Orrin Keepnews, who as a record company executive and producer helped create some of the most celebrated recordings in jazz over a half-century, died on Sunday at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his son Peter.

Mr. Keepnews, a four-time Grammy Award winner, was a jazz journalist, essayist and writer of album notes as well as the producer of enduring albums by the likes of the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the pianists Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans.

His attention to detail and sensitive hand as a producer earned him the respect of musicians almost as soon as he started Riverside Records with Bill Grauer, a record collector and former classmate at Columbia University, in 1953. As a tribute, Evans wrote “Re: Person I Knew,” a composition whose title is an anagram of Mr. Keepnews’s name.

Mr. Keepnews began his professional jazz life as a journalist. In his mid-20s, while working as a junior editor at Simon & Schuster, he moonlighted as the managing editor of The Record Changer, a small but reputable jazz magazine. It was in that capacity that Mr. Keepnews, in 1948, wrote one of the first profiles of Monk, the influential pianist and composer, who at the time was relatively unknown.