Remembering producer Tom Wilson on his birthday

Remembering important but unjustly overlooked producer Tom Wilson with a discussion of his work, some Sun Ra outtakes from 1956 and more. 

Writes Irwin Chusid...

Tom Wilson was a legendary record producer in the '50s and '60s. He produced four Dylan albums, and the first Simon & Garfunkel, which was a commercial failure. So Wilson added a rock backing track to the duo's acoustic recording "Sounds of Silence," and helped invent folk-rock. 

He signed and produced the first two albums by the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground. A decade earlier, after graduating  Harvard in 1955, he founded Transition Records and produced the first albums by Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd. He later produced Nico's first, and co-produced the Soft Machine's debut. In 1978, at age 47, he died of a heart attack. 

In 1967 and '68 the charismatic Wilson hosted a free-form radio program called "The Music Factory," sponsored by MGM-Verve. The debut episode of that series, gone from radio since 1967, will be aired on my WFMU program... listen here: http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/68065 

More info about Wilson at ProducerTomWilson.com. 

Listen to a Tom Wilson Jazz Sampler put together by Marshall Crenshaw – who is working on a Tom Wilson documentary – right here. Watch a discussion of Tom Wilson's work with Richie Unteberger, an interview with Marshall Crenshaw discussing his Tom Wilson research, followed by some Transition-era Sun Ra studio outtakes. Read the Tom Wilson feature "The Man Who Put Electricity Into Dylan" by Michael Watts (Melody Maker, January 31, 1976) right here.