Orchestrated the success of popular artists
George Avakian, a producer and record executive who helped define the jazz canon and redefine the album, popularizing everything from long-play vinyl records to live albums and liner notes, died Nov. 22 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
His daughter Anahid Avakian Gregg confirmed the death to the Associated Press but did not disclose the cause.
A softspoken son of Armenian immigrants, Avakian was among the most impactful behind-the-scenes figures of 20th-century music, credited with popularizing a number of innovations and a variety of musicians.
At Columbia Records, where Avakian led the oncefloundering pop and international division for much of the 1950s, he assembled a roster that included pianist Dave Brubeck and trumpeter Miles Davis and oversaw retrospective releases that revitalized interest in Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith.
He produced saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s 1962 comeback hit “The Bridge”; signed rock musicians Bill Haley and the Everly Brothers to Warner Bros. Records; assembled one of the bestselling comedy albums in history, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (1960); and for several years in the 1970s managed jazz and classical pianist Keith Jarrett and saxophonist Charles Lloyd.
Avakian orchestrated the commercial success of dozens of jazz, rock and international artists, successfully betting that Davis could overcome a heroin addiction and that a teenage Johnny Mathis could become a star.
“Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way,” Avakian wrote in an oft-cited 1955 telegram to Columbia after seeing Mathis sing at a San Francisco club. “Send blank contracts.”
But he was also a singleminded jazz scholar who taught one of the earliest jazz history courses and sought to elevate the music he loved as a teenager into an art form that commanded the same critical respect as classical music.
Nearly all the technical innovations he championed were adopted in the service of jazz. While studying at Yale University, he waged a letter-writing campaign to record executives, complaining about the lack of full-length jazz albums. The only records on the market were low-quality singles, heavy shellac discs known as 78s for their revolutions per minute.
Avakian eventually persuaded the label Decca to let him record an album of his own: “Chicago Jazz” (1940), a set of six 10-inch discs that featured guitarist Eddie Condon and is widely considered the first full-length jazz record in history.
The album also marked one of the earliest examples of liner notes, with Avakian crafting an accompanying 12-page booklet that offered listeners the wealth of information that had long eluded him as a young jazz fan, including details on the record’s performers and composition. The annotations became a staple of Avakian’s releases and would later win him a Grammy Award, for his scholarly liner notes to a 1996 Davis and Gil Evans box set that described recording sessions Mr. Avakian had originally overseen.
A young Avakian went on to connect with Columbia, whose factory was just 20 miles down the road from Yale’s campus, and reissue a series of “Hot Jazz Classics” that put old recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Armstrong and other early jazz artists in wide release.
The records formed the bedrock of a jazz canon Avakian spent much of his early career codifying, strolling the archives of Columbia’s factory and record library to seek out long-forgotten albums that soon became hits.
Avakian was one of the founders of what is now the Grammy-giving Recording Academy and contributed to recording sessions and reissues until shortly before his death.
He received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 2010, “a culminating honor,” he said, that confirmed his “long-held belief: Live long enough, stay out of jail, and you’ll never know what might happen!”