Malcolm Cecil obituary

Musician whose championing of the synthesiser helped shape a new sound for Stevie Wonder in the early 1970s

When Stevie Wonder met Malcolm Cecil at a New York recording studio one May weekend in 1971, he was holding a copy of Zero Time, the album of electronic music that Cecil and Bob Margouleff had just released under the name of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. A couple of weeks away from his 21st birthday, Wonder was looking for a way to establish his musical independence. Cecil invited him in, demonstrated the newly developed Moog synthesisers with which they were working, and began a relationship that would help transform Wonder, already a successful soul singer, into an international superstar.

Cecil, who has died aged 84, was an English musician who had once been the double bassist in the house band at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. But it was his other vocation, as a recording-studio technician, that took him to New York and a partnership with Margouleff, a sound-effects expert.

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by Richard Williams via Electronic music | The Guardian