Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Worked on albums for Dylan, Sinatra And McCartney
TWENTY-TIME Grammy winner Al Schmitt’s extraordinary career as a recording engineer and producer included albums by Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and many other of the top performers of the past 60 years.
Announcing his death on Facebook, his family said: “The world has lost a much-loved and respected extraordinary individual, who led an extraordinary life.
“The most honoured and awarded recording producer/engineer of all time, his parting words at any speaking engagement were, ‘Please be kind to all living things’.”
He won his first Grammy in 1963, then collected 19 more competitive awards and the honorary Recording Academy Trustees Award, in 2006.
Schmitt, who was 91, worked on more than 150 gold records, in a wide range of styles.
He engineered Henry Mancini’s Moon River and Sam Cooke’s Another
Saturday Night, Steely Dan’s Aja and Madonna’s This Used To Be My Playground.
He engineered Natalie Cole’s blockbuster Unforgettable album and Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were.
He produced Volunteers and several other Jefferson Airplane albums, helped produce Neil Young’s On The Beach and more recently Dylan’s Shadows In The Night and Sir Paul McCartney’s Kisses On The Bottom.
Brian Wilson, whose album of Gershwin songs was remixed by Schmitt, was among those offering tributes, tweeting: “Al was an industry giant and a great engineer who worked with some of the greatest artists ever, and I’m honoured to have worked with him on my Gershwin album”.
Born in Brooklyn, he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s and became a staff engineer for RCA Records.
His memoir Al Schmitt On The Record published in 2018, included tributes from Dylan, Young (“Al is the master,” he wrote), Streisand and the Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, who remembered Schmitt’s skill and patience with “this bunch of musical anarchists”.
Schmitt had his own stories to tell. He became close to Sam Cooke and dined with him just hours before the singer was shot and killed in 1964 at a Los Angeles motel.
He remembered Natalie Cole crying in the studio while making Unforgettable as she worked on “duets” with her father, the late Nat “King Cole,” whose vocals were joined to hers thanks in part to the studio tricks of Schmitt.
He learned to work with, and work around, the musicians, whether the Airplane’s indulgence of drugs and sonic effects or Sinatra’s request that he sing in front of the studio band and not in the recording booth.