Teo Macero - R.I.P.

[Dr Dave]

From today's NY Times:

February 22, 2008
Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF

Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y.

His death followed a long illness, his stepdaughter, Suzie Lightbourn, said.

Helping to build Miles Davis albums like “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent Way” and “Get Up With It,” Mr. Macero (pronounced TEE-oh mah-SEH-roh) used techniques partly inspired by composers like Edgard Varèse, who had been using tape-editing and electronic effects to help shape the music. Such techniques were then new to jazz and have largely remained separate from it since. But the electric-jazz albums he helped Davis create — especially “Bitches Brew,” which remains one of the best-selling albums by a jazz artist — have deeper echoes in almost 40 years of experimental pop, like work by Can, Brian Eno and Radiohead.

Davis’s routine in the late 1960s was to record a lot of music in the studio with a band, much of it improvised and based on themes and even mere chords that he would introduce on the spot. Later Mr. Macero, with Davis’s help, would splice together vamps and bits and pieces of improvisation.

For example, Mr. Macero isolated a little melodic improvisation Davis played on the trumpet for “Shhh/Peaceful” on “In a Silent Way” and used it as the theme, placing it at the beginning and the end of the piece. Even live recordings he sometimes treated as drafts; the first track of Davis’s “Live at Fillmore East,” from 1970, contains a snippet pasted in from a different song.

Mr. Macero strongly believed that the finished versions of Davis’s LPs, with all their intricate splices and sequencing — done on tape with a razor blade, in the days before digital editing — were the work of art, the entire point of the exercise. He opposed the current practice of releasing boxed sets that include all the material recorded in the studio, including alternate and unreleased takes. Mr. Macero was not involved in Columbia’s extensive reissuing of Davis’s work for the label, in lavish boxed sets from the mid-’90s until last year.

Attilio Joseph Macero was born and raised in Glens Falls, N.Y. He served in the Navy, then moved to New York in 1948 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the composer Henry Brant. In 1953 he became involved with Charles Mingus in the cooperative organization called the Jazz Composers Workshop; he played in Mingus’s other groups and put out his own records on Debut Records, the label founded by Mingus and Max Roach.

While simultaneously working as a tenor saxophonist — with Mingus, Teddy Charles and the Sandole Brothers, among others — and composing modern classical music as well as working in the classical-to-jazz idiom then called Third Stream, he joined Columbia Records in 1957. He was first hired as a music editor; in 1959 he became a staff producer.

At Columbia he worked with artists like J. J. Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Johnny Mathis, Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck, for whom he produced the famous album “Time Out.” He also produced Broadway cast albums like “A Chorus Line” and film soundtracks.

Mr. Macero left Columbia in 1975. He later worked with the singer Robert Palmer, the Lounge Lizards, Vernon Reid, D.J. Logic and others.

Besides Ms. Lightbourn, of Morristown, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jeanne, of Quogue, N.Y., and his sister, Lydia Edwards of Sarasota, Fla., and Queensbury, N.Y.

[Gary Sisco]

RIP, Teo.

[Brian Olewnick]

Too bad. He also produced one of my all-time favorite jazz albums, Mingus' "Let My Children Hear Music". He was also adventurous enough to appear on Kip Hanrahan's first record, "Coup de Tete", iirc.

[Derek Taylor]

Sad news, but a pretty good run. He was a decent/eccentric saxophonist too, as this set bears out:

[Gentle Giant]

Pretty good run is a pretty good-sized understatement. It's always tough to discern a producer's role in a session (certainly his scissors was as important as his ears in the early electric Miles recordings) but no question a Teo-produced recording became a good bet, a seal of quality you could trust.

I love in Straight...No Chaser when they show him clowning in the studio with Monk. "Are you jivin' me? Are you jivin' me?"

Thanks for being there, Teo. RIP.

[Gentle Giant]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

He opposed the current practice of releasing boxed sets that include all the material recorded in the studio, including alternate and unreleased takes. Mr. Macero was not involved in Columbia’s extensive reissuing of Davis’s work for the label, in lavish boxed sets from the mid-’90s until last year.

Interesting.

[Chris D]

Originally Posted by Derek Taylor

Sad news, but a pretty good run. He was a decent/eccentric saxophonist too, as this set bears out:

This is a nice album. Teo's sound is dry like a choice martini, astringent in a good way. Charles' modernism was a fine complement.

While I do enjoy hearing the whole performances on the Miles boxes, there's more than enough evidence that Teo got it right on the official releases. A poet with the Exacto knife.

[Surfer]

Originally Posted by Chris D

A poet with the Exacto knife.

As Ezra was to TS, Teo to Miles.

il miglior fabbro

[Bill Barton]

R.I.P.

What a legacy!

I too liked his playing though I've never heard that Teo album... Some of the stuff with Mingus is very cool indeed.

[Ron Thorne]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

I love in Straight...No Chaser when they show him clowning in the studio with Monk. "Are you jivin' me? Are you jivin' me?"

Me, too, Jason. I laughed my ass off while watching that documentary the first time.

He was so well-respected by a huge number of musicians in various genres and sub-genres.

What an important thread he was in this tapestry we love and share.

While strongly identified with Miles Davis recordings, Teo's reach was broad, indeed. Here's another fine example of his brilliance as a producer.





R.I.P, Teo Macero~

[bruce massey]

from an alternate take on The Complete Bitches Brew...

"Miles what do we call this"?

"I don't give a fuck mother fucker, call it anything"

[shrugs]

played tenor on:




see you when I get there....

[shrugs]

and I guess hearing Miles telling Teo to play a particular take again will always be like hearing some relative in years past....

[Erik Lund]

I was listening (still am) to the Jack Johnson album when I came in here

[Derek Taylor]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

Pretty good run is a pretty good-sized understatement.

As a nutshell summary of his career? No doubt. Still, age-wise, 82 years on the planet is in my book a pretty good run.

What's the scoop on that Hanrahan, shrugs?

[shrugs]

Originally Posted by Derek Taylor

What's the scoop on that Hanrahan, shrugs?

See what Big B had to say:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p...0:jxfqxq9gldje



There is also a German Festival Tribute to New Orleans under Hanrahan that circulates. It is incredible at times. The lineup, too lazy to sekk it out right now, is rather tasty.

[Bill Barton]

Thanks for the info on the Kip Hanrahan, shrugs.

That's one of the very few Hanrahan recordings I don't have. Another to add to the list...

[bostontricky]

Man, was this guy involved in bringing a lot of music to people's ears. Any trumpet geek worth their salt will also know Macero from Maynard Ferguson's shout out ("he's sitting out on the street in the mobile thing") on the last track of MF's legendary "Live at Jimmy's" album from the early 70s.

One of Macero's albums (Time +7?) was also mentioned in Max Harrison's Essential Jazz Recordings, I'll have to dig it up when I get back to Boston.

RIP, Teo.