The term "hipster" is loosely applied in today's culture, but the American record producer Alan Douglas, who has died in Paris aged 82, was the real thing. Equally at home in Greenwich Village and on the Left Bank, Douglas was distinguished by his advanced taste. The span of artists with whom he worked ranged from Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix via Eric Dolphy and John McLaughlin, and he was the first to record the Last Poets, the confrontational Harlem versifiers whose albums played a crucial role in the evolution of rap music.
Like a few other eminent producers, including Jerry Wexler, Tom Wilson and Chris Blackwell, he saw the role as demanding a measure of creativity and imagination through which he would encourage musicians to reach beyond their normal scope into new areas of collaboration and discovery. A typical Douglas project would be Money Jungle, the 1963 album that, by uniting Ellington with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, a bassist and drummer of a later generation, forced listeners to consider the veteran pianist and composer as a modernist.
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