Music moguls have rarely been as monumentally influential as Jerry Moss was. Last week’s loss of the M half of A&M Records — Herb Alpert, the A, is still kicking at 88, the same age his partner reached — rises to a level of recognition reserved for legendary scene-shapers such as Mo Ostin at Warner/Reprise or Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. Like those fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Moss was a crucial titan with a decades-deep effect on careers and stylistic shifts.
He was there at the dawn of a new sophisticated soft-pop era, launching the label with Alpert’s Tijuana Brass LPs alongside showcases of Burt Bacharach’s genius and Sergio Mendes’s popular platters, then rapidly expanding via the Carpenters and Captain & Tennille and Paul Williams, all skyrocketing commercially as a calmer alternative to heavier vibes.
Not that A&M shied away from rock: Joe Cocker, Free, Procol Harum, Humble Pie as well as Peter Frampton solo, Nazareth, Supertramp, Styx, Fairport Convention, the Move and plenty more all found a happy home at Charlie Chaplin’s studio near La Brea and Sunset, where A&M set up shop from the mid-‘60s until 2000, when the Muppets moved in.
Moss also picked up much of the scattered fallout from punk’s pipebombs, helping bring a clutch of key new wave acts to the masses (the Police chief of all) while financially forging an entire division (I.R.S.) devoted to more adventurous sounds.
Someone this important merits a lengthy salute.
Memo to @vinyl_is_life_: I plan to spend the next however-many installments of #VinylTwosDays recapping some of Moss’s A&M highlights. Call it #TuesdaysWithJerry.
And I’m starting with what he and Alpert did for Creed Taylor’s CTI Records, renowned jazz purveyor, initially a subsidiary of A&M. But this preamble has eaten up my character count, so I’ll share details of these specific records from two six-string masters in the comments.
CTI was under the A&M umbrella relatively briefly, issuing nearly three dozen gems between Sept. ‘67 and the dawn of ‘70, when it became fully independent. This pairing of Beatles-inspired bookends sums up that period with panache.
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At top is an original (and weathered) copy of ‘A Day in the Life,’ the first CTI release, a smash success that topped Billboard’s jazz chart, nearly did the same on the R&B rundown, and almost cracked the Top 10 overall. Fans of Wes Montgomery know this isn’t the most jaw-dropping display of the guitarist’s virtuosity; it’s groovy and mellow and orchestrated like Ramsey Lewis’s records of the time. But it isn’t forgettable background kitsch, either. Even the softest flourishes are worthy of focused attention.
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Granted, I tend to skip his take on ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ — too sickly sweet for me, and I’m not much of a fan of the song to begin with. But his renditions of the title track and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ are memorably subdued jams, as is his hit version of the Association’s ‘Windy,’ while a bossa nova handling of ‘Watch What Happens’ (from Jacques Demy’s movie-musical marvel ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’) is on par with masters like João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
As with Montgomery’s fast-selling hi-fi mainstay, George Benson’s ‘The Other Side of Abbey Road’ (seen here in a 2019 180g reissue) gains precision and tempered passion from the same remarkable roster of core players: Herbie Hancock on keys, Ron Carter on bass, Ray Barretto on percussion. Benson’s more remarkable album, however, one of the final CTI releases under A&M’s auspices, goes further on both the talent front and its commitment to Beatles reinterpretation.
Not only does he gently radicalize the entirety of ‘Abbey Road’ — albeit in rearranged sequence and often in extended pairings or medleys of multiple pieces that scale epic Isaac Hayes-ish heights — Benson also enlisted top-flight soloists to match his own subtly soaring fretwork, most notably Hubert Laws on flute and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. The latter scores one of the LP’s highlights, trading licks with Benson on a funky reworking of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy).’ A similar treatment applied to ‘Come Together’ is just as invigoratingly cool.
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Most curious, though, is why it took seven years for Benson to sing again on record, despite proving himself a compelling vocalist more than once here. Hereafter he would let his guitar do all the talking for him until his big ‘Breezin’’ breakthrough from ‘76, when that set’s sole sung song, a cover of Leon Russell’s ‘This Masquerade,’ turned him into an overnight pop sensation.