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    Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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    She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      Herbert Deutsch, Co-Creator of the Moog Synthesizer, Dies at 90

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      An experimental composer, Mr. Deutsch collaborated with Robert Moog to create the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music, launching a revolution in electronic music.Herbert Deutsch, who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, a groundbreaking instrument that opened up new frontiers in electronic music and brought a futuristic sheen to landmark recordings by countless artists, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his wife, Nancy Deutsch, said.Mr. Deutsch, a Hofstra University music professor and experimental composer, joined forces with Robert Moog, an engineer and inventor, to introduce a modular voltage-controlled synthesizer in 1964.With its otherworldly sounds, which could call to mind both a Gothic cathedral’s pipe organ and an extraterrestrial mothership, the Moog (the name rhymes with “vogue”) was the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music. Its debut marked the dawn of the synthesizer age.“There were plugged-in instruments before the Moog synthesizer, but none arrived on the scene with such awe-inspiring potential,” Ted Gioia, the music writer and author of the 2019 book “Music: A Subversive History,” wrote in an email. “The first recordings of Moog music from the 1960s felt like messages from the future, telling us that all the rules were going to change.”Many of those recordings turned out to define their eras. George Harrison purchased an oversized early Moog, which the Beatles used to color multiple tracks on their 1969 album, “Abbey Road,” including “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and Harrison’s composition “Here Comes the Sun.”The Moog reached a broader market in 1971 with the introduction of the compact Minimoog Model D, the first widely used portable synthesizer.“Within months of the first commercial Moog synthesizers showing up in retail stores, commercial recordings started to sound different,” Mr. Gioia said. The futuristic synthesizer beeped and booped its way onto the pop charts in 1972 with “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, and went on to become a driving force behind landmark songs like Kraftwerk’s arty “Autobahn,” Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” (1977), Parliament’s epic funk freak-out “Flashlight” (1977) and Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk crossover hit “Rockit” (1983).The Minimoog Model D, introduced in 1971, was the first widely used portable synthesizer.Moog Music Inc.Even when it was not the featured instrument, the Moog provided moody textures to timeless songs like Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” (1973) and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (1975). It also provided throbbing bass tracks to Michael Jackson’s mega-selling 1982 album, “Thriller.”While Mr. Moog handled the technical side of his namesake invention, during its creation Mr. Deutsch provided a practicing musician’s perspective, which was crucial in transforming it from an electronic gadget into a viable instrument.“Herb Deutsch was the catalyst for the invention of the synthesizer,” Michelle Moog-Koussa, Mr. Moog’s daughter and the executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, said in a phone interview. “That is no overstatement.”“Herb would say, ‘This is what I need,’” she added, “and Dad would build the circuitry. It was a true partnership between a designer and a musician.”Despite his impact on music of all genres, Mr. Deutsch was the last person to trumpet his accomplishments.“I’m unwilling to go around shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m a part of the history of music,’” he said in a video interview with the Moog Music company in February. “But I do understand that Bob and I are an important part of music history, because that idea has been used in every direction that music can go into.”Herbert Arnold Deutsch was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Hempstead, N.Y., the youngest of three children of Barnet and Miriam (Myersburg) Deutsch. His father was a clerical worker for the Veterans Health Administration, his mother a bookkeeper. With money tight, his parents also ran a small chicken farm on their property.In a detached garage next to the farm’s largest coop Mr. Deutsch, at age 3, had his first musical epiphany.“For some reason, I had picked up a long straight stick and, holding it in my right hand, was tapping it down on the dirt floor,” he recalled in a 2018 interview with Parma Recordings, a music production company. “At some point in this meaningless action I heard a note whenever I tapped the floor.”“It was a C,” he continued. “Then I tapped the floor an inch or so to the right and heard a D.”Soon he began to “tap out some melodies of music that I recognized as well as music that was new to me,” he said. “Suddenly, I stopped in terror. Of course I could not hear those actual pitches, or was the dirt floor truly magical?”The German rock band Kraftwerk was among the earliest exponents of the Moog synthesizer.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesHe started piano lessons a year later, and at 11, inspired by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, turned his sights to the trumpet. He played in bands throughout high school and during his years at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.One of his best-known compositions was the haunting, multi-media track “A Christmas Carol, 1963,” an aural collage interspersed with recorded news snippets and medieval chants composed to honor the four Black girls murdered in the infamous Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that year.His performance of another modernist composition at the New York studio of the sculptor Jason Seley in January 1964 earned a positive review in The New Yorker. More significant, however, was the fact that Mr. Moog was in the audience.Mr. Moog, whom Mr. Deutsch had met at a music trade show, was working on his Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell University while running the small R.A. Moog Company, based in Trumansburg N.Y., which manufactured his versions of the theremin, the electronic instrument whose eerie space-age sound was a staple of 1950s science-fiction movie soundtracks.After the performance, the men and their wives went to dinner, where Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Moog discussed new possibilities for electronic music. Mr. Deutsch ended up commissioning a new electronic instrument, to be designed by Mr. Moog in collaboration with Mr. Deutsch.With Mr. Deutsch advising, Mr. Moog designed an instrument consisting of modules linked by patch cords that allowed musicians to create their own vast array of previously unheard sounds from scratch, whether to simulate acoustic instruments or to create their own distinctly electronic sonic palette.That same year, Mr. Deutsch wrote “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” the first composition for the Moog. Soon he was giving pioneering performances at Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 1968, Wendy Carlos released “Switched-On Bach,” a watershed moment for the Moog, launching Baroque musical into the Apollo age and the Moog into the bedrooms and dorm rooms of baby boomers. Ms. Carlos also used the Moog to conjure the foreboding sound of a dystopian future on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, “A Clockwork Orange.”After his work with Mr. Moog, Mr. Deutsch turned his attention back to teaching at Hofstra. In 1976, he published his first of three books, “Synthesis: An Introduction to the History, Theory & Practice of Electronic Music.”But in the late 1970s, he joined the Moog Company as marketing director and consulted on new synthesizer designs.By that point, sales of the American-made Moogs had begun to slide as cheaper Japanese synthesizers from companies like Roland and Yamaha came to dominate the market.In addition to his wife, Mr. Deutsch is survived by two children, Lisbeth Mitchell and Edmund Deutsch, from his marriage to Margaret Deutsch, who died in 1996; three stepchildren, Cheryl Sterling, Adam Blau and Daniel Rogge; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.The Moog synthesizer enjoyed a renaissance beginning in the 1990s, thanks to bands like the Beastie Boys, Wilco and Portishead. But by then, Mr. Deutsch had moved on from his days helping design synthesizers. He was, after all, a musician at heart, not an inventor.“A year ago I texted him to discuss something, and he said, ‘I can’t talk tonight because I have band practice,’” Ms. Moog-Koussa said. “He was 89 years old.” More

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      Vangelis, Composer Best Known for ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 79

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      A master of the synthesizer, he won an Oscar for that film’s score, and his memorable theme song became a No. 1 pop hit.Vangelis, the Greek film composer and synthesizer virtuoso whose soaring music for “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 movie about two British runners in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, won the Academy Award for best original score, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 79.The cause was heart failure, said Lefteris Zermas, a frequent collaborator.A self-taught musician, Vangelis (pronounced vang-GHELL-iss), who was born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, recorded solo albums and wrote music for television and for films including “Blade Runner” (1982), “Missing” (1982) and “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992). But he remains best known for scoring “Chariots of Fire.”The most familiar part of that score — modern electronic music composed for a period film — was heard during the opening credits: a blend of acoustic piano and synthesizer that provided lush, pulsating accompaniment to the sight of about two dozen young men running in slow motion on a nearly empty beach, mud splattering their white shirts and shorts, pain and exhilaration creasing their faces.Vangelis’s music became as popular as the film itself, directed by Hugh Hudson, which won four Oscars, including best picture.The opening song, also called “Chariots of Fire,” was released as a single and spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including a week at No. 1. The soundtrack album remained on the Billboard 200 chart for 30 weeks and spent four weeks in the top spot.Vangelis said the score immediately came to him as he watched the film in partly edited form.“I try to put myself in the situation and feel it,” he told The Washington Post in 1981. “I’m a runner at the time, or in the stadium, or alone in the dressing room … and then I compose … and the moment is fruitful and honest, I think.”Vangelis recorded a track with 25 children from the Orleans Infant School in Twickenham, England, for a 1979 single, “The Long March.”Fred Mott/Getty ImagesHe was working at the time in his London studio with a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer.“It’s the most important synthesizer in my career and the best analog synthesizer design there has ever been,” he told Prog, an alternative music website, in 2016, adding, “It’s the only synthesizer I could describe as being a real instrument.”For “Blade Runner,” a science-fiction film noir set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Vangelis created a score to match the director Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision. He augmented the CS-80 synthesizer, which produced the sounds of horns and bass, with an electric piano and a second synthesizer that emulated strings.“What interested me the most for this film was the atmosphere and the general feeling, rather than the distinct themes,” he said on a fan site, Nemo Studios, named for the studio in London that he built and for many years worked out of. “The visual atmosphere of the film is unique, and it is that I tried to enhance as much as I could.”The “Blade Runner” soundtrack album was not released until 1994, but it was well received. Zac Johnson of Allmusic wrote that “the listener can almost hear the indifferent winds blowing through the neon and metal landscapes of Los Angeles in 2019.”Vangelis at the French Culture Ministry in Paris in 1992.Georges Bendrihem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVangelis was born on March 29, 1943, in Agria, Greece, and grew up in Athens. He started playing piano at 4 and gave his first public performance two years later. He did not have much training and never learned to read music.“Music goes through me,” he told The Associated Press in 1982. “It’s not by me.”In the 1960s, he played organ with the Forminx, a Greek rock band. He left Greece for Paris in 1967 after the military coup there.Vangelis was a founder of Aphrodite’s Child, a progressive rock band that had hit singles in Europe and enjoyed some success on FM radio in the United States. The band released a few albums, including “666,” which was inspired by the Book of Revelations. When Aphrodite’s Child broke up, he moved to London in 1974.In the 1970s he began composing music for television shows like the French documentary series “L’Apocalypse des Animaux” (1973), as well as working on solo albums and film projects. Music from his album “China” was used by Mr. Scott in the memorable 1979 “Share the Fantasy” commercial for Chanel No. 5.He also became friendly with Jon Anderson, the lead vocalist of the British prog-rock band Yes. Vangelis was invited to replace the keyboardist Rick Wakeman when he left the band, but he turned down the offer. He and Mr. Anderson subsequently collaborated, as Jon and Vangelis, on four albums, including “The Friends of Mr. Cairo,” between 1980 and 1991.Vangelis’s music was also heard on the scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series, “Cosmos.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Among the films Vangelis scored after “Chariots of Fire” were “Antarctica” (1983), a Japanese movie about scientists on an expedition; “The Bounty” (1984), with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson; Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” (2004), about the Macedonian king; and “El Greco” (2007), a Greek film about the artist.He also composed music for spectacles like the 2000 and 2004 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup. And in 2001 he recorded a choral symphony, “Mythodea,” which he had adapted from earlier work, at the Temple of Zeus in Athens to commemorate NASA’s Odyssey mission to Mars.“I made up the name Mythodea from the words myth and ode,” Vangelis said in an interview for NASA’s website in 2001. “And I felt in it a kind of shared or common path with NASA’s current exploration of the planet. Whatever we use as a key — music, mythology, science, mathematics, astronomy — we are all working to decode the mystery of creation, searching for our deepest roots.”Vangelis performed in concert with a choir in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1991.Rob Verhorst/Redferns) More

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      Joel Chadabe, Explorer of Electronic Music’s Frontier, Dies at 82

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      As both a composer and an advocate, Mr. Chadabe devoted himself to what one music critic called the “marriage between humans and their computers.”Joel Chadabe, a composer who helped pioneer electronic music in the 1960s, later developing compositional software programs and founding the Electronic Music Foundation, an advocacy organization for electronic music, died on May 2 at his home in Albany, N.Y. He was 82.His wife, Françoise Chadabe, said the cause was ampullary cancer, a rare form similar to pancreatic cancer.In 1965, when Mr. Chadabe was 27 and computer music was in its nascence, he was asked by the State University of New York at Albany to run its electronic music studio. He had recently graduated from Yale’s music school, and his sensibilities lay with jazz and opera, but he needed a job, so he accepted. From his perch at the university, Mr. Chadabe began to explore the wonders of making music with machines.“I took to it, I think, because for me it was the frontier,” he said in a 2013 interview with the University of Minnesota. “It was the new frontier of music, and I saw unlimited possibilities.”Early on, Mr. Chadabe (pronounced CHA-da-bee) commissioned Bob Moog, who had just started developing a commercial synthesizer, to build one for the studio. He could initially afford only part of the synthesizer (which he powered with a car battery), but after securing enough funding he asked Mr. Moog to create what he called a “super synthesizer.” The result, known as CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio), was a system that filled an entire room at the university and offered a vast range of sonic capabilities. Students were soon lining up to experiment with it.Before long, Mr. Chadabe found himself mesmerized by the machine as well. At night, he would wait for the campus to clear out so that he could sequester himself with the synthesizer, twisting its knobs to generate soundscapes. He went on to compose electronic music prolifically and to release several experimental albums, including “After Some Songs” (1995), which featured his abstractions of jazz standards, and “Many Times …” (2004).Mr. Chadabe hosted concerts at the university, to which he invited avant-garde composers like Alvin Lucier and Julius Eastman to perform works. In 1972, John Cage visited the studio to tape “Bird Cage,” a sound collage that featured shrill chirps that he had recorded in aviaries. Mr. Chadabe also acquired an early Synclavier for the school, a digital synthesizer that was later used by artists like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Genesis.Reviewing a 1983 concert performance in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote, “Mr. Chadabe seemed everywhere to be asking gentle, unassertive questions about who will lead and who will follow in this new marriage between humans and their computers, about how fully and how well people will cope with the potential riches and intimidating complexities of this newest addition to our family of musical instruments.”In the 1980s, Mr. Chadabe began developing compositional software programs that musicians could use to make electronic music at home. He founded a company called Intelligent Music, which released programs like M, Jam Factory and UpBeat, which the band New Order used in recording its 1989 album, “Technique.”In 1994, he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of electronic music. The group presented concerts and festivals; had a record label that released work by composers including Cage, Laurie Spiegel and Iannis Xenakis; and maintained an online CD store.“A lot of important people in the electronic scene weren’t exactly high profile in terms of the public, but Joel was incredibly interconnected with the community, and he reached a lot of people with the Electronic Music Foundation,” said Kyle Gann, who was the longtime new-music critic for The Village Voice. “He had a tremendous underground influence.”Mr. Chadabe in 1993, a year before he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of computerized music.Seth McBrideAs artists like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers enjoyed mainstream success in the 1990s, Mr. Chadabe felt it was vital to document electronic music’s history while its pioneers were still alive. He published the book “Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music,” which featured more than 150 interviews with figures like Mr. Moog, the composers Milton Babbitt, Pierre Henry and Éliane Radigue, and Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland Corporation and an architect of MIDI. (Inevitably, Mr. Chadabe’s own contributions were also included.)While he interviewed his subjects, Mr. Chadabe tried to divine what precisely it was that had compelled them all to make music with machines.“In writing the book I asked people, ‘Why do you use electronics?’” he recalled in his University of Minnesota interview. “One of the answers that I received mostly was. ‘To make any sound.’”Joel Avon Chadabe was born on Dec. 12, 1938, in the Bronx and grew up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood. His father, Solon, was a lawyer. His mother, Sylvia (Cohen) Chadabe, was a homemaker.Joel attended the private Bentley School in Manhattan and studied classical piano. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but instead he studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1959. At Yale, he studied with the composer Elliott Carter, and after he acquired a master’s in 1962, he continued his studies with Mr. Carter in Italy. He was in Rome when he heard about an unusual job opening at SUNY Albany.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Benjamin, and a sister, Susan Strzemien.As he grew older, Mr. Chadabe became a passionate environmentalist, and in 2006 he started the Ear to the Earth music festival, which featured performances of electronic music themed around nature. At the festival in New York that year, one composition included the rustling of pine beetles, and another utilized a soundscape of the city’s pigeons.Mr. Chadabe retired from SUNY Albany in the late 1990s but continued to teach electronic music courses at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and Bennington College, where he had been teaching as an adjunct since the 1970s.Well into his 70s, Mr. Chadabe remained tantalized by the possibilities of electronic music, whose potential he felt was only just being understood.“Electronics has opened up an amazing world of sound, and more than just an amazing world of sound, an amazing way to understand sound,” he said in 2013. “We are really just beginning to get a good handle on how sound works and how we can transform it.” More

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      Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.Lou Ottens in 1988, 25 years after he led the team that introduced the cassette tape to the world.Credit…Philips Company ArchivesMarch 11, 2021, 6:58 p.m. ETIn these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, and to record it conveniently as well. “It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens said in 2013.Credit…Philips Company Archives“It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of that wallet-size breakthrough. “It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation.”Mr. Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, in the Netherlands, Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips, said. He was 94.In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside.“The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”Not quite. Cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a retro sort of way. Mr. Ottens, though, was not one of them.“Now it’s nostalgia, more or less,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia.”Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from what is now Delft University of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began working at Philips in 1952.He became head of product development in Hasselt in 1957 and began overseeing the development of a portable reel-to-reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a cassette tape, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the very first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testimony to his foresight and innovation.”The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery was quickly proved.“Our cassette was extensively viewed and photographed by the Japanese,” Mr. Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. Not shocking, but too many hit the market. Then it becomes a big mess.”Mr. Ottens in 2013. When he conceived of the idea of a cassette tape half a century earlier, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.Credit…Jerry Lampen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPhilips made its licensing available free, largely at Mr. Ottens’s urging, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.“That’s the reason that it didn’t become obsolete too early,” Mr. Ottens said in the film, “and it’s taken 50 years to die.”Philips says 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before shifting to the CD. And before that innovation was released, he had shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system intended to compete with VHS; it, too, did not catch on.He retired from Philips in 1986. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.The makers of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” took a romanticized view of the cassette and its importance to the countless people who made use of it in myriad ways, but Mr. Taylor said Mr. Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.“Lou was never comfortable taking credit for the cassette, or for the incalculable impact it had on the history of music,” Mr. Taylor said. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic answer to the cumbersome nature of the reel-to-reel.”In the film, Mr. Ottens and three of the men who worked under him on the cassette project reminisce. Mr. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little gizmo.“We expected it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More