EGN NEWS DESK
Michael Cuscuna, who introduced an artist’s stage of devotion and a scientist’s consideration to element to the work of exhuming and producing archival jazz recordings — work that vastly expanded entry to the buried treasures of American music’s previous — died on Saturday at his house in Stamford, Conn. He was 75.
The singer and songwriter Billy Vera, a good friend of greater than 60 years, mentioned the trigger was problems of esophageal most cancers.
Mr. Cuscuna might have been essentially the most prolific archival file producer in historical past. Starting in an period when midcentury jazz skilled a resurgence of curiosity, his identify confirmed up within the tremendous print on over 2,600 albums, most of them reissues, lots of which included his painstaking liner notes.
The Mosaic label, which he based with the music-business veteran Charlie Lourie 41 years in the past, has turn out to be the gold normal of archival jazz releases. Its first situation was an exhaustive boxed set of previous materials that Mr. Cuscuna had discovered within the vaults of the famed Blue Note label.
Soon after that, he helped to revive Blue Note, which had been dormant for years. Working with Bruce Lundvall, who turned Blue Note’s president in 1984, Mr. Cuscuna took cost of the label’s again catalog. He launched unissued gold by John Coltrane, Art Blakey and quite a few others, finally combing by way of all the catalog and placing out just about each misplaced observe that appeared match to be heard.
“Finding one thing that’s by no means been heard earlier than and inflicting it to come back out, for me, was all the time an extremely gratifying factor,” he mentioned in a video interview with Brett Primack. “Even in the event you put one thing out and it solely sells 1,000 copies and will get deleted in two years — as soon as you place it out, it exists. Once it’s out on the earth, it’s out on the earth. That can get copied, it will possibly get analyzed, it will possibly get critiqued. But if it’s simply sitting on a shelf, it solely exists in a theoretical method. It doesn’t exist.”
Mr. Cuscuna’s archival dives at Blue Note additionally turned up tens of 1000’s of pictures taken within the studio by Francis Wolff, one of many label’s founders. Mr. Cuscuna organized and administered the picture archive as properly.
He received Grammy Awards for producing boxed units of Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday, and for the liner notes he wrote for a Miles Davis field.
“In particular person, Cuscuna might be acerbic, magnetic, wickedly humorous, loud, and all the time fiercely dedicated to musicians and their music,” the writer Ashley Kahn wrote in a tribute on the Blue Note Records web site.
Mr. Cuscuna had a typical reply when anybody requested if he had a favourite form of music: “Atlantic singles and Blue Note albums.”
In January, DownBeat journal honored Mr. Cuscuna with its award for lifetime achievement in recording.
He is survived by his spouse, Lisa (Podgur) Cuscuna; his son, Max; his daughter, Lauren Cuscuna; and two grandchildren. Two earlier marriages resulted in divorce.
Michael Arthur Cuscuna was born on Sep. 20, 1948, in Stamford. His father, Arthur, labored at a housing undertaking; his mom, Lorraine, managed the house. His first musical love was the Black common music he heard on the radio within the late Fifties.
He began gathering 45-r.p.m. information when he was 7 and commenced drum classes a number of years later. This sparked an curiosity in drummer-bandleaders like Max Roach and Buddy Rich. “When I began to listen to the music across the drums, that’s after I obtained utterly hooked,” he instructed DownBeat.
As a teen within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Cuscuna labored at a file store and sometimes went to New York on weekends with a cousin and associates to hop between file shops — the place they might take pattern listens to way more information than they may purchase — and jazz golf equipment, typically returning to Stamford on the final practice at 3:30 a.m.
By the time he enrolled on the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he knew he needed to discovered a file label. But nothing about enterprise college agreed with him, so he switched his main to English; started doing a nightly present on the campus radio station; and located part-time work on the influential avant-garde label ESP-Disk, studying the music enterprise on the job. After graduating, he began writing for Rolling Stone and DownBeat and hosted a radio present on a progressive FM station in Philadelphia, till WABC-FM in New York employed him away.
Mr. Cuscuna got here to producing by way of the radio. When the blues guitarist Buddy Guy was a visitor on his present, Mr. Cuscuna talked about that he was occupied with producing. Mr. Guy later bumped into issues together with his label and known as Mr. Cuscuna with a proposal: Come in and produce this session for me.
He independently produced a number of extra albums, together with Bonnie Raitt’s “Give It Up,” earlier than leaving radio and turning into a workers producer for Atlantic Records. His work there swept throughout a variety of jazz — together with each the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whom he delivered to the label, and Dave Brubeck — in addition to pop and blues.
He ultimately went freelance, working with Muse, Arista, Motown, ABC and different labels.
As a listener, Blue Note had all the time been his favourite, and his ears all the time perked up when he heard artists discussing previous classes that they’d performed on. “I’d hear issues mentioned like, ‘Remember that Lee Morgan file we have been on? It by no means obtained launched,’” he recalled in an interview for the web site Jerry Jazz Musician. “I began to convey a pocket book, and I began making notes of all these conversations. Then I’d begin asking musicians.”
It took him years of prodding at Blue Note, however in 1975 he gained entry to the label’s vaults because of Mr. Lourie, Blue Note’s new head of promoting, who shared Mr. Cuscuna’s pursuits. He discovered way more high-quality unreleased materials than he’d anticipated. Between 1975 and 1981, Mr. Cuscuna helped convey out quite a few albums of beforehand unissued Blue Note recordings.
DownBeat’s critics’ ballot launched a class for producer of the 12 months in 1979, and Mr. Cuscuna received it for the primary three years straight. Yet musicians’ appreciation mattered to him extra.
“Once, strolling down Broadway, I heard my identify shouted from a cab. It was Howard Johnson asking me if I had discovered the Hank Mobley date that he instructed me about and if it was popping out,” Mr. Cuscuna remembered in an essay posted to Mosaic’s web site. “The approval and the keenness of the artists who made the music was essential to me.”
While combing by way of Blue Note’s archive, he listened to all of the label’s Thelonious Monk recordings from the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, and located half-hour of never-before-released materials.
The label heads weren’t , however he had a plan of his personal: He and Mr. Lourie would begin an unbiased label dedicated to releasing as a lot materials from the vault as they may. In 1983, they based Mosaic Records; a full set of Monk’s Blue Note recordings was its first launch.
Mosaic launched its boxed units in hand-numbered, restricted runs. Mr. Cuscuna continued to run the label, with Scott Wenzel, till his loss of life. Through the label, he was chargeable for collating, annotating and releasing units by Dexter Gordon, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and lots of others.
For Mr. Cuscuna, jazz’s inventive progress depended upon musicians having the ability to converse with its previous.
“There was an entire younger group within the early ’80s of music college students who turned skilled musicians, who didn’t have entry to this unbelievable physique of labor,” he instructed Mr. Primack. “Once you make it accessible to them, it sends out that info, and that info impacts the long run as a lot because it celebrates the previous.”
