George Avakian Received The Django d'Or Award

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Thursday, Nov. 30th, legendary record producer George Avakian received The Django D'or Award - the most prestigious jazz honor in Europe - at the Pavillon Baltard, 12 Avenue Victor Hugo Paris, France. Apart from the usual reasons that everyone repeats (produced first jazz album, first annotated reissue album program, etc. etc.) they have cited what I consider an even bigger contribution to the music business, which was the creation in the 1950s at Columbia of the widest-ranging and most successful popular album catalog the industry had ever seen. It soon resulted in the displacement by 12-inch pop LPs of the three-minute single as the main source of income for record labels worldwide, while also elevating jazz through treating it as an integral part of a pop album catalog rather than a specialty. That's when people started calling me the Father of the LP, and later. Grandfather of the CD.

Europeans were particularly aware of this in the mid-fifties, when the brand new Philips label, which had no artists to begin with except the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, become a major label overnight through the impact of Frank Sinatra and Doris Day as the two most popular singing film stars of the time as well as a select all-star jazz roster. As Director of the International Department, I was initially considered out of my mind to drop EMI, the biggest company in the world, in favor of a start-up Dutch label - but the conservative management at EMI hated LP, and the energetic, well- financed young Philips team jumped at the chance to promote neglected artists who were already known in Europe (Armstrong, Ellington), or were just beginning to tour the continent (Miles, Brubeck, Garner, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett).

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