1. George Mesrop Avakian was an American record producer, artist manager, writer, educator and executive.
29 Facts About George Avakian
1. 2.
George Avakian became a jazz fan in his early teens through listening to the radio at night; his first loves were Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, the Casa Loma Orchestra, and Benny Goodman, among others.
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George Avakian managed to meet and interview Goodman for the Horace Mann School Record during his senior year.
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George Avakian began writing letters to such companies as Decca and the American Record Corporation.
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George Avakian began writing letters lobbying them to reissue those recordings.
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George Avakian discovered a number of unreleased Louis Armstrong Hot 5 and Hot 7 sides while researching the first album of the series, King Louis.
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George Avakian had continued to write for such magazines as Down Beat, Jazz Magazine, and Mademoiselle while stationed in the Pacific.
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George 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.
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At around the same time he returned to Columbia, George Avakian met his wife-to-be, Anahid Ajemian, a violinist who was at the dawn of what would be a major performing and recording career.
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That same year, George Avakian collaborated with Walter Schaap and Charles Delaunay on The New Hot Discography, an English translation and expansion of Delaunay's Hot Discography, the first significant catalog of existing jazz records, originally available only in France.
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George Avakian financed the first recordings of John Cage and Alan Hovhaness, and was one of the co-founders of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1957; he served as president from 1966 to 1967.
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The list of artists with whom George Avakian collaborated at Columbia, and later at Pacific Jazz, Warner Brothers, RCA, and as an independent producer, was extensive.
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George Avakian signed Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck to the label, both of whom had only previously recorded for independents with limited distribution systems.
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Beyond the LP, George Avakian was innovative in other ways: he made Columbia the first major record company to record live performances of jazz and popular music.
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George Avakian worked in the studio with Armstrong as well in this period to produce some of the trumpeter's best later recordings, including Louis Armstrong Plays W C Handy.
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From 1956 to 1963, George Avakian produced several cornerstone albums recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival, including Ellington at Newport and the companion album to the film Jazz On A Summer's Day.
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George Avakian was 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, and overdubbing and editing Miles Davis's Miles Ahead in 1957.
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In 1960, George Avakian left Warners to sign on as manager of popular artists and repertoire for RCA, which gave him the opportunity to work with jazz musicians.
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In 1962, George Avakian planned and accompanied the clarinetist's landmark tour of the USSR, which provided him with valuable experience dealing with the Russians that would come in handy within a few short years.
21.
George Avakian 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 of Charles Lloyd, as well as that of Lloyd's young pianist, Keith Jarrett.
22.
George Avakian arranged for the Charles Lloyd Quartet, which featured Jack DeJohnette and Ron McClure, to be the first small American jazz group to perform in the Soviet Union ; he produced several very successful Lloyd albums for Atlantic Records.
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George Avakian did even more for Jarrett, arranging record deals, managing tours, and producing albums on Columbia, Atlantic, and Impulse.
24.
George Avakian negotiated a contract for Jarrett with Manfred Eicher, the founder of a new German label, ECM Records, for whom Jarrett still records as of 2017.
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George Avakian was the first to record Soviet and American artists together.
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George Avakian sponsored the first performance by Soviet musicians in the United States and arranged for the Branford Marsalis Quartet to play at the Moscow International Jazz Festival, the debut of American performers at that event, in 1990.
27.
George Avakian remained active in jazz research and writing and discovered several previously unknown Louis Armstrong compositions at the Library of Congress.
28.
George 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.
29.
George Avakian is a founding officer of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.