Creed Taylor left Verve Records in 1967 to accept a lucrative offer producing records for a new jazz division of Herb Alpert's highly successful independent pop label, A&M Records. Taylor was guaranteed $1,000,000 over a five-year period by Alpert's organization. 

From the very beginning, CTI had a highly distinctive character. Sam Antupit's much copied design was the height of elegant simplicity. Each cover named the artist and the album title on two lines in clean Helvetica typeface while Pete Turner's evocative photography was framed by swaths of white (for jazz oriented releases), gray (for pop-oriented releases) or, in two cases (SP-3017 and SP-3018), silver. Taylor also scored hits right from the start, too, with significant commercial and artistic success for Wes Montgomery's A Day In The Life and Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave. 

Although the records were officially A&M releases, a CTI logo was clearly visible on the jackets and labels of all but two (SP-3030 and SP-3031) of the initial 27 releases. Taylor produced records for A&M through 1970 and the label continued the 3000 series for its own sporadic jazz releases throughout the remainder of the decade. 

In 1984, A&M re-mastered and reissued 16 of its best CTI titles - a tribute to the enduring quality of Creed Taylor's productions. Additionally, A&M also introduced George Benson's I Got A Woman And Some Blues for the first time that year and compiled two very good A&M/CTI samplers (SP-6-3000 and SP-6-3021). Several titles in this series were issued on CD in 1988-89 with then-innovative digipack packaging. But these have since gone out of print and are now very difficult to find (or terribly tattered). 

Each of the George Benson and Wes Montgomery titles were reissued on CD rather generically in 1999. But since Universal's acquisition of the A&M label, Verve is now in charge of this series. In early 2000, Creed Taylor's pre-A&M employer, did a good job reissuing a mere three A&M/CTI titles (We And The Sea, From The Hot Afternoon and Tide). However, none of the other albums from CTI's earliest days have yet to see the light of day on domestic CD.