George Martin, Redefining Producer Who Guided the Beatles, Dies at 90
George Martin, the urbane English record producer who signed the Beatles to a recording contract on the small Parlophone label after every other British record company had turned them down, and who guided them in their transformation from a regional dance band into the most inventive, influential and studio-savvy rock group of the 1960s, died on Tuesday. He was 90.
“We can confirm that Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home yesterday evening,” Adam Sharp, a founder of CA Management, a British company that represented Mr. Martin, said on Wednesday in an email. Mr. Sharp did not say how Mr. Martin had died.
“God bless George Martin,” Ringo Starr, the former Beatle, wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Martin helped redefine a record producer’s role in pop music. He was one of a handful of pop producers — Phil Spector and Quincy Jones among them — to become almost as famous as the musicians they recorded. And when he left Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI Records, to start his own production company in 1965, his reputation as the producer of the Beatles helped raise the stature of record production as an independent career, rather than a record label function.
By: Allan Kozinn
Source: NY Times
