[Dixielandjazz] Teo Macero Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Mecero was a pioneer in the art of splicing different bits of recorded  
music together to make a new composition. (in addition to being the  
producer of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" album)

Cheers,
Steve


February 22, 2008 - NY Times - By Ben Ratliff
Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies

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.