George Butler Jr.

1931-2008

Record-company executive, music producer

George Butler Jr. was one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the music business during the mid-1980s. A producer and record-company executive, he is credited with discovering both trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Harry Connick Jr. Among his other notable achievements was luring jazz legend Miles Davis out of a self-imposed retirement. In Jet Marsalis noted that "Butler worked very hard to help create quality music and strongly believed in music education.… He had eclectic tastes and embraced a philosophy that accommodated all different types of people and styles of music."

George Tucker Butler Jr. was born on September 2, 1931, and grew up in the Beatties Ford Road area of Charlotte, North Carolina. His musical education began with piano lessons at a young age, but he was known to skip an appointment at the teacher's house to join a baseball game in progress, according to his sister, Jacqueline Butler Hairston, in the Charlotte Observer. "He'd shout back, ‘Don't you dare tell Mama and Daddy!’" she recalled. "He was my older brother, so I never did." At West Charlotte High School Butler was star of the basketball team, and he continued to play the sport when he entered Howard University in 1949 as a piano major. In the mid 1950s he moved to New York City, where he earned a master's degree in music education at Columbia University.

Signed Marsalis, Connick Jr. at Columbia

In 1972 the chief of United Artist Records hired Butler to head Blue Note Records, the jazz label, which United Artists had acquired in a merger. "At a time when jazz was rapidly losing its audience," Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, Butler "strove to fight the trend by arranging for many jazz-pop crossover projects, including albums by Earl Klugh, Donald Byrd, Ronnie Laws and Bobbi Humphrey." Butler served as producer for several Blue Note releases, among them Byrd's Ethiopian Nights in 1971 and Laws's Pressure Sensitive in 1975.

In 1978 Butler was lured away from Blue Note by CBS Records, which offered him a slot as an artists and repertoire (A&R) executive with Columbia Records, the oldest label in the history of recorded music. His first notable signing was Wynton Marsalis, an eighteen-year-old from New Orleans, who would become one of the most honored jazz artists of his generation. Butler discovered Marsalis playing trumpet in a bar. He subsequently signed Marsalis's brother, Branford, a saxophonist, as well. Their father, Ellis, was a respected New Orleans musician and teacher, whose students included Harry Connick Jr., a piano prodigy who performed on his first jazz recordings at age ten. Butler signed the twelve-year-old Connick in 1979. The three musicians became part of a movement dubbed the Young Lions of jazz, described by Ratliff as "young musicians playing hard bop or traditional styles with polished technique."

Butler's most notable achievement as a record-label executive, however, was urging jazz trumpeter Miles Davis to come out of retirement and record again. Davis was at the forefront of several new strains of jazz starting just after World War II. By the mid-1970s, however, his groundbreaking foray into funk had been blighted by failing health and a heroin habit. He retreated entirely from performing and recording. According to most reports, Davis rarely left his New York City town house during those years except to buy drugs on the street. In an interview with George Cole for the book The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980-1991, Butler said he was surprised to learn that Davis was still signed to Columbia Records. "I decided to call him and introduce myself and just let him know that he had a friend," Butler told Cole. "I knew that a number of people from Columbia had tried getting Miles to record again and failed. I thought I would visit him and talk about three things that interested him most—cars, boxing, and clothes. I didn't have a great deal of knowledge about these subjects, but I pretended I knew more than I did. I knew I was not going to talk to Miles about music."

Coaxed Davis out of Retirement

Butler visited Davis almost every weekday morning for a nine-month stretch, often just watching television with him. Finally, Davis hinted that he had been working on some new material, but when he tried to play it for Butler, it became clear that Davis's piano had just a few working keys. Butler asked the head of Columbia Records for approval to spend $100,000 on a piano as a birthday present for Davis. When the delivery company turned up at Davis's town house, the reclusive performer refused to answer the door. The company called Butler, who contacted a mutual friend and neighbor to persuade Davis to allow the deliverymen in. The friend "told me that when Miles saw the piano, there were tears in his eyes," Butler told Cole. Davis, however, was also famously abrupt on the telephone, and Butler also noted in The Last Miles that "Miles called and said ‘Thanks George,’ and slammed the phone down before I could say, ‘You're welcome.’"

The careful wooing of Davis resulted in The Man with the Horn, produced by Butler and released in 1981 to lukewarm reviews. It represented a significant step for the music pioneer, however; Davis was able to wean himself off prescription and illegal drugs, which reignited his creativity and led to important work. Davis eventually left Columbia, however, because he thought Butler and the record company were grooming Marsalis to be his replacement. Davis made some of his displeasure public. In an interview with Nick Kent in the British magazine The Face, Davis said of Butler: "I can't stand a black man who wants to be bourgeois! That's a pitiful condition to be in."

When Columbia became part of Sony in the 1980s, Butler was promoted to senior vice president and executive producer. At the time, he was one of the highest-ranking African-American executives in the record business. One of his last notable finds was jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon; he served as executive producer for her first three albums in the early 1990s. He retired a few years later and settled in the San Francisco Bay area community of Hayward, where his sister, Jacqueline, lived. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2005.

Suffered Alzheimer's in Retirement

Butler was living in a retirement facility, Casa Sandoval, when he went missing for thirty-six hours in January of 2008. "According to police, Butler told the staff at Casa Sandoval that he planned to go back to his home in New York City," wrote Jason Sweeney in the Daily Review. "At 9:20 a.m. Tuesday, he walked through a hallway door, went down a stairwell and then exited via a building door. Video surveillance captured Butler leaving Casa Sandoval through a west exit, according to police." Alarms on the doors had been temporarily disconnected because the facility was being renovated. Using a handheld thermal-imaging device, authorities located Butler in a ravine along San Lorenzo Creek, where he had become entangled in bushes. The weather was typical for northern California in January—cold, windy, and rainy, and Butler had been mired there for at least ten hours. "The incident made headlines in the Bay Area," noted a report on All-AboutJazz.com, "and marked a sad episode in the life of a man once considered one of the most influential figures in jazz."

At a Glance …

Born George Tucker Butler Jr. on September 2, 1931, in Charlotte, NC; died of multiple organ failure and complications from Alzheimer's disease on April 9, 2008; son of George Sr. (an auto mechanic) and Ethel (a teacher) Butler; children: Bethany Butler. Education: Howard University, BA; Columbia University, MA, music education.

Career: Blue Note Records, 1972-76, producer; Columbia Records, artists and repertoire executive, after 1978; senior vice president and executive producer, after 1988.

Butler died three months later, on April 9, at a care facility in Castro Valley, California. In a memorial on the Web site The Key Influencer, the record industry executive Vernon Slaughter wrote: "It's sheer irony that a disease that literally makes you forget who you are would take from us a man who accomplished so very many unforgettable things."

Selected works

Producer

Elvin Jones, Mr. Jones, Blue Note, 1969.

Horace Silver, In Pursuit of the 27th Man, Blue Note, 1970.

Bobbi Humphrey, Bobbi Humphrey's Best, Blue Note, 1971.

Donald Byrd, Ethiopian Nights, Blue Note, 1971.

Bobby Hutcherson, Live at Montreaux, Blue Note, 1973.

Shirley Bassey, Nobody Does It Like Me, United Artists, 1974.

Ronnie Laws, Pressure Sensitive, Blue Note, 1975.

(Various artists) Blue Note Live at the Roxy, Blue Note, 1977.

(Various artists) Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Body Workout, Columbia, 1983.

Branford Marsalis, Scenes in the City, Columbia, 1983.

Wynton Marsalis Septet, In This House, on This Morning, Columbia, 1992.

Executive producer

Max Roach, M'Boom, Columbia/Legacy, 1979.

Miles Davis, The Man with the Horn, Columbia, 1981.

Wynton Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, Columbia, 1981.

Miles Davis, You're Under Arrest, Columbia, 1985.

Grover Washington Jr., A House Full of Love (Music from "The Cosby Show"), Columbia, 1986.

Harry Connick Jr., Harry Connick Jr., Columbia, 1987.

Harry Connick Jr., 20, Columbia, 1988.

Branford Marsalis, Trio Jeepy, Columbia, 1988.

Ramsey Lewis, Urban Renewal, Columbia, 1989.

Harry Connick Jr., We Are in Love, Columbia, 1990.

Nancy Wilson, With My Lover Beside Me, Columbia, 1991.

Nnenna Freelon, Nnenna Freelon, Columbia, 1992.

Nnenna Freelon, Heritage, Columbia, 1993.

Lou Donaldson, Sentimental Journey, Columbia, 1994.

Nnenna Freelon, Listen, Columbia, 1994.

Sources

Books

Cole, George, The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980-1991, University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 36-38.

Kent, Nick, "Lightening Up with the Prince of Darkness: Miles Davis Approaches Sixty," in The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 1972-1995, Da Capo Press, 1995, p. 274.

Periodicals

Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), April 17, 2008.

Daily Review (Hayward, CA), January 12, 2008.

Jet, May 5, 2008.

New York Times, May 20, 1990, p. 34; April 20, 2008, p. A30.

Online

AllAboutJazz.com, http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=18108 (accessed September 21, 2008).

Andrews, James, "Celebrating the Life of George Butler," The Key Influencer, April 15, 2008, http://thekeyinfluencer.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/georgebutler/ (accessed September 21, 2008).

—Carol Brennan