Birth of George Avakian (March 15, 1919)
Record producer and artist manager George Avakian was best known for his work in major American recording companies (Decca, Columbia, Warner, RCA) from 1939 to the early 1960 and as a major force in the expansion of development of U.S. recording industry. Names like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Bob Newhart, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Ravi Shankar, and many others were among the luminaries that worked with him.
George Mesrop Avakian was born on March 15, 1919, in Armavir, in the Northern Caucasus (Russia); the family moved to the United States in July 1923. His younger brother was photographer and filmmaker Aram Avakian (1926–1987). George Avakian became a jazz fan in his early teens through listening to the radio at night. He began amassing his enormous collection of jazz recordings while attending Horace Mann School.
While Avakian was still at Yale University, Decca Records hired him to produce his first recording, Chicago Jazz (1940), featuring musicians such as guitarist Eddie Condon, trumpeter Jimmy McPartland, and drummer George Wettling. It became known as the first “jazz album,” which consisted of six 78 rpm records, complete with Avakian’s liner note essay, and set the template for future jazz releases.
By 1940, the swing era was in full bloom, and Columbia Broadcasting System was the home of much recorded jazz after having acquired the bankrupt American Record Corporation. It decided to form a subsidiary called Columbia Records, and Avakian was tapped to produce a reissue series. He returned to Columbia Records after serving in the US Army during the war and was responsible for the Popular Music and International divisions. He continued production of the Hot Jazz Classics series, as well as the Special Editions and Archives series. He was also assigned the role of head of popular albums, part of which involved issuing the first 100 pop records in the 33 1⁄3 rpm long-playing format, a new technology perfected by Columbia that represented a marketing innovation no less than a technical one. Beyond the LP, he made Columbia the first major record company to record live performances of jazz and popular music. He was also one of the first producers of popular music to fully embrace multitrack recording and tape editing techniques.
At around the same time, George Avakian met his future wife, violinist Anahid Ajemian (1925–2016), who was at the dawn of her major career. They married in 1948 and had a marriage of 68 years and three children. In 1957, Avakian and Ajemian produced a three-concert series at Town Hall titled Music for Moderns, featuring jazz musicians and modern composers on the same bill, a very unusual venture for its time.
Avakian taught one of the first academic jazz history courses at New York University in 1948 and was one of the co-founders of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (now known as The Recording Academy, which presents the Grammy Awards) in 1957; he served as its president from 1966 to 1967.
He departed from Columbia in 1958 after a groundbreaking 12-year run. After a short stint as co-owner of the much smaller Pacific Jazz label, Avakian was invited, along with his former Columbia colleague Jim Conkling, to form a record company for Warner Brothers. He left Warner in 1960 to sign on as manager of popular artists and repertoire for RCA, which gave him the opportunity to work once again with jazz musicians until he left in 1964. He began working at Avakian Brothers, and through the rest of the 1960s and into the 1970s, he managed his own artists.
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, 1960). After organizing the 1962 tour of Benny Goodman and Charles Lloyd’s successful Tallinn appearance in 1967, Avakian assisted Duke Ellington and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestras in planning their Soviet visits. He also sponsored the first performance by Soviet musicians in the United States (1988) and arranged for the Branford Marsalis Quartet to play at the Moscow International Jazz Festival in 1990. For his lifelong efforts, the Soviet Composers Union successfully pushed for Avakian to receive the Soviet highest honor, the Order of Lenin, 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. He also remained active in jazz research and writing and discovered several previously unknown Louis Armstrong compositions at the Library of Congress.
Avakian died on November 22, 2017, at the age of 98 in New York City.