CTI Records

CTI: The Brilliance of Hubert Laws

April 23, 2025

If you asked me to name one artist whose albums for Creed Taylor's CTI label hold up best today, I'd have to say Hubert Laws. Laws is probably jazz's finest flutist and is still with us, yet you barely hear or read much about him. In fact, if I had to sell off all of my ...

Johnny "Hammond" Smith: Wild Horses Rock Steady

by Arnaldo DeSouteiro
November 3, 2024

Born John Robert Smith on December 16, 1933 (in Louisville, KY), formerly known as Johnny Hammond Smith, and later as Johnnny Hammond, one of the all-time best jazz organists passed away on June 4, 1997, in Chicago, Illinois. For some of his early fans, some of the best albums he recorded were done for Prestige in ...

CTI Acid Jazz Grooves by Various Artists

by Arnaldo DeSouteiro
June 19, 2024

The CD you are holding in your hands is a very special compilation. It's the celebration of CTI as one of the most “sampled" labels on Earth! For the past ten years, many CTI tracks have been cut up, sampled, scratched and looped to create new songs for a new audience. Many of the selections on ...

Creed Taylor Productions, Part 1

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 2, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 The place in jazz history held by Creed Taylor is impeccable, stylish, and essential. He produced some of the best music for some of the best labels dedicated to jazz, then formed his own label and with meticulous preparation and his musician's ear kept on making great jazz ...

Creed Taylor Productions, Part 2

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 3, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 The place in jazz history held by Creed Taylor is impeccable, stylish, and essential. He produced some of the best music for some of the best labels dedicated to jazz, then formed his own label and with meticulous preparation and his musician's ear kept on making great jazz ...

Creed Taylor

Born: May 13, 1929

Creed Taylor revolutionized the respectability and popularity of jazz with CTI Records. In fact, some of the most significant jazz of the last half of the 20th century has been fashioned under Taylor's guidance and supervision.

Taylor has been especially influential in the packaging of music. His records are as much art to see as they are to hear. With heavy, glossy, gatefold covers featuring stark design and striking photography, his records have the sound and feel of something bearing unusual class and great quality.

After earning a degree in psychology in the early 1950s, Taylor played trumpet in clubs around Virginia Beach. He relocated to New York and secured a venerable post as head of artists and repertoire at Bethlehem Records. He produced a wide variety of jazz for Bethlehem before he took a higher profile position with ABC Paramount during the late fifties. At ABC, he produced some jazz and a great many more vocal recordings that enjoyed popular success. ABC also issued several records at the time under Taylor's name (Ping Pang Pong and Lonelyville) with music and orchestral guidance by the great film and TV composer Kenyon Hopkins, one of Taylor's first "house" arrangers.

CTI Records: Ten Tasty Albums With No Added Sugar (Almost)

by Chris May
September 17, 2020

Few jazz producers divide opinion as much as Creed Taylor. He is a hero to many and a villain to as many more. His fans love him for his high production values. His detractors accuse him of dumbing jazz down with excessively sweetened orchestrations and other sales-oriented compromises. Nowhere is the dispute more heated than over ...

J.J. and Kai: Stonebone

February 19, 2019

In 1967, Creed Taylor launched CTI Records as a subsidiary of the A&M label. Creed had just left Verve, where he headed the jazz label and pioneered new concepts in young-adult jazz, including covers with abstract color photography and jazz interpretations of pop-rock and pop-soul radio hits. In New York, Creed had complete autonomy over CTI. ...

Pete Turner (1934-2017)

September 21, 2017

Pete Turner, a commercial photographer who befriended jazz producer Creed Taylor early in his career in the late 1950s and whose richly saturated color images were used on album covers by Creed when he was at ABC-Paramount, Impulse, Verve, A&M and, most notably, CTI, died Sept. 18. Turner was 83. Pete's iconic images were featured on ...