The Wall Street Journal: George Avakian, Jazz Producer to the Greats

PanARMENIAN.Net - George Avakian probably has done more to influence the way jazz has been heard over the past 70 years than anyone else alive. Will Friedwald writes about this in the article "Jazz Producer to the Greats" in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Avakian, who celebrated his 90th birthday in March, may not have single-handedly invented the jazz album, but in 1939 and 1940 he got the concept off the ground. He is responsible for essential albums by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and other jazz greats -- a list much too long for this column. And he ran the first jazz reissue program.



Born in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, Mr. Avakian arrived in New York in 1923. The first jazz record he distinctly remembers hearing was of the Casa Loma Orchestra in 1933, when he was 14, and the first jazz star he remembers seeing in person is Lucky Millinder, at a theater in New York's Washington Heights, the part of upper Manhattan where Mr. Avakian grew up. He got hooked on jazz via the radio, hearing Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. By 1936, when attending the Horace Mann School in the Bronx's Riverdale neighborhood, he contrived to interview Benny Goodman for the school paper; in 1962, Mr. Avakian accompanied Goodman on his ground-breaking tour of Russia. In 1998 he came to Yerevan to the first international jazz festival.



Mr. Avakian, who has received lifetime achievement awards from Downbeat magazine and the Grammies, continues to be involved in new albums and reissues.