Secret Agent: Top-10

I’ve spent the last year plus digitizing my vinyl collection for personal use. I’ve done all my general soul/jazz/jazz funk and disco artists from A-K. Which in total is only about 1/4 of the collection.

My passion though is collecting albums made by, former A&M producer/A&R manager Creed Taylor. CTI was initially a sub-label on A&M Records in the late 1960’s. There were a number of classic albums released including

10-Years earlier, a 28-year old Creed Taylor, was working with a small orchestra on a series of albums with Kenyon (Ken) Hopkins, one of jazz’s great composers and arrangers. Ken spent the 1950’s and 60’s in New York studios, where he became king of “the concept album.”

I spend a lot of time hunting both in person and online for affordable but good quality albums on the Creed Taylor CTI and Kudu labels. I have all but two of the Kudu label, I’ve had more than 50% of the label output since the late 1970’s. I’ve also had probably 40% of the CTI label. Buying the remainder has been a fun, rewarding experience, I’m working on ideas for the 50th anniversary of the labels in 2020.

A few weeks back I mentioned my CTI project to Rusty Hodge, founder of SOMA FM and he immediately came back with

I’d love to get some of Creed Taylor’s “crime” stuff for Secret Agent.

I’ve had all four of the Hopkins/Taylor concept albums for a few years, but aside from the Sound of New York, never played them. They were really only there for completeness. While you can get some of the albums from specialist UK outlets Sounds of the Universe and Boomkat as downloads, they just don’t have the same atmosphere as the original mono albums, and especially after some re-engineering.

I was delighted to see four of the tracks in the SOMA FM Secret Agent by spins chart this week.

The four albums I’ve worked on for SOMA FM are as follows, interestingly these albums are not mentioned in either the Kenyon Hopkins or Creed Taylor wikipedia entries. I’ll have to see what else I can find out about that period. It is remarkable to me that Creed Taylor, possibly one of the key people behind the early Jazz > Funk evolution in the early 70’s was working on these soundtrack style albums 20-years earlier.