NEW YORK — George Avakian, a Russian-born jazz scholar and architect of the American music industry who produced essential recordings by Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and other stars has died at age 98.

Avakian’s daughter, Anahid Avakian Gregg, confirmed that her father died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan.

Avakian, an executive at Columbia Records and Warner Bros. among other labels, helped popularize such consumer standards as liner notes, the long-playing album and the live album.

Few could claim as many milestones as Avakian, who started out as an Ivy League prodigy rediscovering old jazz recordings and became a monumental industry figure and founder of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, presenters of the Grammys. Through the artists he promoted and the breakthroughs he championed, Avakian helped shape the music we listen to and the way we listen to it.

“The innovations Avakian brought or helped bring to the recording industry are so fundamental and taken for granted today that most people under the age of 70 would find it hard to imagine there was ever a time when they didn’t exist,” DownBeat magazine declared in presenting Avakian a lifetime achievement award in 2000.

Avakian produced the classic “Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy” and one of Dave Brubeck’s most popular albums, “Dave Digs Disney.” He also signed up Davis for Columbia and co-produced “Miles Ahead,” the 1957 album that began Davis’ collaborations with arranger Gil Evans and established him as among the first jazz superstars of the post-World War II era.

“I saw him as the best trumpet ballad player since Louis Armstrong,” Avakian told The Wall Street Journal in 2005.

The music business was rapidly changing in the 1940s and ’50s, thanks in part to Avakian. Columbia was the industry leader in issuing classical recordings as albums and Avakian, as head of Columbia’s pop division, oversaw the landmark 1948 release of 100 long-playing records for pop and jazz. Featuring Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore and other artists, they were pressed on vinyl that was thinner than the traditional 78 rpm “shellac” records and played at what became the standard speed, 33 1-3 rpm.

In the 1950s, Avakian supervised two historic live recordings: “Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall 1938” and “Ellington at Newport.” The Goodman concert, released in 1950, was among jazz’s first double albums, first live albums and first to sell a million copies.

He was born in 1919 in the Russian city of Armavir, the child of wealthy Armenians who fled from the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution. Once settled with his family in New York, Avakian fell in love with jazz listening to the radio, on low volume, so his parents wouldn’t know he was still awake.

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