Legendary jazz producer Orrin Keepnews discovered the brilliance of artists like Thelonious Monk.

Orrin Keepnews has never played a note of music, but the world would sound entirely different without him. A master of producing jazz in either studios or nightclubs, Keepnews has played a central role in shaping the music’s advanced mainstream for more than half a century.

As jazz’s most important living producer, he has overseen classic sessions by many of the music’s most creative figures, including pianists Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, guitarist Wes Montgomery and saxophonists Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson and Joe Henderson, just to name a few. He’s won four Grammys and founded three record labels: Landmark, Milestone and most importantly Riverside, which from 1953 to 1964 was surpassed only by Blue Note as the era’s definitive independent outlet for modern jazz.

At the age of 84, Keepnews isn’t producing many new sessions, but he’s getting a fresh opportunity to burnish his legacy with the Keepnews Collection, a reissue series overseen by Concord Records, which absorbed Riverside, Milestone and the catalogs of several other significant indie jazz labels when it took over Berkeley-based Fantasy Records in 2004. In a recent conversation in the El Cerrito home that he shares with his wife Martha, Keepnews talked about the mysterious process through which an inherently improvisational art form is captured for posterity.

“One of the important things about jazz artists is the infinite variety,” Keepnews says. “If they’re very different people, you’ve got to treat them that way. You mustn’t have a formula and expect they’re going to adhere to it. On the other hand, you can’t just be a dishrag. You’ve got to set rules when necessary.

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“You’ve got to realize that you’re a catalytic agent. The goal is to allow these serious creative artists to express themselves most effectively. You’re in there to make it happen. The artist should not have to worry about any of the other shit going down, least of all you. It’s a matter of taking all of the tension out of it, or leaving in the good, positive, creative tension, and taking away anything that’s going to detract from the value of the performance. I haven’t the faintest idea of why that’s a difficult lesson, but when I look around me, I see an amazing absence of this.”

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As Keepnews tells it, he was an unlikely person to turn into one of the preeminent producers of modern jazz’s golden age. He grew up with “not a drop of music” in a middle-class Jewish household in upper Manhattan. His mother was a public school teacher and his father worked for the Department of Welfare, civil service jobs that shielded the family from the brunt of the Great Depression. After graduating from Columbia University and serving in the Army during World War II flying bomber missions in the Pacific theater, he returned to New York City and took a job as a junior editor in a publishing firm. When his college buddy Bill Grauer took over The Record Changer in 1948, a publication that specialized in jazz, Keepnews came on board as editor, following his passion for 1920s jazz.

Though at first unimpressed with bebop, the modern jazz movement that had come to the fore during the war years, he had the musical insight to champion an obscure pianist/composer named Thelonious Monk. Introduced to the pianist by Blue Note producer Alfred Lion in 1948, Keepnews wrote an incisive article about Monk and his first recordings as a leader. In comparing the pianist to Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, he was among the first nonmusicians to foresee the central role Monk would play in postwar jazz.

It was another Record Changer piece that transformed him from a journalist covering the music into an active participant in the music business. His exposé detailing how RCA Victor was allowing a label aptly named Jolly Roger to press bootleg copies of out-of-print 1920s and ’30s jazz recordings owned by rival labels led to the creation of Riverside Records in 1952, which he and Grauer founded as a vehicle for reissuing classic recordings by early jazz stars like Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. By 1954, they were ready to start producing new music, signing pianist and budding composer Randy Weston as their first artist. But Riverside really made its mark when it signed Monk, who had been languishing unhappily at Prestige, a rival indie, after his epochal stint at Blue Note.

“We were more than a little unhappy with our traditionalist reputation,” Keepnews says. “We said to ourselves, if we can come up with Monk it’s going to mean either we’re crazy or we’re serious about wanting to be on the contemporary scene, or maybe both. When we set up a meeting, Monk informed me that the The Record Changer piece I had written was the first article about him that had ever appeared in a national magazine.”

Indeed, in those years most jazz critics regarded Monk as an interesting composer with deficient keyboard technique. He had been pegged as the “High Priest of Bop” and was widely dismissed as a willfully eccentric figure. The situation was exacerbated when a drug bust cost him his all-important Manhattan cabaret card, which meant he couldn’t get multi-night gigs in clubs. In a brilliant stroke of marketing, Keepnews successfully orchestrated Monk’s reintroduction to the public with Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (one of the albums selected by the producer for reissue as part of the Keepnews Collection series). Along with the standards trio album The Unique Thelonious Monk, the records enabled many listeners put off by Monk’s opaque public demeanor or baffled by his compositions to start hearing his thinking applied to familiar melodies. The sessions went relatively smoothly, though Keepnews recalls that Monk, who died in 1982 at the age of 64, took his producer’s measure in the studio in his typically oblique way.

“He had asked for a certain amount of sheet music, and when we got to the record date he pulled out a piece of music and put it on the piano and started to act as if he was playing it for the first time,” Keepnews says. “Somehow or other, I was alert or suspicious enough that I didn’t believe him. I just got the feeling I was being given a test, that I was being put on to see how I would react to this wild man behaving in this way. And I let it alone. I didn’t react to it. And after he picked his way through it a couple of times, all of a sudden he did know it.”

By the time Monk left Riverside for major label digs at Columbia in 1961 he was recognized as a giant of 20th-century music, a pervasively influential pianist and inimitable composer. Keepnews credits Monk with providing an invaluable education in how to relate to artists in the studio, an education that has clearly served the producer well.

“I learned not just how to deal with a flaky genius, although that’s a pretty valuable thing, too, but in a very practical sense how to conduct myself in the studio, what the relationship between the artist and the producer should be,” Keepnews says. “With musicians Monk was the same way. Sonny Rollins makes the point that a guru is someone who makes it possible for you to bring out the best in yourself. According to Sonny he did it for him, and Monk did it for me.”

Like many artists associated with Riverside, Monk did much of his finest work for the label. Keepnews was also instrumental in convincing a reluctant, largely unknown pianist named Bill Evans to make his first recording as a leader in 1956. By the time he returned to the studio in 1958 he was a rising star with the Miles Davis Sextet, and he started recording a string of hugely influential albums that culminated with Sunday at the Village Vanguard, a session that became a template for musical interplay among piano trios.

By listening to the advice of his musicians, Keepnews was often able to sign brilliant players who had been overlooked by other labels. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham tipped him to tenor saxophonist, arranger and composer Jimmy Heath. The trumpeter Clark Terry introduced him to the Adderley Brothers, who became jazz stars with the release of the blazing 1959 Riverside album recorded at North Beach’s Jazz Workshop, The Cannonball Adderley Quintet Live in San Francisco (another Keepnews Collection selection). And it was Cannonball who turned Keepnews on to a little-known guitarist living in Indianapolis.

“Cannonball came busting into my office and said, ‘I heard this incredible guitar player Wes Montgomery and we’ve got to get him on the label,’” Keepnews recalls. “My principal artist referred to the label as ‘we!’ That’s what it’s all about. I’ve devoted my life to this thing and I must have done something right.”

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Perhaps that attitude is why musicians who have recorded with Keepnews are less interested in discussing his legacy as one of jazz’s greatest producers than in talking about the man himself. Jimmy Heath had been off the scene for several years when Keepnews signed him to Riverside in 1959. He was also being courted by Blue Note, the other great indie jazz label of the 1950s and early ’60s, but Heath decided to go with Keepnews because he offered Heath opportunities to work as an arranger.

“The thing that strikes me as unique about Orrin is that he allowed me to choose my material and instrumentation, in other words artistic freedom,” Heath says. “He was also a good friend of my whole family, my mom and pop. My wife Mona was close with his wife, Lucy. It was a family affair.”

Sonny Rollins was the most influential tenor saxophonist in jazz when he started recording for Riverside as a freelance artist. One project was his politically charged 1958 album The Freedom Suite, which included liner notes by Rollins that made it clear he was protesting American society’s endemic racism. “At the time it was a somewhat controversial record,” Rollins says. “It was sort of a black consciousness record made before the Civil Rights Movement took off, and I’m not sure that a lot of other producers would have allowed that record to be made with the sentiments that I expressed. I thought Orrin had to be a standup guy to do that, and that’s some extra added respect I’ve had for him all these years.”

Rollins later signed with Keepnews’ second label, and he recorded for Milestone under that contract until launching his own Doxy label last year. Keepnews and his wife Lucy, who passed away in 1989, moved to San Francisco in 1972, when Fantasy bought Milestone and hired him to recruit artists as head of jazz A&R. Unfortunately the 30 or so albums Keepnews produced for his Landmark label in the late 1980s, including excellent releases by Kronos Quartet, Bobby Hutcherson and Mulgrew Miller, have been out of print for years, though they were purchased by the Savoy label several years ago. While Landmark didn’t prosper commercially, like Keepnews’ previous labels it was a creative goldmine, showcasing jazz’s finest artists in sympathetic settings. At a time when he’s taking stock of a career marked by dozens of essential cultural documents, Keepnews is loath to blow his own horn loudly.

“The most important thing is you’re not engaged in some kind of struggle, and you don’t win by coming out on top,” Keepnews says. “It’s awful easy to lose sight of that. In some cases I started working with people who if I had tried to impose my will on them, they would have given me a very hard time for it. On the other hand, I’m damn glad that Bill Evans got to start off with me, because he could have been crushed so easily (and eventually of course he was crushed by the world and himself). In most cases, I’m not walking around claiming something or somebody happened because of what I did. There are cases however where I’m not going to be bashful about the fact that what I did and the way I did it certainly contributed to what happened. Whether it’s the only way it could have happened, or I made it easier or even harder, I don’t know. But I do know that I did it, and in a certain number of cases it worked.”

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Andrew Gilbert is The Monthly’s music critic.

1) Thelonious Monk, Monk’s Music, 1957—This septet session captures the sly wit and probing intelligence of Monk’s piano, while tenor sax titans Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane stretch out on Monk’s classic “Well, You Needn’t,” and Hawk offers a tender rendition of Monk’s lovely ballad “Ruby, My Dear.”

2) Bill Evans, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, 1961—With his exquisite bell-like touch and sophisticated harmonic sensibility, Evans was already one of jazz’s most influential pianists when his trio with Scott LaFaro (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) documented their astounding interplay, pioneering an approach that musicians are still exploring today.

3) Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, 1961—There’s no hyperbole in the title of this album, which features Montgomery’s dazzling thumb work as he introduces his soon-to-be standards “Four on Six” and “West Coast Blues” accompanied by a superlative rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan (piano), Percy Heath (bass) and Tootie Heath (drums).

4) Cannonball Adderley, The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York, 1962—Arguably the definitive hard-bop band, Adderley’s group with brother Nat (cornet), Yusef Lateef (tenor sax, flute and oboe), Joe Zawinul (piano), Sam Jones (bass) and Louis Hayes (drums) was utterly hip, soulful and ebullient, perfect-ly reflecting its leader’s charismatic personality.

5) Sonny Rollins, The Freedom Suite, 1958—Backed by bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Max Roach, Rollins introduced his title composition, an extended theme and variation masterpiece that put modern jazz squarely in the camp of the incipient Civil Rights Movement.

6) Joe Henderson, The Kicker, 1967—Henderson’s first album for Keepnews’ Milestone label was also one of his best, an adventurous sextet session pairing his tremendously melodic tenor with trombonist Grachan Moncur III, pianist Kenny Barron and trumpeter Mike Lawrence.

7) Jimmy Heath, Really Big, 1960—A consistently thrilling little big band session featuring Heath’s scintillating arrangements, commanding tenor and an all-star cast, including his brothers Percy (bass) and Tootie (drums), Cannonball Adderley (alto sax) and Clark Terry (flugelhorn).

8) Benny Golson, The Modern Touch, 1957—This album helped establish Golson as one of jazz’s great composers and arrangers, though of course it helped that he was joined by world-class improvisers like J.J. Johnson (trombone), Kenny Dorham (trumpet) and Wynton Kelly (piano).

9) Clark Terry, In Orbit, 1958—A wonderfully funky, relaxed quartet session showcasing Terry’s deliciously warm flugelhorn and an extremely rare appearance by Thelonious Monk as a sideman.

10) Milt Jackson, Invitation, 1962—When Jackson stepped out of the rarefied confines of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the great vibraphonist was usually ready to blow, but this marvelous sextet/septet session balances savory solos with consistently outstanding charts by Jimmy Heath and Kenny Dorham, who are also on hand as featured soloists.

—Andrew Gilbert