Malcolm Cecil (GB)
Born in London, England of artistic parents and formally educated in both music and physics, Malcolm became a musician, arranger, composer, record producer and audio engineer, while simultaneously pursuing his career as a technical consultant to numerous film and recording facilities throughout the world as well as lecturing on music and technical topics at schools and colleges in the UK, Africa, Russia and USA.
He engineered, co-produced and created the unique synthesizer sounds on Stevie Wonder's "Music of My Mind", "Talking Book" "Fulfillingness' First Finale" and "Innervisions" for which he was awarded the GRAMMY for best engineered non classical recording ('73) as well as awards for engineering the "Album of the Year" two years running ('73 & '74). He also played bass on the title track “Innervisions”.
Malcolm won the Melody Maker Jazz Polls as a jazz bassist, ('53, '54 & '55) and was the youngest principle ever in any BBC orchestra (Radio Orchestra, Principle Bass '65-'68). He was resident bassist at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club ('58-'65). He has played and recorded with many of the world’s finest jazz musicians including Stan Getz, J.J. Johnson, Johnny Griffin, Roland Kirk, Jim Hall, Annie Ross, The Jazz Five, Ronnie Scott, Sonny Stitt, Earnest Ranglin and Jack Costanza . He is listed in Groves "Dictionary of Jazz" and Leonard Feather's "Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 60's".
Emigrating to the USA in 1968 he became a pioneer of electronic music. He built TONTO - The Original New Timbral Orchestra - the world's first and still largest multi-timbral, polyphonic analog audio synthesizer currently installed as a working exhibit in the Canadian National Music Center in Calgary Alberta. A full chapter is devoted to TONTO in the book "Analog Days" by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (Oxford University Press). Malcolm has released four albums of his own compositions featuring TONTO.
Malcolm has produced, engineered and created unique electronic musical instrument sounds on albums by Stevie Wonder, Minnie Ripperton, The Isley Brothers, Weather Report, Little Feat, Richie Havens, Gil Scott-Heron, Quincy Jones, T-Rex, Joan Baez, Steven Stills, James Taylor, Randy Newman, the Felice Brothers and numerous other recording artists.
An expert in archiving and restoration, he recently discovered and restored a rare and valuable 1957 live recording of Miles Davis in concert, released in '05 on CBS Records ("Miles Davis - Round About Midnight-Legacy Edition").
Malcolm has provided recording, sound editing, mixing, sound FX and music scores for numerous documentaries, shorts and feature films including designing many of the sound effects for the first "Star Trek" movie and composing the music score for the TV series "Firehouse". He has 5 Platinum and 21 Gold records as producer and/or engineer and received "Q" Magazine's "Unsung Hero" award for lifetime achievement in '97 and was recently honored by the Smithsonian Institute along with Bob Moog and Keith Emerson in a three day special event "The Keyboard Meets Modern Technology" commemorating the 300th anniversary of the invention of the piano at which he gave a lecture on Synthesisizers. Malcolm received the President’s Adjunct Award for Excellence for his contribution to the mission of C-GCC in 2018.
Malcolm built, owned and operated his own recording studio, TONTO's, in Santa Monica, California ('76 - '82). He left California and relocated TONTO’s Studio to Woodstock, New York in 1998.