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Editor's Note: In honor of Bay Area jazz producer Orrin Keepnews being honored as a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, we're sharing this early profile from our Archives...

"I accept the fact that, in all probability, sooner or later I will split. And I haven't really thought about [an epitaph]. But I hope it would have to do with recognizing that I did understand the music, and I did do everything I possibly could, by fair means or foul, to advance the cause of the music and the people who play it."

— Orrin Keepnews

Orrin Keepnews — like the music he's loved, nurtured, cultivated, produced and ultimately brought to the ears of jazz fans around the world for more than 50 years — has a long and celebrated history that simply can't be told in one sitting. In fact, it could — and undoubtedly will — take a lifetime.

Although the feisty, often cantankerous record producer professes a strong disdain for interviews in general, and in particular the well-worn stories recounting his work with jazz legends like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins, he's a man who clearly relishes the telling of the tale ("I do enjoy the sound of my own voice," he slyly admits). Interviews — even ones disguised as conversations — can go on for hours and hours.

Such contradictions are a integral part of the jazz producer's personality. Keepnews is one of the most highly opinionated people you'll ever meet, and yet he's remarkably open-minded. He's fiercely independent, and yet remains a generous collaborator in the studio. Raised on the music of the swing era, he can wrap his ears around bebop, post-bop, and beyond. He never learned to play a musical instrument, yet he speaks the language, and understands intuitively how to elicit the best performance from a musician. In conversation, like in the studio, he's infinitely patient, but he's also, without a doubt, someone who isn't likely to suffer fools lightly.

Throughout his career as a producer and record label owner, and his tireless efforts as a jazz historian and writer, the sum of his contributions to jazz have entertained, inspired, informed and educated four generations of jazz lovers and musicians alike. He was honored on both coasts by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences with a Governors Award for Outstanding Achievement, and lauded in a tribute concert at the San Francisco Jazz Festival that featured performances by veteran pianist Randy Weston and the young pianist Mulgrew Miller.

A Life in the Midst of Jazz

The accolades and awards barely scratch the surface of Keepnews' storied career. As a producer, he's worked with a phenomenal range of musicians, from jazz giants such as Monk, Evans, Cannonball Adderley, and Wes Montgomery in the 1950s and 60's to some of today's younger jazz talents. As a record label owner — first with Riverside (along with partner Bill Grauer), and later with the Milestone and Landmark labels (now both under the umbrella of Fantasy Records in Berkeley), his personal and professional history is intertwined with the history of the music itself.

"I've spent most of my life in the middle of jazz," muses Keepnews during a Sunday afternoon chat in the living room of his modest flat in San Francisco's Richmond District [he originally moved to San Francisco in 1972, and has moved to El Cerrito since this profile was first published]. "I've been listening to jazz all my life, and I've been professionally involved in the music for more than 40 years.

"Not just in the music," he adds, "but in the community as well."

Asked to define jazz, Keepnews says that "I don't think I have a definition, which is deliberate on my part. Defining jazz is restrictive, unnecessarily so, and it's a tricky thing. But jazz is anything that Duke Ellington has ever played, or Thelonious Monk, or Dizzy Gillespie, or Fats Waller. I could even get controversial and say that jazz is anything that Miles Davis has ever played.

"But I think it's possible to define jazz in terms of reality," he notes. "It is what it is. It's the way Thelonious Monk phrases something. It's the kind of creativity you'll find expressed by Eric Dolphy. It's James P. Johnson playing the piano.

"I'm far less interested in what jazz isn't, than I am in what it is," says Keepnews. "I don't see any value in excluding things." He does, however, feel comfortable in excluding what he calls "wallpaper music" or "elevator music."

"Of course," he quickly adds, "Kenny G is not jazz."

Producing the Unpredictable

Keepnews came to jazz as a fan, and as a writer. Graduating from Columbia University with a degree in English and working for a small New York magazine for record collectors, The Record Changer, the aspiring jazz aficionado wrote what would become the first national profile of the iconoclastic, innovative pianist, Thelonious Monk, then little-known outside of the inner sanctum of East Coast musicians, in 1952.

The 1950's were a golden age of independent jazz labels — Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside in the East, and Contemporary and Pacific Jazz in California — started by fans as labors of love rather than money-making machines. Keepnews and Grauer launched the Riverside imprint as a means of reissuing out-of-print jazz sides from the previous decades, and gradually added more contemporary artists to their growing roster. His first recording session as a producer was with the often-unpredictable Monk.

"I've always felt that one of my strengths [as a producer] is that I wasn't a musician," says Keepnews. "There are three different professions at work in the studio: the producer, the engineer, and the musician. And each one doesn't have to understand exactly how the others do what they do. I think that a very important part of making jazz records is a mutual respect on the part of the different people involved for each other's professionalism."

"I understand why the artist's name is in much larger type than the producer's, and I don't have a problem with that. We have to create something together. My job is to produce the best possible record by the artist I'm working with, and anything I have to do to achieve that goal is what I must do."

Keepnews' high standards, impeccable taste, and love of jazz carried him through some lean years after the Riverside label folded in the early 1960's, in part from the onset of rock and roll, and in part from what he obliquely calls his partner's "creative bookkeeping." In 1972, he inaugurated the Milestone label, and set about recording seminal works by Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, and saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins.

A lifelong New Yorker, he moved west to the laid-back ambiance of California, and was almost immediately sidelined by a heart attack. Returning to work with a revitalized sense of purpose and a renewed sense of determination, he sold Milestone to the Berkeley-based Fantasy Records (best known for its million-selling Creedence Clearwater Revival records), which had also picked up the Riverside catalog. Keepnews worked for Fantasy as an A&R man for a spell, but found he was "never cut out to be somebody else's employee."

Instead, he began yet another label, Landmark, and acted as a consultant and resident Monk expert for Columbia. When the compact disc revolution demanded instant catalogs of titles, Keepnews found himself in demand as a reissue producer.

Full Circle...and the Future

Today, Keepnews has come full circle. His earliest days with the Riverside label focused on reissuing classic jazz from the 1920's, 30's and 40's, and now he's considered the "reissue king" for his exhaustive and definitive compilation projects, from the 4-CD "Riverside Record Story" and the 3-CD retrospective of performances culled from 40 years of performances at the Monterey Jazz Festival, both released in the fall of 1997.

And he's still intrigued by what's yet to come, and has remained active as a producer, guiding a new generation of musicians through the recording studio. When he's asked about where he thinks jazz is headed in the future, he says with characteristic dry wit, "I don't know where it's going, and if I did, wouldn't that take most of the fun out of it?"

Keepnews likes to cite three reasons why he's still active as a producer. "First, I haven't got anything better to do," he says. "Second, I love the music. And third, having been involved in jazz all my life, I still need the money."