Teo Macero RIP

Obituary by John Fordham (The Guardian)
Obituary by Ben Ratliff (NYT)
John Fordham on Macero’s influence (Guardian Online blog)
Producer Teo Macero on His Work With Miles Davis (YouTube)
Interview with Teo (Perfect Sound Forever)
Keeping It Unreal (Destination: Out)
Teo film website

Daragh McCarthy:

“After a lifetime working with musicians trying to achieve perfection, Teo hated the exploitation of old recordings in the CD era. He told me Miles Davis would have hated their remixes, remastering and the use of additional tracks, which were, in reality, just the rejected tracks. He felt releasing these rejects undermined the art and the work.”

Miles’ 70s work is unimaginable without Teo. Despite being a massive fan of Miles Davis, after being given the complete Bitches Brew sessions, I’ve not bothered with the rest of the reissues because I agree entirely with Teo’s view. I thought I’d try again recently and acquired a copy of the complete On The Corner sessions. They just don’t compare to the final disc wherein the original album is properly presented.

Despite Columbia’s craven (or terribly misguided) exploitation, the original work stands. Teo’s editing and production was way ahead of its time and remains to this day tremendously contemporary. His work puts him there alongside the great Jamaican producers Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby. From the Wikipedia entry on Bitches Brew:

Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring stacks of edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music. Miles and his producer, Teo Macero, used the recording studio in radical new ways, especially in the title track and the opening track, “Pharaoh’s Dance”. There were many special effects, like tape loops, tape delays, reverb chambers and echo effects. Through intensive tape editing, Macero concocted many totally new musical structures that were later imitated by the band in live concerts.

Macero, who has a classical education and was most likely inspired by the 1930s and 1940s musique concrète experiments, used tape editing as a form of arranging and composition.”Pharaoh’s Dance” contains 19 edits – its famous stop-start opening is entirely constructed in the studio, using repeat loops of certain sections. Later on in the track there are several micro-edits: for example, a one-second-long fragment that first appears at 8:39 is repeated five times between 8:54 and 8:59. The title track contains 15 edits, again with several short tape loops of, in this case, five seconds (at 3:01, 3:07 and 3:12). Therefore, Bitches Brew not only became a controversial classic of musical innovation, it also became renowned for its pioneering use of studio technology.

“Teo oh Teeeeooo…” (spoken in Miles’ raspy whisper)