Tom Wilson (music producer)
American record producer (1931–1978)
Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. (March 25, 1931 – September 6, 1978) was an American record producer. He is best known for his work in the 1960s with artists such as Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Simon & Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, Nico, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Blues Project, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and others.
Early life and education
Wilson was born in Waco, Texas on March 25, 1931, to parents Thomas and Fannie Wilson (née Brown). He attended A.J. Moore High School in Waco and was a member of New Hope Baptist Church. Wilson attended Fisk University before transferring to Harvard University, where he became involved in the Harvard New Jazz Society, radio station WHRB, and was president of the Young Republicans. He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1954.
Career
After university, Wilson borrowed $500 (equivalent to $6,009 in 2025) to set up Transition Records, having a goal in mind of setting up a record label and recording the most advanced jazz musicians of the day. The label released about a dozen albums, including Sun Ra's Jazz By Sun Ra (retitled Sun Song when reissued in 1968), which was Ra's first LP (a second LP of Transition material remained unreleased until 1968), and the album Jazz Advance by Cecil Taylor, which was Taylor's debut release. Transition also released the first sessions led by Doug Watkins, Donald Byrd, and Herb Pomeroy.
“Tom Wilson (music producer)” enters the record as american record producer (1931–1978). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wilson, music and producer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2007168. VIAF identifies the subject as 51146825214307631650. The Library of Congress control number is n2019061031. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1978, 1954 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Wilson (music producer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.