From Notable Alumni · Foundation editorial

Co-founder of Riverside Records; recorded Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans; Grammy Awards for liner notes. Orrin Keepnews (CC 1943) published one of the first serious profiles of Thelonious Monk in The Record Changer in 1948, at a moment when the consensus held Monk to be a novelty act with an unreliable left hand. Five years later he co-founded Riverside Records and began recording him, and then Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wes Montgomery and most of the rest of the label's catalogue. The critic had become the man who made the thing being criticised, an arrangement that would now attract a disclosure statement. He never stopped writing. The liner note was his form and he worked in it for six decades, three times winning a Grammy for album notes, a category you did not know existed until you read this sentence, and which he effectively defined. The View from Within (1988) collects forty years of it.