Legendary jazz producer and player Teo Macero-- best known for his work
with Miles Davis during his incredibly fertile jazz-rock fusion period
of the late 1960s and early 70s-- died Tuesday, February 19 according to
The New York Times. He was 82.

Macero, born in Glens Falls, New York, studied at the Julliard School of
Music before becoming involved with Columbia Records in 1957. In his
nearly 20 years with Columbia, Macero was a pioneering figure in the way
jazz was released on record. His early work with the label yielded such
classics as Davis' Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out and Charles
Mingus' Mingus Ah Um, lending the proceedings a warm, natural sound.

But it was his involvement with Miles Davis' experiments with rock music
beginning in the late 60s that truly defined Macero as a producer. Not
content to simply let Miles and company's gloriously unruly sessions be
released in their unedited form, Macero laboriously edited Davis' raw
improvisations to create the finished product. He believed that the
studio albums themselves were as vital as the performances on those
works.

Macero's touch-- and deftness with a razorblade, then the best way to
splice together audio tape-- can be felt on such landmark LPs as In a
Silent Way and Bitches Brew. According to the New York Times, Macero was
not involved in Columbia's reissue series of Miles Davis' sessions from
that era in largely unedited box sets, as he saw the proper LPs as the
only true "finished versions" of the work.

In addition to his role behind the boards, Macero was an accomplished
composer and saxophonist, playing in Mingus' band and recording LPs
under his own name. As a performer, he was also involved in the
proliferation of the jazz/classical hybrid Third Stream in the 1950s.
Macero also worked as a producer on Broadway cast recordings and film
soundtracks, and, after leaving Columbia in 1975, went on to work with a
diverse crew of artists like Robert Palmer and Vernon Reid.

I guess he became to Miles what Maxwell Perkins was to Thomas Wolfe. Just got the On The Corner box, which is 30% OTC great but padded with material from great albums Miles cut through '75 (like 'Get Up With It') that imo don't really belong on here. Like sticking 'Worried About You' on a "Deluxe Edition" of "Black and Blue"

Oh thats sad, he was a producing genius.
RIP Teo

Quote
john r
I guess he became to Miles what Maxwell Perkins was to Thomas Wolfe. Just got the On The Corner box, which is 30% OTC great but padded with material from great albums Miles cut through '75 (like 'Get Up With It') that imo don't really belong on here. Like sticking 'Worried About You' on a "Deluxe Edition" of "Black and Blue"

You mean the "On The Corner SESSIONS" box, right? All those tracks belong on there (and there are even a few missing ones), because they were cut at the same sessions for the album. Hence the name: "The On the Corner SESSIONS". You see?

Miles didn't cut those albums "through '75". Those albums through '75 were comprised of material he recorded for On The Corner (and Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew etc etc), but the Columbia edited and packaged as new albums, because Miles was too busy doing coke, brandy and heroin to get his ass to the studio. They did this right up to Agharta in 1979.

Anyway, if you've really got the time and patience, you'll see that "OTC" like Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson and n A Silent Way before it, owes everything to Teo Macero's peerless editing skills in the studio.

Here's the full NY Times obit:

Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y.

His death followed a long illness, his stepdaughter, Suzie Lightbourn, said.

Helping to build Miles Davis albums like “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent Way” and “Get Up With It,” Mr. Macero (pronounced TEE-oh mah-SEH-roh) used techniques partly inspired by composers like Edgard Varèse, who had been using tape-editing and electronic effects to help shape the music. Such techniques were then new to jazz and have largely remained separate from it since. But the electric-jazz albums he helped Davis create — especially “Bitches Brew,” which remains one of the best-selling albums by a jazz artist — have deeper echoes in almost 40 years of experimental pop, like work by Can, Brian Eno and Radiohead.

Davis’s routine in the late 1960s was to record a lot of music in the studio with a band, much of it improvised and based on themes and even mere chords that he would introduce on the spot. Later Mr. Macero, with Davis’s help, would splice together vamps and bits and pieces of improvisation.

For example, Mr. Macero isolated a little melodic improvisation Davis played on the trumpet for “Shhh/Peaceful” on “In a Silent Way” and used it as the theme, placing it at the beginning and the end of the piece. Even live recordings he sometimes treated as drafts; the first track of Davis’s “Live at Fillmore East,” from 1970, contains a snippet pasted in from a different song.

Mr. Macero strongly believed that the finished versions of Davis’s LPs, with all their intricate splices and sequencing — done on tape with a razor blade, in the days before digital editing — were the work of art, the entire point of the exercise. He opposed the current practice of releasing boxed sets that include all the material recorded in the studio, including alternate and unreleased takes. Mr. Macero was not involved in Columbia’s extensive reissuing of Davis’s work for the label, in lavish boxed sets from the mid-’90s until last year.

Attilio Joseph Macero was born and raised in Glens Falls, N.Y. He served in the Navy, then moved to New York in 1948 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the composer Henry Brant. In 1953 he became involved with Charles Mingus in the cooperative organization called the Jazz Composers Workshop; he played in Mingus’s other groups and put out his own records on Debut Records, the label founded by Mingus and Max Roach.

While simultaneously working as a tenor saxophonist — with Mingus, Teddy Charles and the Sandole Brothers, among others — and composing modern classical music as well as working in the classical-to-jazz idiom then called Third Stream, he joined Columbia Records in 1957. He was first hired as a music editor; in 1959 he became a staff producer.

At Columbia he worked with artists like J. J. Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Johnny Mathis, Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck, for whom he produced the famous album “Time Out.” He also produced Broadway cast albums like “A Chorus Line” and film soundtracks.

Mr. Macero left Columbia in 1975. He later worked with the singer Robert Palmer, the Lounge Lizards, Vernon Reid, D.J. Logic and others.

Besides Ms. Lightbourn, of Morristown, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jeanne, of Quogue, N.Y., and his sister, Lydia Edwards of Sarasota, Fla., and Queensbury, N.Y.