Terry Vosbein of the Stan Kenton Research Center shared this obituary from John Edward Hasse to the Stan Kenton Appreciation Group.
Bruce Talbot, 1939-2024
Bruce Talbot, an esteemed and prolific record producer, died as the result of a fall, in Reston, Virginia, on May 4, 2004. He was 84. In the US, he is best remembered for producing such celebrated Smithsonian anthologies as the Grammy-winning Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Louis Armstrong, 1923-34; Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra; The Jazz Singers, 1919-1994; and The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues. Previously, in the UK, he produced hundreds of discs and helped build BBC Records into a respected record company. Talbot was also the biographer of composer, arranger, and bandleader Tom Talbert.
“Bruce had lots of knowledge and was always willing to share,” remarked Dan Morgenstern, formerly Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. Amy Henderson, historian at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, who worked with Talbot on the boxed set Star-Spangled Rhythm, said, “He was superb to work with, and I remember him especially as someone devoted to ‘making the music sing.’” Bill Kirchner, who co-produced and annotated Big Band Renaissance, commented that “Bruce Talbot was an innovative record producer, a first-rate music scholar, and a fine musician. I’ll remember him for all these things, plus a wonderful sense of humor.”
Bruce Talbot was born July 25, 1939, in Wellington, New Zealand. As a child, he developed a fascination for radio and recordings. At age 13, he took up the tenor saxophone. His ear was so sharp that once he heard a tune, he could reproduce it. As a teenager he avidly read Down Beat magazine. He sent away to St. Louis to buy jazz records: a few months later, they would arrive by sea. Between the ages of 17 and 19, he led a band that played at the Studio Jazz Club seven nights a week.
In 1955, he joined the New Zealand Broadcasting Company as a trainee producer and then as a producer. He began his own weekly series, Time for Jazz. He worked for RCA Records (New Zealand) in the marketing department, and in 1961, he produced programs for a radio station in Auckland.
In 1963, clutching his saxophone, clarinet, and Remington typewriter, he emigrated to England. He landed a job at the BBC—in the mail room! In 1965 he became a librarian in the BBC TV Music Library. The 1960s and 1970s were a rich time for music on British television. Every great American performer, and many lesser, played London and while there, appeared on BBC television, live.
In the 1970s, he played with the London Vintage Jazz Orchestra. In 1981, he joined BBC Records as a producer. He was largely responsible for the growth of what was originally a backwater specializing in sound effects, birdsong and 45s of TV theme songs into a respected record company, creating soundtrack albums and program-related released. He developed and produced an entire historical line of classical music recordings. He brought to the BBC Australian audio engineer Robert Parker and his series “Jazz Classics in Digital Stereo” and its complementary radio series, totaling fifty-plus releases.
Bruce also became a studio producer of live music, supervising the recording of jazz groups, big bands, solo performers, chamber music ensembles, and the 80-piece BBC Concert Orchestra.
In 1987, he joined the Oxford-based band Vile Bodies (named after the novel by the British writer Evelyn Waugh), which specialized in transcriptions from the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1990, Bruce became Artiste and Repertoire Manager for BBC Records. One of his last productions for the BBC was producing the British edition of the three-disc The Classic Hoagy Carmichael, which was produced by John Edward Hasse for Smithsonian Recordings. This led to Talbot’s appointment as Executive Producer/Director of the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings. There followed a stream of his productions, including 12 boxed sets and 17 individual CDs.
1993
We’ll Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War I.
1994
Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Louis Armstrong, 1923-34. Earned Bruce and Dan Morgenstern a Grammy nomination for “Best Historical Album,” and a Dan a Grammy for “Best Notes.”
1995
I Got Rhythm: The Music of George Gershwin.
Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra. The booklet earned a NAIRD award for Bill Kirchner.
You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To: Love Songs of World War Two and the Homecoming.
The Victory Collection: The Smithsonian Remembers when Americans Went to War.
The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues.
1996
Mean Old World: The Blues from 1940-1994. Larry Hoffman nominated for “Best Notes”
Grammy.
1997
Star-Spangled Rhythm: Voices of Broadway and Hollywood.
Hot Jazz on Blue Note.
1998
The Jazz Singers, 1919-1994. Grammy nominee.
From 1992-95, he also executive produced 17 individual CDs in the “American Songbook Series” on songwriters Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Fields, E.Y. Harburg, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Arthur Schwartz, Jule Styne, James Van Heusen, Harry Warren, Kurt Weill, Richard Whiting, Alec Wilder, and Vincent Youmans.
In 2004, Scarecrow Press published his Tom Talbert: His Life and Times; Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz (Studies in Jazz, no. 45), including a CD of 14 of his most important and representative recordings.
He is survived by his wife, Sandra Gregory, of Herndon, Virginia.
