Paul Buckmaster TRIBUTE
Orchestral arranger who worked with top pop artists
Pau l Buck master, whose orch estral arrangements brought power and poignancy to signature songs by David Bowie, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Carly Simon and countless other rock, pop, country and jazz stars has died at the age of 71.
Buckmaster was something of a child prodigy on the cello and might have made a career solely as a musician, but a few fortuitous introductions connected him to Bowie and brought him the assignment of arranging Space Oddity, the eerie 1969 song that begins with the lyric“Ground control to Major Tom ”.
Not long after, at a concert by Miles Davis( with whom Buckmaster would later coll aborate), he was introduced to a singer and pianist then in his early 20s, Elton John, who was working on his second album, which would be released in 1970 as simply Elton John.
Buckmaster was invited to do the arrangements, putting his fingerprints on one of the most acclaimed albums of the period ( it lost the Grammy Award for album of the year to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water ). His string enhancements elevate Your Song, John’ s breakthrough single off that album. It was Buck master’ s idea to put a harp at the start of Sixty Years On, which opens Side 2. He would continue to work with John regularly.
“He helped make me the artist I am ,” John wrote on Twitter after the death, calling Buck master“a revolutionary arranger” who “took my songs and made them soar”.
He went on to do the same for a vast and varied list of artists over the next 47 years, working with rockers like Guns N’ Roses ( the Chinese Democracy album, 2008), mainstream bands like Train( Drops of Jupiter, for which Buckmaster won a Grammy in 2002), musical theatre stars like Idina Menzel ( her 2016 album, Idina), country stars like Faith Hill ( You’re Still Here and other songs).
“I don’t want to disparage all of the brilliant arrangers out there,” the singer, songwriter and pianist Ben Folds wrote in a Facebook tribute, “but there was Paul, and then there’ s everyone else.”
Paul Buckmaster was born on June 13, 1946, in London. His father, John, was an actor, and his mother, Ermengilda Maltese, who was Italian, was a concert pianist and a graduate of the Naples Conservatory of Music.
He showed musical ability from a young age. His mother tutored him in piano and music theory and signed him up for cello lessons when he was four. He won his first cello competition in the five to six age group at a youth music festival.
He later studied cello in Italy, and at 17 he was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. After his graduation, one of his former professors arranged for him to join the orchestra backing the pop singer Paul Jones, which led to a job playing with the Bee Gees on a tour of Germany.
Soon after that he met Gus Dudgeon, a producer; Tony Hall, who would become a record executive and manag er; and Tony Vis con ti, a producer and arranger. It was Hall who suggested that he try arranging and gave him some trial assignments. Hall and Dudgeon then introduced him to the still largely unknown David Bowie, gave him a demo tape of Space Oddity and asked him to give it a shot. The introductions to John and other artists followed, and soon he was sought after by all sorts of stars as rock continued to push beyond the limitations of guitars and drums.
Buck master’ s arrangements, often heavily reliant on strings, can be heard on songs as different as the Rolling Stones’ Moonlight Mile, CarlySimon’ s You’ re So Vain and the Swedish band Grand Illusion’s Gates of Fire.
He branched out into other genres and media as well. He worked with Miles Davis, most notably on the 1972 album On the Corner. He also wrote the score for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys.
His orchestrations could help elevate an artist beyond his normal sound and audience, as they did for country star Dwight Yoaka mon his 1993 album This Time.
Buckmaster was rarely interviewed, but he described his approach in a 2010 article in The Guardian, citing Your Song, on which the rhythm section does not turn up until midway through.
“One general rule is to hold back as much as possible ,” he said ,“to give the listener the chance to let the song grow and unfold, introducing new sonic elements, such as new instruments or sectional groupings. If you use everything from the beginning, you have nowhere to go.”
“Paul seemed to identify the genetic code of a song,” wrote Folds, who used his arrange - ment son several projects, “and then add the thing that you didn’ t know was there before – that explained it all – as the last touch.”
Buckmaster is survived by a son, Banten; a brother, Adrian; and a sister, Rosemary. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.
“I don’t want to disparage all of the brilliant arrangers out there, but there was Paul, and then there’s everyone else”
BEN FOLDS