Recording - May 2015 - 72

Orrin Keepnews, 1923-2015

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

Riverside was always a low budget
operation, run by people who loved jazz
rather than people who expected to make
a profit. They hired Buzz Reeves' studio
out for overnight sessions at a discount,
an arrangement that worked well for
musicians who would come in after their
normal gigs in the clubs and perform in a

and performance. But who got the idea to
put Thelonius Monk into the studio all alone
with just a piano for a completely solo jazz
album? Had anyone ever done anything like
that before? In retrospect it was the natural
extension of shrinking the jazz group down,
but nobody really thought about it until
Keepnews.
Riverside recorded performers like Milt
Jackson and Wes Montgomery who were
at the top of their field but who were never
tremendously popular and really broke into
the market until after the label had gone
bankrupt.
Keepnews believed in performers who
didn't believe in themselves and made great
records for a limited market of jazz fans,
many of which were never really discovered
by the mass audience until years later.
Keepnews discovered new artists, great
artists, and tried to do well for them. He
often talked about "the line between tyranny
and overindulgence" that the producer is
constantly walking, and about the job of the
producer being to create an environment
where a performance can happen.

Orrin Keepnews believed in performers who didn't believe in themselves,
and made great records.
In the fifties, Orrin Keepnews and Bill
Grauer were record collectors who were
dismayed that so many classic jazz
recordings of the 1920s were no longer
available. Writing in a record-collecting
magazine, they protested about major
labels having discontinued so much of that
music, to the point where RCA hired the
two of them as producers to make a 12disc compilation called The Encyclopedia
of Recorded Jazz.
They formed the Riverside Records label
to reissue these classic jazz recordings
from the likes of Bessie Smith and Sidney
Bechet, but soon Keepnews found himself
in the middle of the modern bebop movement, producing records with the likes of
Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk, and many of
the new breed of young musicians.
As I kid, I knew him only as the guy
who wrote the liner notes on a bunch of
my favorite jazz albums. Those albums
were magical; when I was eight or nine
years old, I looked at the cover of
Thelonious Himself by Thelonious Monk
and wished I could be there; it was the
quintessence of the midnight recording
session.
72

RECORDING May 2015

relaxed environment without having to
watch the clock.
Talking about his work as a producer,
Keepnews constantly discussed the importance of creating the right environment-
bringing the right people together in the
right environment and letting them play
the way that was natural to them.
The Fifties was an era where the big
bands were dying out and being replaced
with smaller combos, and this made it possible for a whole new approach to recording

After his partner Grauer's untimely
death in 1964, Riverside went bankrupt
but Keepnews continued on, founding the
Milestone label with Dick Katz and then
later on the Landmark label. All the time
he continued finding new musicians with
new things to say and new ways to say it,
and making records with them.
Orrin started out as a jazz fan and a
jazz critic and in the end created the environment that created a lot of great jazz. He
died on March 1 at age 91, and he left
behind a huge body of work. His name
was never stamped in big letters on the
front of a record album, only in tiny little letters at the end of the liner notes, but without
him much of the transformative modern
jazz never would have happened.
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com)
is a recording engineer, electrical engineer, software engineer, mic and music
electronics guru, and jazz fan, living in
Williamsburg, VA. Scott would like to thank
Bret Primack (check out his channel Jazz
Video Guy on YouTube) for permission to
use a still from his video interview with
Orrin Keepnews.

Recording - May 2015

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