George Avakian

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George Avakian (around 1938 to 1948)
Photo: William P. Gottlieb .
Avakian 2007 at the Hard Rock Cafe in New Orleans

George Mesrop Avakian , pronounced Awokean, ( Armenian Ջորջ Ավագյան * 15. March 1919 in Armavir , Russia ; † 22. November 2017 in Manhattan ) was an American record producer of jazz and popular music. He was of Armenian origin. He was best known for his work for Columbia Records , where he produced many Miles Davis albums.

Life

Avakian was born in southern Russia to an Armenian family of clothes dealers who emigrated to the United States shortly after his birth. Avakian grew up in New York and listened to jazz as a teenager, partly because its strange tone sounded like the Armenian music on his parents' records to his ears. He studied at Yale , but was also an avid jazz record collector and jazz fan (who also published reviews).

As a student, Avakian was responsible for the production of the first jazz album ( Chicago Jazz ) and the first reissues (reissues) of Columbia Records (and other classical jazz recordings) around 1940, including some previously unreleased recordings of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five and Hot Seven discovered. He was the first producer to discover and publish alternate takes . At that time (1939) he drove personally from Yale, where he was studying, to the Columbia Records production facility 20 miles away to convince the record company to reissue jazz classics such as Bix Beiderbecke and Armstrong. He was a soldier in World War II. He later produced Louis Armstrong himself at Columbia ("Louis Armstrong plays WCHandy" 1954, "Ambassador Satch" 1956).

At Columbia in 1948 he was the producer responsible for the first releases (around a hundred in pop and jazz) in the format of the then new LPs (33s), which had a longer playing time and higher quality than the 78s. This enabled him to publish Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert from 1938 in 1950 , the first live recording and the first double album on LP and an immense success with over a million albums sold. He brought out Dave Brubeck (for example "Brubeck plays Brubeck" 1956) and brought Miles Davis and his quintet (with John Coltrane ) from Prestige in 1955 (eg " Miles Ahead ", " Sketches of Spain " with Gil) Evans ). He also produced the comeback of Duke Ellington in the Newport concert in 1956. Avakian was employed by Columbia from 1946 to early 1957 and at the height of his career was responsible for the Popular Music and International Division. He discovered Johnny Mathis in 1955 , who sang in a San Francisco club as a teenager.

In 1957 he joined the label Pacific Jazz by Richard Bock . In 1959 he worked with his younger brother Aram Avakian (died 1987) and Bert Stern on the jazz film Jazz on a summer evening . Aram Avakian has also been a photographer on many of the jazz sessions that George Avakian recorded.

From 1959 he was with Warner Brothers , where he was to build up the pop division under his former boss at Columbia Jim Conkling and in 1960/61 he produced " Bill Haley and the Comets" and the Everly Brothers . In 1960 he produced one of the most successful comedy albums ("The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart "). In 1962 he organized Benny Goodman's USSR tour . In the same year he went to RCA Victor , where he produced Paul Desmond and the re-active Sonny Rollins ( The Bridge 1962).

In 1963 he decided never to work permanently in a larger record company again and managed the Charles Lloyd Quartet, and from 1970 to 1974 its former pianist Keith Jarrett . Then he retired from the music business and started breeding racehorses. However, he also participated again in the reissue series "Columbia Legacy" of his old record company

Avakian was married for 68 years to violinist Anahid Ajemian (1924-2016), who was a professor at the Juilliard School of Music .

Act

With "Chicago Jazz" 1940 (Decca 121, six 10-inch records with a twelve-page booklet, with new recordings by the bands of Eddie Condon , Jimmy McPartland and George Wettling ), which was followed by others on jazz in New Orleans and New York he the first jazz album in the modern sense. He was also significantly involved in establishing the long-playing record. In addition to a thematic concept for the album, this also included precise information about the composer and recording dates and informative liner notes.

In the same year 1940 he started the "Hot Jazz Classics" series at Columbia, the first reissue series in jazz. He also revitalized the live recordings of jazz concerts, such as the Louis Armstrong tour in Europe in 1955 or the aforementioned Newport concert by Duke Ellington, which gave his career a new boost. Avakian also produced one of the first LP samplers in 1955 , I Love Jazz , which sold for just a dollar at the time.

Awards and awards

Avakian was 2000 with the Lifetime Achievement Award from Down Beat honored (which is specifically awarded for major contributions to the promotion of jazz; the first was John Hammond). In 1996 he received a Grammy Award for Best Liner Notes for The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, the production of which he himself oversaw. In 2009 he received the Trustee Award from the Recording Academy , which he co-founded and of which he was President in 1966/67. In 2010 he was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship .

Web links

Commons : George Avakian  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual references, comments

  1. ↑ a b Peter Keepnews: George Avakian, Record Producer and Talent Scout, Dies at 98. The New York Times , November 22, 2017, accessed November 22, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Avakian, quoted in Washington Post obituary, November 23, 2017
  3. ↑ At Yale in 1937/8 he met the great record collector and down-beat columnist Marshall Stearns , who was just doing his doctorate in English literature. At Yale they formed a circle of record listeners similar to the hot clubs in Europe.
  4. ↑ He himself produced almost no jazz for Warner, but brought Chico Hamilton to Warner Brothers.
  5. ↑ He could have been president of the Warner Brothers label, but wanted to be as far away from Los Angeles as possible and close to the actual production
  6. ↑ After Avakian, the idea came to him when he saw how much alcohol Eddie Condon and his friends were consuming, which led Avakian to suspect an early death. In order to document the Chicago jazz beforehand, he persuaded a Columbia producer to make the recordings
  7. ↑ Susan Schmidt Horning Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP Johns Hopkins Press 2015, p. 83
  8. ↑ For example with the 4 LP box “Louis Armstrong Story” 1951
  9. ↑ See Susan Schmidt Horning Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP Johns Hopkins Press 2015, p. 110
  10. ↑ See Susan Schmidt Horning Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP Johns Hopkins Press 2015, pp. 233, 245
  11. ↑ Ted Wallerstein of Columbia, after reading a Life article from 1938 on the history of swing, of which many records were no longer available, actually wanted to hire John Hammond . He recommended Avakian. In addition to Armstrong's Hot Five and Seven, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Bix Beiderbecke appeared in the series
  12. ↑ Obituary at Grammy , 2017
personal data
SURNAME Avakian, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Avakian, George Mesrop (full name); Ջորջ Ավագյան (HyS)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American music producer
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Armavir , Armenia
DATE OF DEATH 22nd November 2017
Place of death Manhattan