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George Avakian | |
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.jpg) Avakian in 2003 | |
| Born | Kevork Mesrop Avakian (1919-03-15)March 15, 1919 Armavir, Russia |
| Died | November 22, 2017(2017-11-22) (aged 98) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Horace Mann SchoolYale University |
| Years active | 1939-2000 |
| Spouse | Anahid Ajemian (1948–2016) |
| Children | 3 |
| Musical career | |
| Genres | Jazz,pop |
| Occupation | Record producer |
| Labels | Columbia,Warner Bros.,RCA Victor |
Musical artist | |
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George Mesrop Avakian (Armenian:Ջորջ (Գևորգ) Ավագյան;Russian:Геворк Авакян; March 15, 1919 – November 22, 2017) was an American record producer, artist manager, writer, educator and executive. Best known for his work from 1939 to the early 1960s atDecca Records,Columbia Records,World Pacific Records,Warner Bros. Records, andRCA Records, he was a major force in the expansion and development of the U.S. recording industry. Avakian functioned as an independent producer and manager from the 1960s to the early 2000s and worked with artists such asLouis Armstrong,Miles Davis,Duke Ellington,Benny Goodman,Dave Brubeck,Eddie Condon,Keith Jarrett,Erroll Garner,Buck Clayton,Sonny Rollins,Paul Desmond,Edith Piaf,Bob Newhart,Johnny Mathis,John Cage,Alan Hovhaness,Ravi Shankar, and many other notable jazz musicians and composers.[1]
Avakian was born in 1919 inArmavir, Russia, toArmenian parents, Mesrop and Manoushak Avakian; the family moved to theUnited States in July 1923 as first cabin class passengers on the S/SArgentina, sailing from Trieste to New York.[2] His younger brother was the photographer and filmmakerAram Avakian (1926–1987). George Avakian became a jazz fan in his early teens through listening to the radio at night; his first loves wereDuke Ellington,Fletcher Henderson,Fats Waller, theCasa Loma Orchestra, andBenny Goodman, among others. He managed to meet and interview Goodman for theHorace Mann School Record during his senior year. This is when he began amassing his enormous collection of Jazz recordings. He also began writing letters to such companies as Decca and theAmerican Record Corporation (ARC). ARC had acquired the catalogs of the bankruptOKeh andBrunswick Records labels, both of which had recorded jazz extensively in the 1920s. Avakian began writing letters lobbying them to reissue those recordings.
While Avakian was still atYale University, Decca RecordsJack Kapp responded to his unrelenting letters, hiring him to produce his first recording,Chicago Jazz (1940), featuring musicians such as guitaristEddie Condon, trumpeterJimmy McPartland, and drummerGeorge Wettling. This became known as the first "jazz album".[2] It consisted of six 78rpm records, complete with Avakian's liner note essay providing full credits and background information, and set the template for future jazz releases.
By 1940, the swing era was in full bloom, and theColumbia Broadcasting System wanted to cash in on the craze by featuring the music's origins. Having acquired the bankruptAmerican Record Corporation, CBS was now the home of much recorded jazz. It decided to form a subsidiary calledColumbia Records. The company's president, Edward Wallerstein, asked John Hammond to produce a reissue series. Hammond declined, but he suggested Columbia tap Avakian for the job.
Avakian, in his third year at Yale, leapt at the opportunity to comb through Columbia's vaults in Bridgeport, Connecticut to research and assemble what was to be called the Hot Jazz Classics series. Using the format he established at Decca, Avakian created boxed sets devoted toLouis Armstrong,Bix Beiderbecke,Fletcher Henderson,Bessie Smith, andBillie Holiday, among many others. In the process, he found many unreleased sides and included them in the reissues.
Avakian discovered a number of unreleased Louis Armstrong Hot 5 and Hot 7 sides while researching the first album of the series,King Louis. A strong, decades-long working and personal friendship formed when the young producer brought a few test pressings to play for Armstrong.
While serving in the US Army following his graduation from Yale, he was recalled to the United States in 1944 for special training in European languages atHarvard University. While stationed in Boston, he produced a jazz radio program for the Office of War Information featuringEddie Condon,James P. Johnson, andFletcher Henderson, among others. He had also continued to write for such magazines asDown Beat,Jazz Magazine, andMademoiselle while stationed in the Pacific.
After the war, he returned toColumbia Records responsible for the Popular Music and International divisions, where he continued production of the Hot Jazz Classics series, as well as the Special Editions and Archives series. In addition to recording jazz and pop artists (such asSidney Bechet,Arthur Godfrey,Doris Day, andFrank Sinatra), Avakian was assigned the role of head of popular albums, part of which involved issuing the first 100 pop records in the 331⁄3rpm long-playing format, a new technology perfected by Columbia that the company was determined to exploit to the full. Avakian was in the forefront of new methods of production to take advantage of the LP, which represented a marketing innovation no less than a technical one.
At around the same time he returned to Columbia, Avakian also met his wife-to-be,Anahid Ajemian (1925–2016), a violinist who was at the dawn of what would be a major performing and recording career. She and her sister, pianistMaro Ajemian (1921–1978), became great performers and boosters of contemporary music. Both sisters studied at the Institute of Musical Art (later theJuilliard School), launched their careers at New York'sTown Hall (in 1940 and 1946), and became interested in contemporary composers. Together and separately, the Ajemians would premiere and make debut recordings of music by composers such asAram Khatchaturian,John Cage,Alan Hovhaness,Lou Harrison,Ernst Krenek, andElliott Carter. Avakian and Ajemian married in 1948, and remained so until Anahid's death in 2016.
During this time, Avakian continued to write for magazines, expanding into education in 1948 when he taught one of the first academic jazz history courses atNew York University. That same year, Avakian collaborated with Walter Schaap andCharles Delaunay onThe New Hot Discography, an English translation and expansion of Delaunay'sHot Discography, the first significant catalog of existing jazz records, originally available only in France. Avakian also financed the first recordings ofJohn Cage andAlan Hovhaness (forDial Records, after the label had switched from bebop to classical), and was one of the co-founders of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS, now known asThe Recording Academy, and presenters of theGrammy Awards) in 1957; he served as president from 1966 to 1967.
The list of artists with whom Avakian collaborated at Columbia, and later at Pacific Jazz, Warner Brothers, RCA, and as an independent producer, was extensive. In addition to those mentioned, it includedDave Brubeck,Erroll Garner,Mahalia Jackson,Ravi Shankar,Gil Evans,Lotte Lenya,Gerry Mulligan,Art Blakey,Buck Clayton,Eddie Condon,Tony Bennett,Edith Piaf,Johnny Mathis, andFrankie Yankovic. He signedMiles Davis andDave Brubeck to the label, both of whom had only previously recorded for independents with limited distribution systems.
Beyond the LP, Avakian was innovative in other ways: he made Columbia the first major record company to record live performances of jazz and popular music. It released a 2-LP set ofBenny Goodman's1938 concert at Carnegie Hall in 1950, and recordedLionel Hampton,Harry James, andLouis Armstrong live. He worked in the studio with Armstrong as well in this period to produce some of the trumpeter's best later recordings, includingLouis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy (1954). From 1956 to 1963, Avakian produced several cornerstone albums recorded live at theNewport Jazz Festival, includingEllington at Newport (1956) and the companion album to the filmJazz On A Summer's Day (1958). He was also one of the first producers of popular music to fully embrace multitrack recording and tape editing techniques, overdubbing Louis Armstrong on the best-selling single "Mack The Knife" in 1955 (he persuaded Armstrong to record it), and overdubbing and editingMiles Davis'sMiles Ahead in 1957.
In 1958, after an extraordinarily-busy and ground-breaking 12-year run at Columbia, he elected to depart. After a short stint as co-owner of the much smallerPacific Jazz label, Avakian was invited, along with his former Columbia colleague Jim Conkling, to form a record company forWarner Brothers (at that time the only major film studio not to have its own record label). There, Avakian signedBob Newhart, producing the first comedy album to win a Best Album Grammy Award. He also signed theEverly Brothers andBill Haley & His Comets.
Avakian personally financed and produced the first three albums byAlan Hovhaness andJohn Cage (unrelated to his jobs at Columbia) and, in 1958, presentedThe 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage at Town Hall, an event he also recorded and sold independently. The year before, Avakian and Ajemian produced a three-concert series at Town Hall titledMusic For Moderns, featuring jazz musicians and modern composers on the same bill, a very unusual venture for its time. The concerts featuredAnahid Ajemian,Dimitri Mitropoulos, theDuke Ellington Orchestra, theModern Jazz Quartet,Mahalia Jackson,Chico Hamilton, the composersVirgil Thomson andCarlos Surinach, pianistWilliam Masselos, violistWalter Trampler, and opera baritoneMartial Singher, among others.
In 1960, Avakian left Warners to sign on as manager of popular artists and repertoire for RCA, which gave him the opportunity to work once again with jazz musicians. His roster included Lambert, Hendricks, and Bavan;Paul Desmond;Sonny Rollins (signed by Avakian for an unprecedented sum for a jazz musician);Gary Burton; and, once again,Benny Goodman. In 1962, Avakian planned and accompanied the clarinetist's landmark tour of theUSSR, which provided him with valuable experience dealing with the Russians that would come in handy within a few short years.
By late 1962, Avakian was once again feeling the pressure of administering a record label on top of his production work, and he negotiated an independent production deal withRCA Records in which he was hired on a per-project basis, relieving him of the busy work. At the same time, he began to manage and produce his own artists as well, beginning withJohn Lewis andGunther Schuller'sOrchestra U.S.A. ensemble; singer/songwriter Bob Morrison; and saxophonistCharles Lloyd.
Though most known for jazz and pop album production, Avakian notably involved himself in two theater projects. In 1947, he arranged for a group of musicians under the leadership of the saxophonistEddie Barefield to perform incidental music for the playA Streetcar Named Desire during its Philadelphia and Broadway runs. In 1965, he was an associate producer of the first Off-Broadway revival ofMarc Blitzstein'sThe Cradle Will Rock, and he personally financed the recording of the cast album (the first complete recording of that show).
As the recording industry moved further away from the music closest to his heart, Avakian left RCA in 1964 and never again held a full-time job at a record label. He began working at Avakian Brothers, and through the rest of the 60s and into the 1970s, he managed to hold down that job while launching and running the high-flying career ofCharles Lloyd, as well as that of Lloyd's young pianist,Keith Jarrett. Avakian arranged for the Charles Lloyd Quartet, which also featuredJack DeJohnette andRon McClure, to be the first small American jazz group to perform in the Soviet Union (at the Tallinn Jazz Festival, 1967); he also produced several very successful Lloyd albums forAtlantic Records. Avakian did even more for Jarrett, arranging record deals, managing tours, and producing albums on Columbia, Atlantic, and Impulse. He also negotiated a contract for Jarrett withManfred Eicher, the founder of a new German label,ECM Records, for whom Jarrett still records as of 2017.
Throughout his career, Avakian worked hard to foster intercultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was the first to record Soviet and American artists together (Pavel Lisitsian Sings Armenian Songs With Maro Ajemian At The Piano, New York Records, recorded in 1957, released in 1960). After organizing theBenny Goodman 1962 tour and Lloyd's successful Tallinn appearance in 1967, Avakian assisted Duke Ellington and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestras in planning their Soviet visits, befriending many figures in Russian music, such as writer Leonid Pereverzev, bandleaderOleg Lundstrem, and trumpeterValery Ponomarev. Avakian also sponsored the first performance by Soviet musicians in the United States (at theVillage Gate in 1988) and arranged for theBranford Marsalis Quartet to play at the Moscow International Jazz Festival, the debut of American performers at that event, in 1990. For his lifelong efforts, the Soviet Composers Union successfully pushed for Avakian to receive theOrder of Lenin, the former Soviet Union's highest honor, in 1990.
From the 1970s to the 2000s, Avakian continued to keep his hand in occasional record productions, and during the 1980s, he managed two vocalists,Helen Merrill and Datevik Hovanesian. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sony Legacy consulted him for the reissues of severalMiles Davis andLouis Armstrong albums and compilations. Avakian also remained active in jazz research and writing and discovered several previously unknown Louis Armstrong compositions at the Library of Congress. In 1997, he produced performances and a recording of them by trumpeterRandy Sandke and other musicians (The Re-Discovered Louis and Bix, onNagel-Heyer Records, 2000).
Avakian and Anahid Ajemian donated their extensive collection of Jazz recordings and memorabilia to theNew York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in 2014.[2] A major exhibit was held there in 2016 entitledMusic for Moderns: The Partnership of George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian. Once semi-retired, he became involved in harness racing, owning and breeding several racehorses. Avakian bred champion pacer Presidential Ball.
Avakian died on November 22, 2017, at the age of 98 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City.[2] The Avakians had three children: Maro, Anahid, and Gregory
He is a founding officer of theNational Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (presenters of theGrammy Awards). His awards over the past years include:
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