Beatles’ producer George Martin dies at 90

George Martin, the Beatles’ urbane producer who guided, assisted and stood aside through the band’s swift, historic transformation from rowdy club act to musical and cultural revolutionaries, has died, his management said Wednesday. He was 90.

“We can confirm that Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home yesterday evening,” Adam Sharp, a founder of CA Management, said Wednesday in an email.

He called Martin “one of music’s most creative talents and a gentleman to the end.”

He said Martin started producing records for EMI’s Parlophone label in 1950, working on comedy recordings with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and others. Martin had his first No. 1 hit in 1961 with The Temperance Seven and, with The Beatles, “helped revolutionize the art of popular music recording.”

“In a career that spanned seven decades he was an inspiration to many and is recognised globally as one of music’s most creative talents,” Sharp said. Too modest to call himself the “Fifth Beatle,” a title many felt he deserved, the tall, elegant Londoner produced some of the most popular and influential albums of modern times — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” “Abbey Road” — elevating rock LPs from ways to cash in on hit singles to art forms, “concepts.” He won six Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1999. Three years earlier, he was knighted.

Martin both witnessed and enabled the extraordinary changes of the Beatles and of the 1960s. From a raw first album in 1962 that took just a day to make, to the months-long production of “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beatles advanced by quantum steps as songwriters and sonic explorers. They not only composed dozens of classics, from “She Loves You” to “Hey Jude,” but turned the studio into a wonderland of tape loops, multi-tracking, unpredictable tempos, unfathomable segues and kaleidoscopic montages. Never again would rock music be defined by two-minute love songs or guitar-bass-drums arrangements. Lyrically and musically, anything became possible.

Source: AP