Arif Mardin: The music producer with over 1,000 mainstream credits
Apart from the fact that Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and Chaka Khan are all fierce feminist icons in their own right, they’ve also enjoyed success through one specific collaborator, Arif Mardin, the coveted Turkish-American music producer who has worked with hundreds of artists across every genre you could think of.
Though his name hasn’t quite reached household status, he spent three decades at Atlantic Records, boasting an enviable career that has undeniably touched us all. Born in Istanbul into a renowned family, Mardin wasn’t exactly surrounded by song, his father being the co-owner of a petroleum gas station chain.
At the end of his teenage years, Mardin studied at the London School of Economics. He’d picked up a love of jazz through his sister and, at this point, was an accomplished orchestrator and arranger, but a music career was never really on his cards. A single night in 1956 changed his fate entirely; at a concert in Ankara, he met the American jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones. Enthralled by his talent, Mardin became the first recipient of the Quincy Jones Scholarship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Across his electrifying, dizzying experience of the most exciting industry out there, Mardin left no stone unturned. During Franklin’s time at Atlantic Records, Mardin arranged and produced huge era-defining hits like ‘Respect’, ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You’, and ‘Chain of Fools’. There are plenty of tremendous stories about Mardin, such as when working on The Bee Gees’ 1975 Main Course album track ‘Nights on Broadway’, he heard a queer rumbling in Barry Gibb’s chest, and soon made the famous discovery of Barry Gibb’s distinctive falsetto. This quickly became a familiar trademark of the band throughout the disco era.
Some more names of people he had in his phonebook were Phil Collins, The Rascals, Average White Band, Hall & Oates, David Bowie, Queen, Wilson Pickett, Willie Nelson and John Prine; quite evidently, the man was somehow superhuman.
It might be hard for the average music-lover to pick a highlight out of such an illustrious, jam-packed career, but Mardin easily picked his most cherished project: the producer considered All My Friends Are Here, an album recorded in 2005 and 2006 and released in 2010, his life’s work.
Symbolic of his collaborative ethos, the brilliant album features performances by Bette Midler, Chaka Khan, David Sanborn, Norah Jones, Carly Simon, Phil Collins, and many more, with Khan famously noting of the endeavour, “He showed me what it was really like to sing jazz“.
Back in the olden days, five decades would mark the average life expectancy, within which one might hope to find love, have a family, and ensure their legacy through their lineage, but Mardin, rather, collected unfathomable accolades, boasting over 40 gold and platinum albums, over 15 Grammy nominations, and 12 Grammy Awards.
Sadly, he passed away at his home in New York in 2006, following a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer. Through music and friendship, he had touched many, and among the swathes of mourners at the funeral event was Bee Gees’ soloist Robin Gibb and his wife Dwina. Truly, a life well spent.
