Malcolm Cecil, synthesizer pioneer, dies
Malcolm Cecil, a Britishborn bassist with the soul of an engineer who revolutionized electronic music by helping to create a huge analog synthesizer that gave Stevie Wonder’s albums a new sound, died Sunday at a hospital in Valhalla, New York. He was 84.
His son, Milton, said the cause had not yet been determined.
Cecil, a loquacious man with a head full of curls, had played the upright bass in jazz bands in England and was the night maintenance engineer at Mediasound Studios in Manhattan in 1968 when he met Robert Margouleff, a film and record producer who owned and operated a Moog synthesizer there.
“He said, ‘Robert, if you show me how to play the synthesizer, I will teach you how to become a firstclass recording engineer,’” Margouleff said in a phone interview. “We had a deal.”
They began designing and building what would become The Original New Timbral Orchestra, or TONTO. Starting with the Moog and adding other synthesizers and a collection of modules, some of them designed by Cecil, they created a massive semicircular piece of equipment that took up a small room and weighed a ton. It could be programmed to create a vast array of original sounds and to modify and process the sounds of conventional musical instruments.
As they continued to develop it, Cecil and Margouleff recorded an album, “Zero Time” (1971), under the name TONTO’s Expanding Head Band.
Reviewing “Zero Time” in Rolling Stone, Timothy Crouse wrote: “Like taking acid and discovering that your mind has the power to stop your heart, the realization that this instrument can do all sorts of things to you, now that it has you, is unsettling.”
The album attracted the attention of Wonder, who had just turned 21 when he showed up at Mediasound on Memorial Day weekend in 1971. Cecil lived in an apartment above the studio so that he would be available to fix anything that might go wrong, day or night.
Cecil and Margouleff won the Grammy Award for their engineering of “Innervisions,” which included the hit songs “Living in the City” and “Higher Ground.” Wonder won Grammys that year for album of the year and for best rhythm and blues song, for “Superstition,” which blended Wonder’s playing on drums and clavinet with a funky bass sound provided by TONTO.
Malcolm Ian Cecil was born on Jan. 9, 1937, in London. His mother, Edna (Aarons) Cecil, was an accordionist who played in bands, including one, composed entirely of women, that entertained troops during World War II. His father, David, was a concert promoter who also worked as a professional clown under the name Windy Blow. They divorced when Malcolm was very young.
Malcolm started playing piano when he was 3 and took up drums a little later. He began to play the upright bass as a teenager and was soon playing in jazz clubs. He studied physics for a year at London Polytechnic before entering the Royal Air Force in 1958. His three years as a radar operator prepared him for future studio work.
He sailed to San Francisco in 1967 and then headed to Los Angeles, where he spent a year as the chief engineer at Pat Boone’s recording studio. He later moved to New York City, where he worked at the Record Plant for six weeks before being hired as the maintenance engineer at Mediasound.