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Obituaries
Phil Ramone 1943-2013
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 3 April 2013
US producer Phil Ramone, who worked with artists including Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Paul Simon, died on Saturday, two months after undergoing surgery for an aortic aneurysm. He was 79.
Born in South Africa in 1934, Ramone showed musical talent from an early age, beginning to play the violin at just three years old. Later his family moved to the US, settling in Brooklyn, and as a teenager he studied to be a classical violinist at the Juilliard School.
However, by this time popular music had begun to pull his attention away from classical and he became interested in songwriting and production. At 20 years old, in 1958, he opened a recording studio in Manhattan with original business partner Jack Arnold, taking the initials from their surnames to name it A&R Recording.
The studio, and Ramone (as a sound engineer), quickly gained a good reputation, by the early 60s attracting many big names, particularly in jazz, such as John Coltrane. In 1965, he won the first of fifteen Grammys for his engineering work on Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s ‘Getz/Gilberto’ album.
Ramone subsequently began to work more with pop artists, and picked up more work as a producer, his first on Burt Bacharach’s ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’ album, while Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ won him his first Grammy as in a producing role. He also acted as engineer on Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’.
As well as being an accomplished producer, earning him the nickname the ‘Pope Of Pop’, Ramone was also at the forefront of many technical innovations in studio recording and music in a wider sense, as a founder member of the Music & Engineering Technology Alliance (META).
He pioneered the use of fibre-optic telephone lines to record different contributors in studios around the world when recording Frank Sinatra’s ‘Duets’ album in 1993. And it was a Ramone-produced album, Billy Joel’s ’52nd Street’, that was the first commercially released CD.
Ramone is survived by his wife Karen, and their sons Matt, BJ and Simon.
