Pete Turner Interview with Richard Warner, Sept. 2002
Pete Turner’s photography helped define A&M Records’ first foray into jazz music. Turner had already established a relationship with jazz producer Creed Taylor, when Taylor signed a distribution deal with A&M in 1967. The albums that resulted were a successful combination of jazz music from masters like Quincy Jones, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Wes Montgomery and George Benson; plus expert engineering by Rudy Van Gelder; and state of the art packaging designed by Sam Antupit (and the entire process supervised by Taylor).
All of the cover photos in the CTI series — many of them enduring classics — were photographed by Turner during his travels around the world. What follows is a description of those cover shots and an overview of how Turner came to be involved with Creed Taylor.
— Richard Warner, 9/02
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Pete Turner
I graduated from the Rochester School of Technology in 1956 and immediately got drafted. During 1957 and the first part of 1958, I was stationed with the Long Island Signal Corps photographic team in Long Island City. We were doing training all the time, but it meant I could go into New York City when I wanted to and take pictures and have some fun…hanging out in Central Park.
During this period, I’d frequently go into record stores because I liked the pictures I saw on some of the album jackets. And there was one name that kept coming up on the jackets I liked: Creed Taylor. So I called him. I still remember it…I set up an appointment with him at the ABC-Paramount building. He was producer for Verve or Impulse.
Right away, he and I hit it off good. One thing he liked about me was that I brought along samples of things I’d shot. I’d had access to this wonderful color lab in the Army.
Creed said, “we’re doing album called ‘Sound of New York’…What can you come up with?” So I went off and started shooting pictures of traffic lights in three colors…multi color things. Then he started having me shoot musicians like Theodore Bikel…crazy things, which really weren’t for me. He asked me if I knew of [orchestra leader] Oliver Nelson, and I told him, no, I didn’t know him. But I did a portrait photograph. And then he had me shoot John Coltrane. Basically I shot those with deep filters; deep blue light, so it came through as moody.
Creed and I had an ongoing relationship when the A&M series came along, which was before Creed formed his own company. I remember him saying, “I have this project with Herb Alpert. We’re going to become the jazz arm of A&M Records, and I want you to shoot all the covers.” He suggested hiring an art director, so I went to Sam Antupit. I met Sam at Esquire; he’d laid out a lot of my work. Sam hit it off with Creed, but he didn’t have much to do with the visuals because Creed was his own man in that department.
Creed would say “Pete, I’m doing a Jobim album and I’m thinking of calling it ‘Wave’ … put together some slides for me to look at.” So I’d bring in 20 or 30 slides and in with those, there would be one that I preferred.
Now, Creed didn’t take things literally. Most people — if they were planning an album called “Wave” would want to show a giant wave…Not Creed. And that’s one of the things that makes him special. He looked at the giraffe, which was my choice for the cover photo, and got excited.
ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM: WAVE
The Wave cover was shot in Kenya in 1964, and it became very successful — it’s one of my signature photographs. It went on to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — when you went up the stairs it was right there, practically as the centerpiece — in a show they called “Photography and the Fine Arts.”
The original version of the “Wave” album was red and magenta. But when they went to reprint the album years later, somebody switched the plates. They used the wrong plates with the wrong ink, so instead of red and magenta, it came out green and blue. I was horrified and so was Creed.
The giraffe was an excellent example of using a good sophisticated visual to say what Creed felt would be the right way to market the music.
WES MONTGOMERY: A DAY IN THE LIFE
Before I was married, I was with this woman who I thought a lot about and had mixed feelings for. The next morning after we’d been together, I was looking at this ashtray…and it looked like how things were going in that department. You could say it was “a day in my life.”
I try to tell people: you can photograph things that are ugly, or anyway not particularly attractive, but that have unique meaning. And that’s a beautiful thing about Creed: he’s a very sensitive human being. Everybody has war stories about Creed, but the guy is one of the true creative producers around. I was right to see him as the kind of creative person I would work with.
HERBIE MANN: GLORY OF LOVE
This image is a statue in Sweden. I was over there doing photography for Holiday Magazine, which is no longer in existence. It was sort of Like Travel and Leisure…and the editor of Holiday had assigned me to shoot an issue about Scandanavia. One of the subjects I came across was a statue; it looked like a postcard against the sky. In shooting it, I wanted to get some sort of a dramatic feeling, so I used a red filter. It became part of the body of my work, and when this album title “Glory of Love” came up, I thought this shot would be good choice. But it’s not a favorite photo of mine.
TAMBA 4: WE AND THE SEA
The sailboat is not really a favorite image of mine because, in this case, it got literal: “sea” and “sailboat.” I don’t think it worked as well as the Wave cover. In fact, as we went through the progression of the CTI covers, we kept referring back to Wave. “Stay away from the literal.”
This shot was taken in New York harbor from a helicopter; we coordinated with the people in the sailboat using a two-way radio. We hired the people to sail the boat.
WES MONTGOMERY: ROAD SONG
Road Song is one of my signature images of a car’s taillights and a picket fence. For this album, the image had to be flopped because we would have lost the taillights on the album cover. The dimensions of a photograph and an album cover are different, which can make it tricky to adapt a photograph for album art. This picture has been heavily published in more variations than my others. They’ve cropped it, flopped it, printed it upside down.
It was taken in Kansas City while I was doing shoot for Time-Life books. After I landed, I saw this long white picket fence by the airport. Then as I was shooting in this museum, I kept thinking about that picket fence…and went out and shot it.
WES MONTGOMERY: DOWN HERE ON THE GROUND
This is a good example of not thinking literally…which was our goal in selecting the CTI covers. You’re not looking at a picture from space, which might be what comes to mind when you hear, “Down Here on the Ground”…the subject is the reflections of buildings off the hood of a car. You’re sort of floating — there’s a kick to it. I liked this shot. It was taken in Portugal.
NAT ADDERLY: YOU BABY
Here’s another picture I really liked. It’s a posterized picture of Buddha that I had done in Thailand during that whole period when everybody was into psychedelics and LSD…Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was kind of experimenting with trendy colors. You might say this is my salute to that period.
ARTIE BUTLER: HAVE YOU MET MISS JONES
This one was shot in Rio during Carnival. It’s just someone made up and crazy. I really like that shot. It’s kind of weird.
K&JJ: ISREAL
As a picture, it’s so-so. I think it was taken on one of the Islands.
PAUL DESMOND: SUMMERTIME:
This shot was one of two of icicles taken in Norway. The other one doesn’t have the sun behind it.
SOUL FLUTES: TRUST IN ME
This shot was the result of a series on black beauty that I did for Look Magazine. Creed told me the album was by the Soul Flutes…so, of course, it got me thinking of lips blowing flutes. But instead of doing beauty shots making up a pair of lips, I thought, let’s make ‘em look primitive. Have make-up person paint them with brilliant paint. It’s a classic.
RICHARD BARBERY: SOUL MACHINE
TAMIKO JONES: I’LL DO ANYTHING FOR YOU
Sam Antupit and I collaborated on these. Creed wanted to use the two of them, but I wanted to keep going the route we’d been taking with the other covers. So I did a double exposure of them because I didn’t want the images to look like promotional photos. I had taken portrait photographs of Wes Montgomery that came across as moody, but somehow it didn’t feel right with these two to do it that way. Maybe it was because I wasn’t familiar with their music.
TAMBA 4: SAMBA BLIM
These are Umbrella trees taken in Italy near the old Fiumicino Airport in 1962. The album was going to have the word “Samba” in the title, and this picture looked like a samba to me. Creed lit up when he saw it; it was an easy sell.
I remember it was difficult photographing the four members of the Tamba 4 group…trying to frame them for the portrait on the back cover. The first time we did it with backlighting, and the second time they came in, it was like, “oh, jeez…how are we going to do it this time?”
GEORGE BENSON: SHARE OF THINGS TO COME
I took this shot in 1969 on Fire Island…the shapes and the clouds. We had the shapes made for a Univac ad…which was a very complex ad. After the session, we had shapes left over and I wanted to shoot them. Geometry is fun for any photographer.
George Benson, by the way, was wonderful to work with.
J&K: BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
I don’t carry a camera around all the time, but in this case, I was in a cab in Midtown Manhattan, stuck in traffic in the rain. Sometimes you surprise yourself.
WALTER WANDERLY: WHEN IT WAS DONE
This picture of the couple strolling on the beach was taken in Denmark in 1966.
NAT ADDERLY: CALLING OUT LOUD
I always wanted to shoot firecrackers. I got this shot in Hong Kong; the firecrackers were brilliant red, and Sam got a great idea of printing the image on silver foil.
MILTON NASCIMENTO: COURAGE:
This was a portrait shot of Milton Nascimento done with sculpting with light. Milton has an incredible face — he is a wonderful subject to photograph. In fact, this is one of my favorite pictures. A lot of people don’t know the guy, but he is well respected.
WALTER WANDERLY: MOONDREAMS
This shoot was done in Libya. Standard Oil hired me to shoot their refineries, and this picture is of burn-off in the middle of the Sahara desert. It’s actually petroleum gas. Back then, they didn’t liquefy it, they just blew it out of the ground.
I got lost one day goofing around taking pictures of dunes. I didn’t intend to go out very far and figured I’d just follow my tracks back. This windstorm came up and covered my tracks. I had no food or water, but eventually I could see this glow and I knew that’s where people were.
QUINCY JONES: WALKING IN SPACE
Quincy was a sweetheart who I knew from his earlier albums on Impulse. We still keep in touch. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing an album cover book. It could be good if I could add more pictures instead of just the 100 that have been made into albums.
ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM: TIDE
I was shooting in Brazil — and if you’ve ever been to Rio, you know…you can’t help but see the statue at Corcovado. When I shot this, it was moody, at dusk. You’ll never get me up at dawn!
(c)2002 Richard Warner
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