Remembering New Music Inspiration Arif Mardin (1932-2006)
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with contributions from Rob Schwimmer
Record producer and arranger Arif Mardin died of cancer on June 25, 2006. Mainstream media is abuzz, and rightly so, with talk of his successes and influence on the music business, stemming largely from his long associations with Atlantic Records and monster hit-makers such as Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, Phil Collins, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, Judy Collins, Hall & Oates, and more recently the mellow, Grammy-garlanded Norah Jones. But Mardin also had strong connections to contemporary composition.
A lifelong fan of the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, Mardin actively composed chamber and orchestral music throughout his life. He also composed many works for big band, some of which have been performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He even wrote an opera, I Will Wait, which was given readings in New York in the mid-’90s.
Born in Istanbul in 1932, Mardin emigrated to the United States upon being awarded the first-ever Quincy Jones scholarship to study at the Berklee School of Music in 1956. Aside from the pop stars whose recordings he helped to define, Mardin worked with a wide array of musicians—from jazz greats Coleman Hawkins and Freddie Hubbard to Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. And Arif was known to spice up tracks with contributions from a few downtown ruffians brought to his attention by his son, Joe Mardin, a prodigious talent himself. These new music denizens include avant songstress Amy Kohn, pianist/thereminist Rob Schwimmer (from the comedy-experimental music duo Polygraph Lounge), and me.
I’m certainly more “new music” than “pop” (what do these terms mean, anyhow?), but Arif played an important role in my career. Joe and he produced a record of mine, a single, on Atlantic Records in 1986. Joe had “discovered” me at Danceteria in ’85, among eight or so other acts opening for Madonna at a benefit concert. We connected not long after Arif’s collaboration with the archly political punk band Scritti Politti, for whom he played midwife to their rebirth as a sleek, arty, electro funk outfit.
Although my record was indeed pretty pop—for me at least—it was maybe the most twisted dance record Atlantic ever released, complete with Fred Frith on guitar, a plethora of experimental bleeps, tape loops, and noises.
I won’t soon forget Arif Mardin mounting the stairs to my cluttered Hoboken digs to see my tape loops (held suspended from toy plastic darts) and processing gear in action. In 1985, when I told Arif I wanted “prepared guitar” on my record, he was all over it and hired Frith on that recommendation alone. Later, Arif thought nothing of bringing me and my 4-track into Atlantic Studios to dupe a multiply-spliced tape loop onto a Chaka Khan remix, or to play the Musical Shoes (my home-made gate-triggering percussion pads) for Yemenite dance-crossover Ofra Haza. I think he was tickled to see my scruffy setup next to the gargantuan consoles and sound baffles of the studios where we worked.
But aside from these more nomimally experimental forays, Arif Mardin was constantly extending the language of music in everything he did, even as he was absorbing all that was around him (or rather, around all of us). Isn’t that as good a definition of “new music” as any?
Early on, Mardin embraced sampling, rap, and the burgeoning field of the extended club mix, culminating in a masterwork of sorts, Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” (1984). Starting from the relatively straightforward arrangement by the song’s composer, Prince, Arif called on rapper Melle Mel (of Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five) to deliver what would become the iconic cut-up, “Chaka-Chaka Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Khan”. Arif layered in a young Stevie Wonder in the form of a sample, and the contemporary Stevie Wonder on solo harmonica. Arif himself tied it all together, delineating sections with some inspired musique concrète, handling the razor and splicing tape himself. “I Feel For You” is kaleidoscopic: crammed with ear candy yet architecturally sound. In Mardin’s hands, the conventions of collage, remix, and extended groove expand song form, rather than reduce it.
At the time of his death, he was writing charts for his third solo album, a collection of complex, jazz-inflected art songs; it will be completed with Joe Mardin at the helm. Word has it that not only will the album showcase a lesser-heard side of its creator, but some of its more demanding charts have been stretching the talents of more than a few of the “special guests” on hand.
He will be missed.