Phil Ramone, a prolific record producer and engineer who worked with
some of the biggest music stars of the last 50 years, including Ray
Charles, Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Barbra Streisand,
died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 79. Though it was widely reported
that he was 72, public records and his family confirm that he was born
Jan. 5, 1934.
Phil Ramone, left, and Paul Simon, won the Grammy for
best album for “Still Crazy After All These Years” in 1976.
His death was confirmed by his son Matthew. He did not immediately give
the cause, but Mr. Ramone was reported to have been admitted to a
Manhattan hospital in late February for treatment of an aortic aneurysm.
In his 2007 memoir, “Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music,”
written with Charles L. Granata, Mr. Ramone defined the role of record
producer as roughly equivalent to that of a film director, creating and
managing an environment in which to coax the best work out of his
performers.
“But, unlike a director (who is visible, and often a celebrity in his
own right), the record producer toils in anonymity,” he wrote. “We ply
our craft deep into the night, behind locked doors. And with few
exceptions, the fruit of our labor is seldom launched with the glitzy
fanfare of a Hollywood premiere.”
Mr. Ramone’s career was one of those exceptions. He was a trusted
craftsman and confidant in the industry who was also one of the handful
of producers widely known to the public. He won 14 Grammy Awards,
including producer of the year, nonclassical, in 1981, and three for
album of the year, for Mr. Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years”
in 1976, Mr. Joel’s “52nd Street” in 1980, and Mr. Charles’s duets
album, “Genius Loves Company,” in 2005. He also produced music for
television and film, winning an Emmy Award as the sound mixer for a 1973
special on CBS, “Duke Ellington ... We Love You Madly.”
Mr. Ramone was born in South Africa and grew up in Brooklyn. His father
died when he was young, and his mother worked in a department store. A
classical violin prodigy, he studied at the Juilliard School but soon
drifted toward jazz and pop, and apprenticed at a recording studio,
J.A.C. Recording.
In 1958, he co-founded A & R Recording, a studio on West 48th Street
in Manhattan, and built a reputation as a versatile engineer, working
on pop fare like Lesley Gore as well as jazz by John Coltrane and Quincy
Jones. He ran the sound when Marilyn Monroe cooed “Happy Birthday” to
President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and three years later won his first
Grammy as the engineer on Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s landmark album
“Getz/Gilberto.”
As a producer, he had a particularly close association with Mr. Joel and
Mr. Simon; the back cover of Mr. Joel’s 1977 album “The Stranger”
features a photograph of Mr. Ramone posing with Mr. Joel and his band at
a New York restaurant.
“I always thought of Phil Ramone as the most talented guy in my band,”
Mr. Joel said in a statement on Saturday. “He was the guy that no one
ever, ever saw onstage. He was with me as long as any of the musicians I
ever played with — longer than most. So much of my music was shaped by
him and brought to fruition by him.”
Mr. Ramone’s relationships with those men were deep enough that he named
two of his sons after them: Simon and William (known as B. J.); they
survive him, along with Matthew, his third son, and his wife, Karen.
As a producer, Mr. Ramone was known for a conservative sound rooted in
jazz and traditional pop, and in later years his biggest successes
included albums with Mr. Charles, Tony Bennett, Elton John and others.
But he was also a proponent of new technologies. He was an early
advocate for digital recording, and pushed for Mr. Joel’s “52nd Street”
to be one of the first commercially released albums on compact disc, in
1982. Mr. Sinatra’s 1993 album “Duets,” featuring stars like Bono, Ms.
Streisand and Natalie Cole, was made by connecting Mr. Sinatra’s studio
in Los Angeles with others around the world using fiber-optic cables.
In an interview
with Billboard magazine in 1996, Mr. Ramone explained why he believed a
producer should not leave too much of his “stamp” on a recording.
“If our names were on the front cover, it’d be different, but it’s not
on the front cover, and the audience doesn’t care,” he said. “If you
think you have a style and you perpetrate that onto people, you’re
hurting the very essence of their creativity.”
“The reward of producing,” he continued, “comes when somebody inside the
record company who has a lot to do with what’s going on actually calls
you and says, ‘Boy, this record really came out great.’ Or when other
artists call you and want to work with you.”
source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/arts/music/phil-ramone-record-producer-and-winner-of-14-grammys-dies-at-79.html?_r=0
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