Through the years i have worked with several record producers. It’s a very tough game and many are no longer here. Recently i hooked up with one such producer Irv Kratka who may have as many stories as me and we have become music friends as he is a true jazz lover. He is a real survivor and an icon in many ways and still enjoys creating which i admire greatly. He released an album I did in 1994 in Europe “Jazz Titans” that was dormant and I just finished 2 tenor saxophone albums for him geared toward jazz education. These new albums which will shortly be released will give you interesting insight into my history with his label and the roll it played in my musical developement. Below is an article that was recently published on his activities and record label Music Minus One. Glenn

Music Minus One, the company with the unique, unforgettable name, was begun in 1950, with a first recording devoted to Schubert’s Trout Quintet, with all five instruments omitted in five different MMO’s This release received a full page review in The New York Times As a result articles appeared in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek and hundreds of papers across the USA and Europe

In the following years we continued to release chamber music and jazz rhythm recordings utilizing the best of New York’s players at the time, many of whom are legends in music. Such names as Stan Getz, Hank Jones, Max Roach, Sam Baron, Julius Baker, Murray Panitz, Doriot Dwyer, Elaine Douvas, Donald Peck, Armando Ghitalla, Stanley Drucker and countless other first chair players in the five major American orchestras were prevailed upon to add their skills to MMO recordings.
Today, 61 years after our inception, MMO offers close to nine hundred albums, devoted to classical, chamber music, opera, lieder, popular , jazz and religious music from all times and periods, from the Baroque, thru the Romantic and Classical periods in music. MMO set the tone and style for the dozens of other publishers in music. We now offer their product as well, bringing our total offerings close to seven thousand book/record combinations. MMO was begun by a college student, in his 24th year, Irv Kratka, who remarkably enough is still at the helm of this extraordinary Westchester, New York company. He is now eighty-five and still active in the daily productions of the company which encompass recording both in the USA and in Europe where major orchestras are commissioned to perform the great concerti in music.

Irv Kratka
CEO, President