Michael Cuscuna, a jazz historian and producer who combed the archives of storied Blue Note Records for lost tracks of greats such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, and co-founded a label that released Grammy-winning compilations from jazz’s golden age, died April 21 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 75.
He had been under treatment for throat cancer and other medical problems, said his wife, Lisa Cuscuna.
Since the 1970s, Mr. Cuscuna helped reissue recordings or find never-released music for hundreds of albums at Blue Note and Mosaic Records, a label he created in 1982 with a former Blue Note marketing executive, Charlie Lourie. Mr. Cuscuna’s work was often cited for significantly deepening the knowledge of jazz and how the genre influenced American culture.
In a 2005 interview with JazzTimes magazine, Mr. Cuscuna described his quest as filling in the blanks in jazz history. “My main motivation is really not reissues, it’s focusing on unissued material,” Mr. Cuscuna said. “Even if it deserves to come out, as long as it’s unissued, it really doesn’t exist.”
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Mr. Cuscuna explored the jazz world much the same way a detective works a cold case. The legwork became an obsession, first as a jazz radio DJ and then a music journalist and producer. He followed rumors of forgotten studio sessions, read past interviews and liner notes, hunted through old contracts and interviewed musicians for tips about forgotten recordings. He filled notebooks of every detail, no matter how obscure or hazy.
“I tried constantly to get into the vaults,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote in a biographical note on the Mosaic website. In 1974, he arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with Lourie, a musician and former CBS Records executive who had recently joined Blue Note as head of marketing. Mr. Cuscuna showed Lourie his notebooks. Within days, a contract was drafted for Mr. Cuscuna to see what he could do with the Blue Note collection.
“I was at last,” he wrote, “in the Blue Note vaults.”
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For the next six years, Mr. Cuscuna and Lourie reissued some of Blue Note’s classic recordings such as Monk’s jazz combo, the horns of Miles Davis and piano of Kenny Drew. Mr. Cuscuna also made another breakthrough find: the notebooks of Blue Note co-founder Alfred Lion, which was full of details on studio sessions and tracks, including some that were never released.
“The experience was staggering,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote. “There were far more unissued sessions than I had even imagined. … So began a long odyssey to unravel this mess and shape it into a body of work that could be released.”
In 1981, the entire Blue Note operation was effectively mothballed by the label’s owner, EMI. Mr. Cuscuna and Lourie, now jobless, negotiated continued access to the Blue Note archives. With that agreement in hand, they launched Mosaic, specializing in limited-edition jazz box sets, along with companion essays and photographs by Francis Wolff, who specialized in the jazz scene and was deeply involved with Blue Note.
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Mosaic’s first release was “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk” (1983), a rerelease that included about 30 minutes of music that had not been made public. “Most of it alternate takes,” Mr. Cuscuna told NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” in 2009, “that I had to get out.”
Mosaic began building its catalogue by reissuing albums from Blue Note and other labels. “The Complete Nat ‘King’ Cole Capitol Trio Recordings” (1993) won a Grammy Award for best historical compilation. Mr. Cuscuna also received Grammys in 1999 and 2002, respectively, for box sets of music from Davis and Billie Holiday.
“If I put out music that is really unworthy or would embarrass the artist or make an artist unhappy, then I think that’s the worst sin I could commit,” Mr. Cuscuna told the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2011.
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Blue Note was revived in 1984 under its new chief, Bruce Lundvall. He offered Mr. Cuscuna a role at Blue Note leading the reissue of hundreds of albums over the next two decades as the label experienced a revival in the jazz world. The projects included Mr. Cuscuna working with Blue Note studio engineer Rudy Van Gelder to remaster some of his best-known recordings with Art Blakey, Tina Brooks and others.
In 2005, Mr. Cuscuna oversaw Blue Note’s release of a rare moment: Monk’s quartet and John Coltrane onstage together. The album, “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: 1957 Concert,” came after a jazz researcher, Larry Appelbaum, uncovered a recording of the Carnegie Hall concert at the Library of Congress.
Mr. Cuscuna called the find “unbelievable” because Coltrane and Monk played together for just six months. “For decades people have speculated on how the group sounded after they developed,” Mr. Cuscuna told Billboard. “But all you had until now was an oral history.”
Michael Arthur Cuscuna was born Sept. 20, 1948, in Stamford, Conn. His father was on the local housing commission, and his mother was a homemaker. As a teenager, he started to spent time at jazz clubs in New York.
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He received a drum kit as a gift but soon realized he would never become a top drummer. “And I switched to alto saxophone and flute, and eventually tenor sax and flute,” he said in a 2019 interview, “and even then I wasn’t a good musician.”
While at the University of Pennsylvania, he landed a spot on the campus radio station, WXPN. After he graduated in 1970 with an English degree, he was hired as a disc jockey for a jazz show on WMMR in Philadelphia and then went to New York’s WABC-FM (now WPLJ) as part of a morning show.
He reviewed bands and albums as a freelancer for DownBeat magazine, Rolling Stone and others. In the recording industry, he became a freelance producer for labels including Atlantic, Motown and Arista, working on albums for musicians such as Dave Brubeck and Bonnie Raitt.
While sorting through the Blue Note archives, Mr. Cuscuna wondered about the album covers. Where were the images not used? He learned there were at least 20,000 unpublished shots by Wolff stashed away. Mr. Cuscuna took on another job as Blue Note’s photo archivist.
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“It’s not hyperbolic to say that there would be no legacy for us to caretake without the exhaustive work he did to identify, catalogue and circulate both our master tapes and the Francis Wolff photo archive,” said a Blue Note statement following Mr. Cuscuna’s death.
Survivors include his wife of 38 years, the former Lisa Podgur; two children; and two grandchildren.
When asked about his efforts uncovering jazz’s past, Mr. Cuscuna often said the most rewarding part was musicians thanking him for giving their work another life. He described how drummer Elvin Jones and sax player Hank Mobley hugged him at clubs after albums were rereleased.
One day while walking along Broadway in Manhattan, Mr. Cuscuna recalled, jazz horn player Howard Johnson yelled to him from a passing cab, asking if he had nailed down some elusive detail about a long-ago recording session.
“The approval and the enthusiasm of the artists who made the music was very important to me,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote.
