Jazz Producer to the Greats

WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 19, 2009
By WILL FRIEDWALD

George Avakian probably has done more to influence the way jazz has
been heard over the past 70 years than anyone else alive. Mr. Avakian,
who celebrated his 90th birthday in March, may not have
single-handedly invented the jazz album, but in 1939 and 1940 he got
the concept off the ground. He is responsible for essential albums by
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and other
jazz greats — a list much too long for this column. And he ran the
first jazz reissue program.

Born in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, Mr. Avakian arrived
in New York in 1923. The first jazz record he distinctly remembers
hearing was of the Casa Loma Orchestra in 1933, when he was 14, and
the first jazz star he remembers seeing in person is Lucky Millinder,
at a theater in New York’s Washington Heights, the part of upper
Manhattan where Mr. Avakian grew up. He got hooked on jazz via the
radio, hearing Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and
others. By 1936, when attending the Horace Mann School in the Bronx’s
Riverdale neighborhood, he contrived to interview Benny Goodman for
the school paper; in 1962, Mr. Avakian accompanied Goodman on his
ground-breaking tour of Russia.

PHOTO CAPTION: The legendary producer remains active in the
recording industry at the age of 90, paneling a Grammy Museum
discussion in January 2009.

From Horace Mann, Mr. Avakian went to Yale, where he met the
pioneering jazz scholar Marshall Stearns. After Stearns received his
doctorate, he accepted an offer to teach at a university in Hawaii,
and in the summer of 1939 he asked Mr. Avakian to drive with him to
the West Coast. They made it a cross-country musical tour. "As we
approached Chicago," Mr. Avakian recently recalled in a phone
interview from his apartment in Riverdale, New York, "we were
listening to the radio, and we heard Fats Waller and then Muggsy
Spanier and his Ragtimers coming from the Hotel Sherman. So we just
drove straight to the hotel, left our bags at the front desk, and
spent the rest of the night with Fats and Muggsy."

When he returned from that trip, Mr. Avakian was given the
opportunity to produce what was possibly the first original jazz
concept album. "I felt that jazz should be treated the way that
classical music was treated, released in albums with three pockets and
six selections, with annotations," he remembered. "I thought that the
way to start the excitement would be to record the pioneers of the
three cities that were responsible for spreading jazz: New Orleans,
Kansas City and Chicago." He put together the Chicago album himself,
starting with a date by Eddie Condon and his Chicagoans in August
1939.

In 1940, he got a call from Ted Wallerstein of the recently
reorganized Columbia Records and was hired to come in one day a week
(while still attending Yale) to put together album packages from the
corporation’s already vast holdings. He remembers playing the
recordings of Robert Johnson, and he made sure that they were
preserved for future generations but wasn’t able to issue them at the
time "because nobody had ever heard of Robert Johnson."

Mr. Avakian’s work at Columbia was interrupted by the war (during
which time the army trained him to speak German and then promptly
shipped him out to the Pacific). His only professional experience with
music during those five years was helping his friend Charles Edward
Smith record an album of W.C.

Handy songs for Asch Records, which indirectly inspired Mr. Avakian’s
famous album "Louis Armstrong Sings W. C. Handy" a decade later.

Returning to New York in 1946, Second Lt. Avakian went back to work
at Columbia and soon was in charge of the label’s jazz, popular and
international album releases — first on 78s and then on 33 1/3 rpm
LPs. From 1946 to 1958, Mr. Avakian produced what seemed like an
endless string of classic albums for the company. Among many others,
he was responsible for pianist Erroll Garner’s masterpiece "Concert by
the Sea," which actually was a tape made almost by accident — of a
performance at an Army base in California. The success of Duke
Ellington’s 1956 Newport Jazz Festival concert also turned out to be a
happy accident: The producer and artist had planned the concert album
around a new suite by Ellington. But in actual performance, the big
event turned out to be his 20-year-old composition "Diminuendo and
Crescendo in Blue," with its epic tenor saxophone solo by Paul
Gonsalves, which drove the crowd into a near frenzy and made "Newport"
the biggest-selling album of Ellington’s career.

Mr. Avakian had particularly good luck with trumpeters, including the
celebrated series of "Buck Clayton Jam Sessions" of 1953-1956. With
Armstrong, Mr. Avakian not only produced two of Satchmo’s most
celebrated later works, his songbook tributes to Handy and to Fats
Waller, but he also steered the legendary trumpeter-vocalist to one of
his biggest hit singles, "Mack the Knife." Mr. Avakian takes special
pride in his association with Miles Davis, as he noted both to me and
in a 2005 interview on this page with John McDonough.

Mr. Avakian was doing his best to keep up with the demand, but the
1950s were the era of a major boom in the recording industry, when
every home had a long-playing turntable and everybody seemed to be
buying tons of albums.

Mr. Avakian was exhausting himself; he even bought a tape deck so he
could edit masters at home on nights and weekends. He was so
overworked that he came down with a "combination of hepatitis and
mononucleosis," and that, combined with the relatively low salary he
was receiving, convinced him to leave Columbia in 1958.

After a rest, Mr. Avakian became an executive at the new Warner Bros.

Records, where he was responsible for pop hits by TV star Edd "Kookie"
Byrnes as well as "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart," the first
comedy album to hit No. 1 on the charts.

Leaving Warner Bros. in 1960, Mr. Avakian returned to jazz at RCA,
where he produced milestone albums with Sonny Rollins, Paul Desmond,
and Joe Williams. For the past 45 years or so, he’s worked mostly as a
free-lance producer; among his discoveries are saxophonist Charles
Lloyd and pianist Keith Jarrett. Messrs. Avakian and Jarrett still
share an interest in a publishing company.

Mr. Avakian, who has received lifetime achievement awards from
Downbeat magazine and the Grammies, continues to be involved in new
albums and reissues. He is writing his long-awaited memoirs and
enjoying his 60-year marriage to violinist Anahid Ajemian (and their
three children and two grandchildren).

He’s followed the trail of music from swing to bebop to postmodernism,
and of the industry from 78s to LPs to CDs to downloads. The legacy of
recorded jazz would be substantially poorer without him.

Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.