Obituary: Michael Cuscuna (1948-2024) (2024)

“Once it’s released, the music exists.” (Michael Cuscuna)

Producer of new and archival recordings, radio presenter, writer, researcher, discographer, co-founder of Mosaic Records (which he ran for over forty years), winner of three Grammys and a Downbeat Lifetime Achievement in Recording award, Michael Cuscuna passed away on Saturday, April 20, Record Store Day. He was 75 and is survived by his wife Lisa, his children Max and Lauren, Max’s wife Jackie, and two grandchildren, Nicolas and Penelope Cuscuna. Fernando Ortiz de Urbina writes.

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Born in 1948 in Stamford, Connecticut, a suburb of New York where Mosaic Records is still based, Michael Cuscuna was interested in music from an early age. He started on the drums and later tried the flute, alto sax and tenor sax, and by age 14 he was already taking trains to Manhattan and lodging himself in the peanut gallery at Birdland. There, among others, he heard Art Blakey and the Messengers around the time when they recorded Cedar Walton’s “Mosaic.” As Cuscuna himself explained, “It’s the stuff that gets to you between about 12 and 25 that stays with you for life.”

Stung by music, and knowing he would not make it as a performer, he looked for other ways to enter the business. While still in school, he worked in a local record shop. In college, he did one year of a Business degree before realising that it wouldn’t equip him to run a small record label, so he switched to English. He ran shows on college radio, and by the time he was 26, he had already produced two albums for Buddy Guy, as well as Bonnie Raitt’s sophom*ore effort, Give it Up. He also wrote for Downbeat magazine, where in 1972 he reviewed four early ECM ‘import’ LPs (#1008-1011) welcoming the label to the US: “ECM is a brave little record company [which] must be congratulated on an outstanding beginning.”

In the 1970s, after a stint at Atlantic Records, where he produced an unlikely album with Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz and Anthony Braxton, and which he left because it was becoming “more and more corporate”, Cuscuna was behind a series of significant avant-garde albums at Arista Records. He spent long hours mining and taking notes at the vaults of the Blue Note label, then dormant. When Capitol Records rejected Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie’s proposal to revive it, they took one of their ideas – the possibility of compiling box sets in the same vein as those Columbia had released in the 1960s – and ran with it. They founded a boutique label which would print, and directly sell, limited runs of definitive, carefully curated collections of music: Mosaic Records.

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Their first release, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, a 4-LP set from 1983, was the only solution Cuscuna could devise to release about 25 minutes of previously unissued Monk he’d found in the vaults. He put it together with the listener’s perspective in mind: consistent sequencing, generous liner notes providing context, and as much discographical information as was available. Thus, he definined the standard the label follows 41 years and 277 sets later.

That monumental catalogue, encompassing the whole vast spectrum of jazz, would be enough to make Cuscuna a giant of the cleaning, fixing and polishing of this sonic history, but he also worked on the Impulse! archive from 1975. There, he compiled The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, released via CD in the 1990s (first on GRP, then Universal), the reissue of all of Miles Davis’s recordings for Columbia in thematic sets (also in the 1990s and 2000s), and the multiple campaigns of Blue Note releases, comprising more than 100 unissued sessions and hundreds of issued ones. These were accompanied by the immortal iconography of Francis Wolff, whose photo archive Cuscuna owned until recently. For the generations of listeners this side of Martin Williams’ The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz from 1973, there is surely no one more influential than Cuscuna in our perception of the jazz canon.

As mindful as Cuscuna was of the importance of preservation of archives and hard data – he co-authored the definitive Blue Note discography – he was not an archivist, but a curator. As a producer of new records, he would remind artists they didn’t have to fill up CDs with music and, generally, he took it upon himself to make artistic calls on the value of the music and was not keen on releasing every sound available. In fact, he consistently refused to release sessions known to be extant in Blue Note’s vaults, much to the disappointment of hardcore fans. At the same time, a number of Mosaic sets can be taken as corrections to previous releases of the same music, like The Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945-1947), which came out soon after a botched 2-CD compilation by Sony, or the recent repackaging of available Blue Note recordings: sets by Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Sonny Clark, whose recent editions by the parent label have been criticised in some quarters for their remastering.

For the last 25 years, I corresponded with Cuscuna on a number of matters, from minute sound quality issues in sets to questions about discography, or advice about some article or other, and he always took time to provide an answer to the best of his ability. We met once in person, for lunch at Mosaic’s local, the Crab Shell in Stamford, and he was a hoot: asked not long ago about retirement, he retorted “No, and do what? I am blind as a bat, I can’t do any sports, and I am too old to do drugs. What the hell am I going to do?”

Cuscuna will be missed, especially at a time when reissues on musical value – as opposed to ‘name’ value – are on the wane, and archives are largely owned as assets not for public release, banishing the music to non-existence.

Still, his legacy will remain for a long time for everyone to listen.

Fernando Ortiz de Urbina (@fer_urbina on Twitter) is a jazz historian and commentator, and contributes regularly to Spanish-language podcast Club de Jazz.