It’s that time of year again, Halloween. Enjoy a track from the 1958 album “Shock” by the Creed Taylor Orchestra.
SHOCK
The Creed Taylor Orchestra
New York City: c. 1958
Kenyon Hopkins (arr, cond).
ABC Paramount ABC/ABCS-259 (issued November 1958)
Track-1 from Side-B, “Haunted House” 3:01
Released in November 1958, while “Shock” is billed as by The Creed Taylor Orchestra, it is in fact The Kenyon Hopkins Orchestra. While Hopkins was on an exclusive artist contract to Capitol Records, Hopkins suggested releasing the albums under the name of “The Creed Taylor Orchestra.” Around this time, Taylor and Hopkins worked together on many albums from the specialty recordings period of Creed’s career, primarily between 1958 and through 1963, for ABC-Paramount.
The Taylor-Hopkins collaboration would move to Verve in 1962, and produced the “Sound Tour Series” which I’ll cover soon in a post. All the albums were recorded and produced just after Creed had started to produce some solid jazz albums with Billy Taylor Trio, and the first ever album Creed produced with Quincy Jones as a band leader, Chris Connor and more.
It’s fair to consider “The Empire City Six Salute The Colleges” as the first of the specialty recordings, while it’s listed as dixieland jazz, even in late 1957, it was not mainstream.
Happy Halloween, more on specialty recordings soon.
More Information/References
The Creed Taylor Orchestra – Tracks from the Hopkins era [via music.youtube(free)]
The Creed Taylor discography [via discogs artist page]
Kenyon Hopkins [via wikipedia.com]