Creed Taylor

Taylor died on August 22, 2022, at the age of 93. Taylor had been visiting family in Winkelhaid, Germany, where he suffered a stroke on August 2. He was taken to hospital in nearby Nuremberg, where he died.

In 2010, Taylor once again put together the CTI All Stars for another tour, this time with Bryan Lynch replacing Randy Brecker. A video was filmed at the Burghausen Festival and was broadcast on German TV.

In 2009, Taylor toured Europe with the CTI All Stars band. The first concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival was recorded and filmed for a CD/DVD/Blu-ray release, CTI All Stars At Montreux 2009, featuring Hubert Laws, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, Randy Brecker, John McLaughlin, George Duke, Mark Egan, and special guest Jamie Cullum. The album was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder with cover art by Pete Turner. That same year, Taylor himself produced, for the first time, an extensive CTI reissue series on SHM-CD format, "The CTI + RVG" series, working for the last time with Van Gelder.

Taylor won numerous Grammy Awards for his decades of production work. These include awards for: Focus (Stan Getz, 1961), "Desafinado" (Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd, 1962), Conversations with Myself (Bill Evans, 1963), "The Girl from Ipanema" (Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto, 1964), "Willow Weep for Me" (Wes Montgomery, 1969), and "First Light" (Freddie Hubbard, 1972).

Although he signed John Coltrane for Impulse! in 1960, Taylor left the following year to accept a job with Verve Records. There he prominently introduced bossa nova to the US through recordings such as “The Girl from Ipanema” with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz. As Taylor recalls, "I went down to Brazil a few times and spent some time at Jobim's house and met all the players down there. Then of course after 'Desafinado' became a hit, Jobim wanted to come up and see what New York was like, so he came in to see me right off the bat. That started a long friendship and series of albums."

In 1956 Taylor left Bethlehem to join ABC-Paramount, where, four years later, he founded the subsidiary label Impulse!. Motivated by the idea of a label dedicated to tasteful, current jazz, Taylor worked with ABC-Paramount executive Harry Levine to advocate for the label, which he dubbed "The New Wave in Jazz". It was Taylor who signed John Coltrane to Impulse!, rather than Coltrane's better known producer at the label, Bob Thiele. Taylor's accomplishments during this period also included gaining immediate credibility for the label by releasing successful gate-fold albums by Ray Charles, Gil Evans, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and Oliver Nelson. Taylor was sensitive to the importance of album cover design to visually attract people to the music, and he regularly hired photographers Pete Turner and Arnold Newman to create cover images. Taylor's successful Impulse! albums regularly blurred the genre-based lines between jazz and popular music, and his superb production values became the hallmark of the label.

After high school, Taylor completed an undergraduate degree in psychology from Duke University in 1951 while actively performing with the student jazz ensembles the Duke Ambassadors and the Five Dukes. Taylor credits Duke's strong tradition of student-led jazz ensembles, and Les Brown's association with Duke in particular, as initially drawing him to the university. As he recalls, "The reason I went to Duke was from hearing Les Brown and all the history of the bands who went through Duke. This was really a great jazz band, . . . and the book was handed down from one class to the next, you had to audition and all the best players who came to Duke got in the band. . . . I had a ball when I was there." After graduating from Duke, Taylor spent two years in the Marines before returning to Duke for a year of graduate study.

Creed Bane Taylor V (May 13, 1929 – August 22, 2022) was an American record producer, best known for his work with CTI Records, which he founded in 1967. His career also included periods at Bethlehem Records, ABC-Paramount Records (including its jazz label, Impulse!), Verve, and A&M Records. In the 1960s, he signed bossa nova artists from Brazil to record in the US including Antonio Carlos Jobim, Eumir Deodato, João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto, and Airto Moreira.