I’m not sure Creed Taylor gets enough shine for his contribution to jazz music during the latter half of the 20th century.
If you’re unfamiliar, he was the mastermind behind one of the great runs in jazz recording and publishing with CTI during the 1970s. He put the CT in CTI. The I stands for Incorporated. Following time with the legendary Verve label, among others, he built himself a bona fide jazz brand. The quality of the work was further improved by the steady presence of engineer Rudy Van Gelder. They released some absolute masterpieces together between the 1950s and 1980s.
These are a handful of great songs that were released on CTI, which emerged from a recent YouTube bender.
Let’s open things up with a slick Brazilian number. This is purely for evenings with patterned shirts and drinks made with rum or cachaca.
Someone was hitting the jazz cabbage when they decided to put a bunch of icicles on the cover of Paul Desmond’s album Summertime, and for that album to also contain “Autumn Leaves”.
Couple of jokers over there, huh? Intermingling seasonal themes willy nilly for laughs? Probably drugs. Or maybe it was an honest mistake due to being distracted by how smooth this song is.
This next one is another smooth criminal of a Brazilian cut. It’s so Brazilian the pre-roll ad it served me was in Portuguese. Legit.
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