The American jazz record producer Creed Taylor, who has died aged 93, achieved a widely envied balance between artistic quality and commercial success. His award-winning artists included the saxophonist Stan Getz, the guitarists Wes Montgomery and George Benson, whose jazz instincts he applied to songs by the Beatles, and Esther Phillips, whose disco-slanted version of What a Difference a Day Makes was one of Taylor’s last hits.
Taylor’s discovery of Brazilian music in the early 1960s, and subsequent introduction to Getz of the sound of bossa nova, led to the enormously popular albums Jazz Samba (1962) and Getz/Gilberto (1964), from which came the singles Desafinado and The Girl from Ipanema.
