes what he sees as he sits in a corner of New York City’s famed Birdland Jazz Club. Growing up in a rural environment, surrounded by country and bluegrass sounds, the young listener is fascinated by this new musical language, sparkling modernism, this explosive new jazz called “bebob”.

Influenced by the playing of innovative trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, he also takes up the trumpet and gradually develops into an enthusiastic young jazz musician. He joins his school’s jazz band, and later, as a student, his university’s famed Duke University Jazz Band in North Carolina. He studies psychology, but, in the early 50s, his homeland calls him to the Korean War. And when his term ends two years later, he decides to go to the city he dreamed of as a teenager while listening to those radio shows to claim a role in the wonderful world of jazz.

It was Creed Taylor, a young white musician from a small, unremarkable town in the American South, who eventually became an internationally influential music producer. He passed away on August 22 at the age of 93, after a brilliant and lavish career spanning half a century, releasing over three hundred music albums, radically innovative collaborations and founding several legendary record labels.

Back in 1954, when the then twenty-five-year-old Taylor arrives in New York and is in the midst of a creative whirlwind, he immediately has great visions and wants to become a record producer, although he has no knowledge and experience in the field. But he has musical knowledge, will and communication skills. His acquaintance with the head of the Bethlehem record company, a jazz drummer and fellow student of Duke, is the beginning. He offers to record on her behalf with Chris Connor, a white singer who knew the classics from the so-called Great American Songbook, the “canon” of American song, and had a similar style to two other white jazz divas. , June Christie and Anita O’Day. She is paired with pianist Ellis Larkins, best known for his contributions to Ella Fitzgerald’s excellent 1950 album Ella Sings Gershwin, and the recording is released as an album called Chris Connor Sings Lullabys of Birdland.

Through Taylor’s painstaking efforts to market and distribute the record (befriending record dealers and radio producers, convincing them to promote it), she eventually became the number one seller. This success earned him a position at the record company, under whose auspices he recorded for two years with such leading musicians as Oscar Pettiford, Herbie Mann and Charles Mingus, as well as with the great singer Carmen McRae.

In 1956, he became a producer for ABC-Paramount, where he founded the Impulse subsidiary in 1960, which soon became synonymous with jazz music of the highest quality.

Now the road was open, and the novice producer walked along it with long strides. In 1956, he became a producer for ABC-Paramount, where in 1960 he founded the Impulse subsidiary, which soon became synonymous with jazz music of the highest quality, releasing such iconic recordings as John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Oliver Nelson’s “A Love Supreme”. Blues and abstract truth. He ended up at Verve, where he worked with stars like Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery.

However, speaking of Taylor’s global reach, there is one episode in his sky-high career that perhaps reveals this the most. In 1962, he was the catalyst for boss nova guitar giant Joao Gilberto and jazz saxophone giant Stan Getz, who recorded together in a Washington church. Next to them is Gilberto’s wife, Astrud, who happened to be in the hall and was not even a singer. And yet, at Goetz’s instigation, she performed “The Girl from Ipanima” with an innocent, surprising authenticity that has forever remained a sonic caress in our collective subconscious. With this song (as well as other popular Brazilian pieces such as the classic “Desafinado” or Antonio Carlos Zobim’s “One Note Samba”) Creed Taylor brought bossa nova to America and topped the charts. Brazil, with its marriage to jazz, has ceased to be something “exotic”.

It seems that this was his big “plan” from the very beginning: to make jazz more accessible to the whole world. He started with that best-selling Chris Connor album when he stated that he wanted to reduce musicians’ forced, introspective improvisations and make jazz songs more “easy” for the audience.

He wanted to create a lighter version of jazz, often including covers of famous pop songs, and brought influences from other musical genres (such as soul or funk) into his sound, which was also evident in the latter phase of his career. when he founded CTI Records in the late 1960s. In its context, what was later called “light jazz” (often despised by critics, branded as “non-serious music”) was born, with historical recordings by artists such as George Benson or Herbie Hancock. But that wasn’t CTI’s only breakthrough: Taylor also created a recognizable, atmospheric graphic style for his covers, using signature images from photographer Pete Turner.

A charismatic music producer with a unique sensibility for the best musicians and the best sound, a magician who bridged the sounds of different musical worlds and spawned new ones, a pioneer of record packaging and graphic design, Creed Taylor has been to countless music lovers on the planet, the soundtrack composer of his life.