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Producer Series: Tommy LiPuma

Twenty-eight tracks from a producer whose taste was so consistent that you can identify his records without knowing his name. Tommy LiPuma made beautiful things for fifty years.

The last of the great record men

Tommy LiPuma was born in Cleveland in 1936 to Sicilian immigrant parents, worked as a barber, and talked his way into the record business. Over the following half-century he produced more than thirty gold and platinum albums and won multiple Grammys, working across jazz, soul, Brazilian music and adult pop with a consistency that is genuinely rare.

His approach was old-fashioned in the best sense: pick great musicians, choose great songs, get out of the way. LiPuma records are warm, uncluttered and beautifully engineered, and they almost never sound like the year they were made. He also co-founded Blue Thumb Records and later ran GRP and the Verve Music Group.

What to listen for

George Benson's "Breezin'" is the landmark. The 1976 album was the first jazz record to be certified platinum, and it effectively created the commercial category that later got called smooth jazz. "Love Ballad" and "Here, There and Everywhere" come from the same partnership.

The Michael Franks tracks — "The Lady Wants to Know," "Blue Pacific," "One Bad Habit" — are the connoisseur's picks: wry, jazz-literate songwriting that has quietly influenced a great deal of modern indie-soul.

Diana Krall's "The Look Of Love" was the LiPuma production that made her a global star. Natalie Cole's "I Wish You Love" comes from the Unforgettable era, and Al Jarreau's "Your Song" shows what he could do with a genuinely eccentric vocalist.

And then Miles Davis's "Tutu." LiPuma produced Miles's late-period Warner Bros. work — a controversial chapter, largely built by Marcus Miller in the studio, and one of the most divisive things in the Davis catalogue. It is on this list for good reason: it shows a producer willing to take a very large risk.

João Gilberto's "'S Wonderful" is the Brazilian thread, and the most purely lovely thing here.

Go deeper

Breezin' (1976) and Diana Krall's When I Look in Your Eyes are the two essential LiPuma productions.

Michael Franks' The Art of Tea is the cult record and worth the trip — the backing band includes Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and Larry Carlton.

For his peers in the producer-as-curator tradition: Creed Taylor at CTI, Rudy Van Gelder as the engineer who defined the jazz sound, and Arif Mardin at Atlantic. Four men who shaped how a great deal of the twentieth century sounds.

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