PLUGGED INTO HISTORY
Music centre houses 1970s synthesizer
Stevie Wonder was introduced to TONTO on a sweltering Memorial Day weekend in 1971 in New York.
He was 21 years old at the time and had become intrigued by Zero Time, a pioneering electronic music record put out earlier that year by a duo called TONTO’s Expanding Headband. His bass player had played him the album while they were touring Canada.
The bass player was also friends with Malcolm Cecil, the musician and producer who had created TONTO and formed a duo with Robert Margouleff. At the time, Cecil was working in New York’s Media Sound Studios, which also housed TONTO or, as it was officially known, “The Original New Timbral Orchestra.” As the name suggests, TONTO is a complex collection of synthesizers or “orchestra of synthesizers.”
Designed and developed by Cecil over a number of years, it was the first and largest “multitimbral polyphonic analogue synthesizer.” TONTO was a revolutionary instrument and, on that 1971 Memorial Day weekend, was about to make musical history.
“It was a real hot day, I had no clothes on at all,” says Cecil, in an interview with Postmedia. “The door bell rings and I go to the window. I look down and there’s my friend, Ronnie, with this guy in a green pistachio jumpsuit holding what appears to be my album.”
He was told that Wonder wanted to check out TONTO. Cecil took him up to the studio for what he figured would be a quick demonstration.
“As soon as he realized it was all jacks and knobs and stuff, he knew this was not going to be something he could do unaided,” Cecil says. “He says ‘Can we record?’”
By the end of the weekend, they had recorded 17 songs, including the 1972 classic Evil. It was the beginning of a four-album relationship between Wonder, Cecil, Margouleff and TONTO, which has been restored and is now housed at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre.
The groundbreaking sounds of TONTO were at the centre of Wonder’s wildly inventive output from 1972 to 1974. Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, all classics, were co-produced by Wonder, Cecil and Margouleff. Having been freed from his Motown contract when he reached 21, Wonder had years of pent-up creativity and was keen to have full creative control of his music. TONTO was like a gateway to the sounds he was hearing in his head.
“When he was 18, he realized he didn’t own his publishing so he stopped playing his tunes,” Cecil says. “He hated the way he had been dealt with. What he had to do was play his tunes for his arranger. His arranger would take it away, arrange it for orchestra, they would go into the studio with a producer, the producer would produce the track and then would call Stevie in. The producer would tell Stevie how, what and when to sing and that was it. Stevie said ‘It’s nothing like the music in my mind.’ That’s how the album got its title.”
Cecil is currently in Calgary, about to start work on new recordings with a Tribe Called Red, a First Nations electronic music duo that will be the first musicians to use the restored synthesizer at the National Music Centre. TONTO, which has also been used on recordings of Weather Report, Joan Baez, the Isley Brothers and Gil Scott-Heron, is at the centre of a weeklong celebration at the Centre. Dubbed TONTO week, the Nov. 14-18 event will put the “holy grail of synthesizers” frontand-centre.
The National Music Centre acquired TONTO in 2013. At that time it was being housed by Cecil in a converted barn in Saugerties, New York. It still worked. But keeping up its maintenance was becoming too expensive for Cecil to do on his own. He was also worried that TONTO would not be kept intact after he was gone, particularly since it was probably worth more money in parts than keeping it whole. The 81-year-old fielded offers from the Smithsonian and Yale University, among other interests, but was never satisfied that these institutions would maintain it or even display it properly.
So he agreed to sell it to the National Music Centre. Jason Tawkin, the centre’s manager of building audio, wouldn’t say how much it cost, but confirmed it was less than what other institutions were offering and “significantly less than its value.” But Cecil was adamant that the centre was the right fit for TONTO, an opinion that was strengthened when he visited his beloved synthesizer’s new home.
Still, while operational, it needed a lot of work. That fell to the centre’s electronics technician John Leimseider. Leimseider, who once played keyboards for Iron Butterfly and began working for the centre in 2002, took more than a year to lovingly restore TONTO, just one of many restoration projects he oversaw on instruments in the centre’s collection.
“One of the things you need for a modular synthesizer was patch chords,” Tawkin says. “I ordered 800 metres of cable and we had a whole crew of volunteers all help to make cables. Now we have hundreds and hundreds of cables. John replaced every single jack in the instrument, where you plug your cable into. Basically, these corrode and there was 1,000 of them that he changed. We’re talking 18, 19, 20 months, and a lot of parts that were near impossible to find.
“It was the kind of thing where John had to go to his network of technicians and trade parts for parts just to get the parts to do it. A lot of components had to be changed. A lot of recalibration. Some of the custom stuff, he didn’t have schematics for because it doesn’t exist. So limited documentation and, yeah, a lot of uphill battles.”
Tragically, Leimseider passed away on Sept. 14, just two months before he was to participate in the National Music Centre’s weeklong celebration of the restored TONTO.
“He always told me that it was very important to him that this stuff would get used,” Tawkin says.
“He didn’t put all this work into these instruments so they would sit on display. He wanted artists to come, use them, interact with them and that’s what has basically happened. It’s important for us. That’s a pillar of our organization. What makes us unique in the world is that we hold these collections in trust for the public, the musical community, and provide access to artists that have unique, creative musical ideas.”