George Avakian - The John McDonough Profile

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The point-of-departure for this belated posting on George Avakian and his contributions to Jazz can be summed up in the following statement by Jazz author and critic John McDonough: “The innovations Avakian brought or helped bring to the recording industry are so fundamental and taken for granted today that most people under the age of 70 would find it hard to imagine there was ever a time when they didn’t exist.”

The world of Jazz has witnessed many misfortunes during its first hundred years of its existence as is implied in Dizzy Gillespie’s answer to the question “Is Jazz serious music?” to which Diz replied: “A lot of people have died for this music. That’s serious.”

Yet, throughout most of its relatively brief existence, Jazz has been immensely fortunate, too, in that a recorded history of the music has been left behind for current and future generations to appreciate and explore.

Of course the music and its makers are the most significant aspects of this audio documentation, but what’s often overlooked are the people working behind-the-scenes who were responsible for making these singularly important recordings happen in the first place. 

Orrin Keepnews in his The View from Within, Jazz Writings, 1948-1987 describes such a person this way:

“Let us consider the least understood figure on the jazz recording scene—even though his function is unquestionably one of the most important. He is known by a variety of titles, of which the most common (and perhaps the most confusing) is a&r man, a set of initials that means "artist and repertoire," which in turn means nothing much to most people.

As it happens, I know a good deal about this subject, having by now functioned in this particular capacity for more than a decade. For this very reason, however, it is quite easy for me to understand why this is an area of more than a little mystery and confusion. I won't really go so far as to say that even I don't always know exactly what an a&r man is supposed to be up to—but there are moments . . .

To put the problem into a specific setting: if the average jazz fan were to visit an average recording session (for present purposes, I allow myself the thoroughly unlikely assumption that either of these "average" items exist), he'd have little difficulty identifying practically everyone present.

In the high-ceilinged, microphone- and wire-cluttered recording studio would be anywhere from a handful of persons to a small crowd. There would be musicians, some of whom he would recognize because he had seen their faces in clubs or on album covers. Others on hand could be deduced on a simple functional basis (the man playing the drums is a drummer; the one in the control room fussing with a multitude of dials is likely to be the recording engineer, etc.). Even the few who might plainly be doing nothing at all

would therefore be identifiable as friends of the musicians, or maybe as the star performer's manager.

But one participant would undoubtedly defy analysis or categorizing: a man scurrying from control room to studio and back again, with something to say to practically everyone, and later perched in the control room listening intently while the music is being recorded and then out in the studio listening intently while it's played back over the loud-speakers there—but probably talking to someone most of that time, too; a man whose reactions vary from anguish to pleasure (and back again); a man who seems to be overseeing everything from the ordering of sandwiches to the sequence of solos. ... In short, this man is clearly a person in some position of authority but one whose precise function would appear virtually impossible to determine.

For me to call this mysterious creature the key figure at this "average" recording session would seem immodest, but to be honest this is exactly what I must do. Not the most important figure, mind you; that role does have to be reserved for the soloist, leader, group, or singer whose performance will be what the record produced here is all about. But the key—the glue, the guide, the catalytic agent, often the instigator of the whole thing and usually the one who, at the end, puts it into suitable shape for presentation to the world. Something like father, mother, foreman, and scoutmaster all in one. Small wonder that it's difficult for anyone (including myself) to define the nature or spell out the details of the job.

To underline the importance (for better or worse) of this key man, let me pause for a moment to reflect that, in our time, jazz records have been coming into existence at an overwhelming rate. Clearly the phonograph record has become far and away the main method of disseminating jazz. Even in a city that offers virtually no in-person jazz, one can stay home and hear a dozen or more groups in a single evening, thanks to records.

And just about all those records exist because of the decisions and production activities of those men described as, among other things, "a&r."”

The following tribute to one of the most important producers in the history of Jazz recordings appeared in the December 4, 2017 Obituary section of Down Beat [originally published in the magazine’s October 2000 issue].

© Copyright ® Down Beat/John McDonough, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

George Avakian, the Grammy-winning jazz producer and NEA Jazz Master who worked with some of the genre’s most important artists and brought numerous innovations to the music industry, died Nov. 22 in Manhattan. He was 98.

In honor of his passing, we present John McDonough’s profile of Avakian that ran in the Down Beat October 2000 issue, when Avakian received the magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

George Avakian: Record Innovator

“In recognizing George Avakian as recipient of the Down Beat Lifetime Achievement Award—counterpart to the Hall of Fame created in 1981 to recognize the contributions and influences of those without whom the history of jazz would likely be diminished or perhaps even nonexistent—the award comes full circle. The first recipient was John Hammond, the legendary talent guru and producer at Columbia Records who not only set an extremely high bar of achievement for all future recipients, but also served as a kind of mentor to Avakian in his early work for Columbia in 1940.

The innovations Avakian brought or helped bring to the recording industry are so fundamental and taken for granted today that most people under the age of 70 would find it hard to imagine there was ever a time when they didn’t exist. At least five are pre-eminent.

One: He was producer of the first jazz album in the history of the industry, meaning a series of sessions recorded with the specific intent of issuing them together and not as singles. The album, Chicago Jazz (Decca 121), reunited Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell and others from the late-’20s Chicago scene and was released in March 1940. Other sets celebrating New Orleans and New York followed.

Two: He organized and launched the “Hot Jazz Classics” line for Columbia, the industry’s first regular series of reissue albums accompanied by notations explaining the history and importance of the material. The series began in 1940, took a wartime hiatus, then continued up to the introduction of the LP.

Three: He helped to establish the long-playing record as the most important single innovation of the record industry during the 20th century and Columbia as the dominant label in its first decade. He planned the first 100 10-inch pop LPs released in the wake of the microgroove introduction in June 1948. He was also a key figure in the breakthrough of the 12-inch LP from a primarily classical medium (“Masterworks”) to a popular record (the Columbia GL, or “gray label,” 500 series).

Four: Under Avakian’s lead, Columbia became the first major label to enter the field of live pop and jazz recording, at a time when only smaller specialty labels such as Norman Granz’s Clef were doing it. Inspired by the success of the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert and broadcast LPs, Avakian recorded Harry James, Lionel Hampton and others in ballroom settings and Louis Armstrong on tour in Europe in 1955, all of which led to the precedent-shattering series of four albums covering the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

Five: He revitalized the careers of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington by taking what they could do best and wrapping it in the synergism of the concept album (Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy, Ellington At Newport).

Avakian was born in 1919 in Armavir, Russia, to Armenian parents. He attended Yale University, where in 1937–’38 he came to meet the early jazz scholar/collector and Down Beat columnist Marshall Stearns, who was then working on his Ph.D. in English literature. In those days the records of the early masters of jazz were for practical purposes out of print and unobtainable, except for a trickle of single 78s that began to appear in 1935–’36. Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith each had been the focus of a “memorial album,” but the concept of regular album-length reissues had yet to be invented. Mostly the music survived in the hands of a few pioneering collectors, one of whom was Stearns. His closet contained one of the most complete jazz collections in America. (It later became the cornerstone of the collection at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.)

Avakian immediately became part of a small group that would come to his apartment every Friday and listen to early records by Armstrong, Ellington, Smith, Beiderbecke, the “Chicagoans” and more. Avakian formed his mature tastes here, and the experience would quickly bring him to record Chicago Jazz, a packet of six 78-rpm records for Decca, and soon after, launch the “Hot Jazz Classics” albums at Columbia, all done while still at Yale.

“When I saw how much alcohol Eddie Condon and his guys drank and abused their health,” Avakian said, “I was very alarmed and became convinced they couldn’t possibly live much longer. So I persuaded Jack Kapp at Decca to let me produce a series of reunions to document this music before it was too late. They were only in their mid-30s. But I was 20. What did I know about drinking?”

When Life magazine ran a major article in August 1938 about the history and roots of swing, Ted Wallerstein, soon to become the first president of Columbia Records under its new parent CBS, had an idea: Why not reissue some of the records referred to in the Life story? Wallerstein moved to Columbia in late 1938, and he asked Hammond to undertake the job. Hammond was too busy, but recommended Avakian. A meeting was arranged in February 1940 in which Wallerstein outlined his idea and asked Avakian to research the masters and assemble a series of 78-rpm albums for $25 a week in pay. Thus, the 20-year-old Avakian became the first “authoritative” person to review the short history of jazz up to 1940 and nominate a fundamental canon of indispensable classics that could be heard by a wide audience. His selections included the Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens, the now familiar Beiderbecke and Smith classics, and basic Fletcher Henderson and Ellington collections. In the process, he also became the first producer to discover and issue unreleased alternate takes. His choices would prove immutable, as they would influence the basic writing about jazz at a critical time when the music was beginning to be seriously written about.

In 1951, Avakian expanded these albums to the LP format to create the famous four-volume Louis Armstrong Story and other LPs. Once in general circulation, they would remain in print until the advent of the CD and have immense impact for generations to come as new listeners came to jazz.

After the war, in 1946, Avakian accepted Wallerstein’s invitation to join the Columbia production staff. He would remain there until early 1958, during which time he achieved the milestones that continue to define his career—the Armstrong Plays Handy/Fats Waller sessions, Ellington At Newport in 1956, the Dave Brubeck quartet sessions with Paul Desmond, LPs by Buck Clayton, Eddie Condon, J.J. Johnson & Kai Winding, Erroll Garner, Mahalia Jackson, neo-trad projects by Wally Rose and Turk Murphy, and even the first Roswell Rudd with Eli’s Chosen Six.

And, of course, he signed Miles Davis, which also brought John Coltrane to Columbia in his prime. Davis’ working habits and bands had been inconsistent. If Columbia was to invest in Davis, he could not drift artistically or professionally. Davis observed how Avakian and Columbia had taken the Brubeck quartet from a relatively small career scale and launched it to international fame, and was eager to associate with Columbia. He frequently approached Avakian, who found reasons to politely delay a decision until he felt Davis was ready to move to the next level.

“He was under contract to Bob Weinstock at Prestige,” Avakian said. “Then one day in 1954 or ’55 Miles came up with an interesting idea. He said he could start recording for Columbia now, but that we would hold the masters until the Prestige contract ended in February 1957. Columbia would help arrange the kind of bookings that could support a stable group, then begin a publicity buildup about six months before the switch. The quintet’s first Columbia session was in October 1955. I consulted from the beginning with Weinstock, who was a realist all the way and totally cooperative. He understood that Miles was ready to move to Columbia. He also realized that he could profit not only by recording Miles in a consistent setting for the balance of the Prestige contract, but by taking advantage of Columbia’s publicity effort for the last six of seven months.”

In the summer of 1955, Avakian issued the first and perhaps the best LP sampler ever, I Like Jazz, a capsule jazz history, intelligently annotated, that sold for only $1 and served as a powerful marketing tool showcasing the Columbia catalog. As chief of Columbia’s pop album and international divisions and through a combination of influential reissues and new sessions, he made Columbia the most powerful force in jazz among the majors.

By the fall of 1957, however, he left Columbia. “I had to get out of the headlong non-stop direction I was in,” he said. Avakian chose to accept the invitation of his friend Richard Bock and become partner in Bock’s Pacific Jazz Records, soon to be called World Pacific Records.

In 1959 he moved to Warner Bros., where two of his closest former Columbia colleagues, Jim Conkling and Hal Cook, were laying the foundations that would make the label a power in the industry. Conkling, president of Columbia during Avakian’s prime years there, had been offered a two-year contract to start a record label for the company. He brought with him Cook, who had built the first company-owned distribution system in the industry while at Columbia. Avakian joined Warner Bros. with a mandate to build a strong pop catalog for the new label, an assignment that cut his activity in jazz to virtually nothing, although he did manage to sign drummer Chico Hamilton. Conkling had looked to the Warner film division for potential pop talent, a strategy that led him to record actor Tab Hunter. Even before Avakian moved to WB, Conkling had asked him to produce Hunter’s initial Warner single, “Jealous Heart,” which became the label’s first charted single.

“The idea was to build an across-the-board album company,” Avakian recalls. Avakian signed the Everly Brothers out of Nashville and a Chicago accountant with a knack for comedy named Bob Newhart.

When Conkling’s contract was up in 1962, Avakian was offered the presidency of WB Records. But a desire to remain close to production and as far away from Los Angeles as possible led him to accept a position at RCA Victor, where he was brought in to improve the company’s sagging pop album sales.

Avakian found few jazz artists available to RCA. He approached the Modern Jazz Quartet, but it was not available. Nor were Granz’s strongest artists—Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. Count Basie had been signed to Roulette, and Avakian’s Columbia artists were not available—with one exception. Desmond was still with the Brubeck quartet but a free agent for recording purposes. Avakian signed him and turned out a series of extraordinary albums. He also turned to trumpeter Al Hirt, a solid if commercial name on the edge of the jazz world.

Then came Sonny Rollins.

“Sonny seemed different from many jazz musicians of the era,” Avakian says. “He was very serious and sort of mystic. But also a very intelligent person. If you’ve recorded some of the jazz people who didn’t have much in their heads, it wasn’t great fun. Also, Rollins had not been seriously exposed and seemed like a talent who was going to grow into more than he was even then. That made him my No. 1 target. I approached him during an engagement at the Jazz Gallery in the Village. Nesuhi Ertegun was also interested in Sonny, and he made some audition tapes of Rollins at the Gallery. But we were not competitors. He invited me to listen to them, and they were very useful to me in planning the first album, The Bridge. I still have them.”

Avakian signed Rollins, and the contract produced, among other things, The Bridge and a pairing of Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, which, Avakian says, “didn’t jell as I’d hoped. For Sonny, it was a gesture of reverence toward Hawk. For Hawkins, it was a matter of courtesy.”

By the end of 1963, Avakian decided he would never work for a large company again, and left recording almost entirely except for occasional associations with small jazz labels such as Chiaroscuro Records and independent productions for Columbia and Atlantic. He managed Charles Lloyd, and then Keith Jarrett, who joined Lloyd in February 1966 when the group played an East Third Avenue club called Slug’s, where Lee Morgan was later stabbed to death by his wife.

In recent years, he has responded to invitations from Columbia Legacy to return to reissues, but with an important difference: Now the reissues he produced and expanded (Armstrong Plays Handy) or to which he contributed annotations (Miles Davis And Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings) involve many of the classic sessions he initiated during Columbia’s golden age of the ’50s.

As Columbia’s one bona fide living-legend executive, Avakian’s knowledge of the company’s archives is as deep as it is detailed and personal. He personifies a glorious period in the first two decades of the company’s modern history and, along with Mitch Miller, stands as its most illustrious living contributor.

In his days at Columbia, the record business was still something of a cottage industry, which was both a curse and a blessing. The money may have been modest, but the opportunities to accomplish things within a relatively small company were great. Avakian attributes his financial security to the success of the Avakian Brothers rug business and the sale of his New York apartment. Today, he lives well with his family in Riverdale, New York, and at long last he is finding time to put the whole story down on paper. It should be a book to read.” 

—John McDonough