Helen Keane

Helen Keane (born February 16, 1923 in New York City , † April 22, 1996 ) was an American music producer and artist agent . She was one of the few women in music production and was best known for her collaboration with Bill Evans .

Live and act

Helen Keane aspired to a career in the entertainment industry from an early age; her mother had worked as a model and her aunt was an actress in New York. She began her professional career in the 1940s as a secretary at the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which was the largest artist agency at the time. At the age of 19 she was soon the first woman to be an artist agent for MCA. One of her discoveries was the young singer Harry Belafonte , whom she made to switch from pop songs to folk songs .

Eventually she left MCA to work at CBS as the casting director for television shows, such as the Gary Moore Show. She came into contact with jazz through Moore and her older brother's records, and around 1960 was in charge of TV appearances for artists such as Chris Connor , Marian McPartland and Toshiko Akiyoshi . Helen Keane stayed with CBS for seven years; in order to be able to spend more time with her children, she founded her own artist agency after her departure ; her first clients were her then husband Geoffrey Holder and the dancer Camman de Lavallade.

The music critic Gene Lees finally introduced her to the jazz pianist Bill Evans; she immediately became his manager and accompanied him to his recording sessions. Keane also made Evans move from Riverside Records to the larger Verve label . Due to her strong stake in Evans productions, she then enabled Evans' then producer Creed Taylor to also produce for MGM / Verve Records . Her first album Empathy (1962), which she produced with Bill Evans, was nominated for a Grammy ; the second, Conversations With Myself (1963) won it.

Keane then remained its manager for 18 years until Bill Evans' death; she also put in contact with Tony Bennett , with whom the pianist produced two albums. In total, over thirty albums were created in collaboration with Evans for the Verve, Columbia , CTI , Fantasy and Warner labels ; seven of them won the Grammy. After her reputation grew through her work with Evans, she worked as a manager and producer for artists such as João Gilberto ( Amoroso ), Mark Murphy , and for Paquito D'Rivera , with whom she produced five albums from 1980. She worked with Art Farmer for eleven years and supervised his productions for Contemporary ( Ph. D. , 1989 and Art Farmer in Japan 1992); also 16 years with Kenny Burrell and Joanne Brackeen , whose trio album Where Legends Dwell with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette was produced under their production. She has also worked with artists such as Barbara Carroll , Philly Joe Jones , the Clifford Jordan Big Band, Morgana King , Steve Kuhn , Claudio Roditi , Carol Sloane , Sylvia Syms , Clark Terry and Grover Washington, Jr.

After Bill Evans' death in 1980, Helen Keane took care of his publications from the estate; So she worked on the edition The Complete Fantasy Recordings and the release of the recording Blue in Green - The Concert in Canada (1991) for Milestone . She also produced the 45-minute film, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, with recordings of performances and interviews. In 1991 she edited A Celebration of Bill Evans for the New School Jazz Program . In 1992 she attended the meeting of the International Association for Jazz Education and lectured on Bill Evans and the topic of women in the music business.

In the early 1990s, Helen Keane worked for the NJSO (National Jazz Service Organization) and appeared at several events and seminars on women and jazz, including the Celebration of Women in Jazz Weeks at Berklee College of Music and Northwestern University , the Women's Jazz Festival in Kansas City, the Universal Jazz Coalition Seminars in New York, and the Jazz Times Convention . She died in Manhattan in 1996 .

Web links

• Biography at pitt.edu
• Obituary in the New York Times
• Discographic references at discogs.com
• Photograph by Bill Evans, Nano Herrera and Helen Keane in Buenos Aires 1974 at Flickr.com