[ image malcolm1 type=center ]

As a longtime synth geek, I sometimes wondered whatever happened to TONTO, the modular behemoth featured on Stevie Wonder's great seventies records Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and on one of the greatest electronic albums ever, Zero Time, written and performed by the enigmatic TONTO's Expanding Head Band. It was easy to assume that TONTO (an acronym for "The Original New Timbral Orchestra") had been consigned to the dustbin of musical history — after all, this was the age of miniaturization. And then I heard from a friend, the science historian Trevor Pinch, that Malcom Cecil — co-creator of TONTO, half of the Expanding Head Band, and the "Fulfillingness" of that cryptic album title — lived not far away, but near Saugerties, New York — and that TONTO was alive and well!

WHAT'S INSIDE TONTO?

2 complete Moog Model III's

2 ARP 2600's

4 Oberheim SEM's

More modules by Malcom, Serge Tcherepnin, and Armand Pascetta Roland and EMS sequencers Roland, Moog, and AKS keyboard controllers Moog ribbon controller

2 Moog 1130 drum controllers

Roland MIDI-CV converters

128 feet of power cable left over (Malcom swears) from the construction of Apollo 11

As it happens, Malcom Cecil is also an accomplished jazz bassist, a Grammy- winning record producer, and a witness to the early days of tape operating — and he is presently involved in a project to re-master rare live jazz recordings, originally made exclusively for broadcast, from lacquer discs. Trevor, who wrote about Malcom in his superb synth-history book Analog Days, suggested we pay the great man a visit. And so, on a sunny Sunday in August, we headed out for the Hudson River Valley, along with our friend, photographer and electronic music composer James Spitznagel.

Malcom lives with his wife, Polly, in a cozy house on a secluded street a couple of hours north of New York City. A wiry man with a wild halo of gray hair, Malcom is ebullient, cheerful, intelligent and enthusiastic — a personality big enough to withstand the upstaging force of TONTO! After a delicious brunch prepared by Polly (and a look at her amazing sculptures made out of molded styrofoam packing material), we headed out to the barn where Malcom's studio, and TONTO, are kept.

The studio is packed with eye candy: gold records on the walls from gigs with Stevie Wonder, the Isley Brothers, and Bobby Womack; a Studer A-820 and a Scully 2-track; a homemade adjustable tape delay, called "The Elephant Nose Machine" that Malcom made out of a defunct 3M 1" 8-track. Malcom records onto Alesis HD24s and Tascam DA98s and DA38s, through a Mackie D8B digital mixer and a pair of Genelec S30Cs. He also uses SADiE mastering software ("It replaced Sonic Solutions when they dumped audio"). And then there's TONTO, filling up half the room, the giant synthesizer looks like the control panel of a Russian nuclear power plant, exuding the awesome power of unreproducible technology. We spend a few minutes jamming with it as sound pours through two large monitors — JBL 4331s that Malcom has torn apart and rebuilt to make room for two 15" "mystery woofers".

For the interview, we sit inside a Buckminster- Fulleresque enclosure, the remains of an aborted interactive surround-sound project, which seems to have a calming effect on all of us. Beside us a Conn Strobotuner tracks our every word, desperately trying to get us in tune. Conversation with Malcom is like navigating a river — there's no stopping it, you can only hope to divert it. Over the next few hours we hear enough great stories for five magazine articles, and I know that it's going to be hard to pare them down to one!

We open our discussion with a bit of history — Malcom's childhood. He came from a musical family. His grandfather, born in the Bronx, was a theater organist and played in the Times Square movie theater. Malcom's grandfather fought the Kaiser in Europe in the First World War. The same bullet that injured his shoulder went on to kill his brother. His nurse in the army hospital would become Malcom's grandmother.

Malcom's mother was an accomplished pianist and violinist and played accordion with a gypsy band. His father was the band's manager, and he played the saxophone. Malcom played the piano (and a tiny custom-made accordion!) but gave up lessons when he realized, at kindergarten, that most families weren't musical at all. Eventually he would excel at science as well, taking physics at his polytechnic grammar school, and, later, engineering at technical college. Around this time he picked up music again, learned to play the drums and bass, and worked his way, as a bass player, into considerable prominence with Dil Jones' jazz trio, at Ronnie Scott's London jazz club, and eventually in the BBC orchestra. A stint in the RAF as a radar operator introduced him to the control voltages that he would later use as a synthesist. At the start of his engineering career, he was stationed in Newcastle, where he was working on bombing trajectories for the Air Force.

Issue 44 Interviews

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