eading over some of the obituary notices of record producer Arif Mardin, who died of pancreatic cancer on June 24 at the age of 74, I'm struck by a few things. The most obvious being just how vast was his list of credits. Actually, this wasn't a complete shock: for years, growing up surrounded by and immersed in so much vinyl, "Arif Mardin" was one of those semi-legendary back-of-the-LP-jacket names you'd encounter every so often, interchangeable in my uneducated mind from "Bob Ludwig," "Jack Douglas," "Ed Stasium," "Tony Visconti," "Phil Ramone" (who were these people?). Eventually, I did start to connect some dots, though up until reading his death notices I mainly associated Mardin with the Bee Gees's 1975 LP, Main Course—the group's bold foray into disco—but also with Chaka Khan's 1983 hit, "I Feel For You," and two very much played-to-death albums: Dusty Springfield's landmark 1968 recording, Dusty in Memphis (a collaborative production with Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler), and Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche '85. A phenomenal little streak of music, to be sure, but I had no idea that Mardin's imprint was also on such venerable pop/R&B standards as the Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'," Brook Benton's "Rainy Night in Georgia," Aretha Franklin's "Day Dreaming," Phil Collins's "Against All Odds" (don't laugh—it's a good recording), Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway's "Where Is the Love," Average White Band's "Pick up the Pieces," and Hall & Oates's "She's Gone." That's but a miniscule percentage of popular Mardin-associated titles; it doesn't even begin to take into account scads of other jazz, soul, folk, and adult contemporary recordings he produced, arranged, and/or engineered in a career that started more than a decade before I was even born.

Which brings me to the second thing that struck me about the guy: his longevity. Even if you only consider Mardin's career in the field of pop music, starting in 1966 with the Young Rascals (this means ignoring a huge chunk of his work, but let's just say) his achievements look somewhat profound. "Produced pop hits for almost 40 years": that's something very few, if any, producers can claim with any degree of legitimacy. And while I'm certainly not suggesting that the music Mardin produced in the last 20 years of his life was anywhere near as epochal as the music he produced in the 20 years prior to that—his imprint in recent times has tended towards the Adult Contemporary (and frequently shlocky) side of the spectrum—he certainly had an ear for hits right up to the present decade, the strongest evidence of which is his work with Norah Jones (if you think you're a Norah hater, get over yourself for three minutes and listen again to "Sunrise," one of the lovelier ballads of the last few years). Even if you count Norah as some sort of fluke, or as some sort of abomination, the mere fact that his Dusty-Bee Gees-Scritti affiliations neatly spans three decades is more than a little impressive—and again, something you can't say about a whole lot of other pop producers. Phil Spector? I suppose he squeaks through the door if you count his handful of worthy early '70s recordings and the two or three decent, though hardly earth-shattering, tracks he produced for the Ramones in 1980. Eno? Not if you believe the '90s actually happened (they did, right?). George Martin? Not even close. Girogio Moroder? Ditto. Dr. Dre, Timbaland? Still to be determined, though it's looking very promising on both counts. I'm no doubt missing some others, but the only obvious person I can think of offhand that gives Mardin a strong run for his money is Quincy Jones, who probably has a more distinguished jazz resumé—not to mention Thriller and Off the Wall in his back pocket—to make up for the fact that he hasn't scored a definitive pop hit for some time now.

Still, the thing that strikes me more than any of all of the above is just how elusive Mardin's talent was—how hard it is to pin him down to any particular sound or "aesthetic." I only started paying attention to producers, and to record production, at some point during the '80s, but in all the time since, I can't ever recall thinking to myself, "Ah, that sounds just like an Arif Mardin production!" (This is a point that is patently untrue of the other names just mentioned.) In a way, it sounds like the most damning criticism you can offer, suggesting a stylistic anonymity that should be anathema in the world of pop music (if you ever said such a thing about a band or a singer—well, you wouldn't, because if such a band or a singer existed, no one at all would be talking about them.). As Richard Harrington wrote in his Washington Post obituary (which you can read on this ILM post to avoid the registration headaches), "Mardin didn't have the ego, or the signature sound, of Phil Spector. He didn't have the fame of George Martin, who was best known for his evolutionary work with the Beatles. There was no identifiable Mardin thumbprint, no obvious post-production tweaking." Well then, I start to wonder—what did Mardin do exactly?

Short of actually being there in the studio while Dusty polished off her eighth take of "Just a Little Lovin'" or as the Brothers Gibb danced euphorically around the control room to the ridiculously rubbery (and still apocalyptic, not to mention obscenely FAT) bass line that kicks off "Jive Talkin'," I can only begin to guess at an answer, but clearly, one does not collect royalties on so many major recordings by simply standing there. Well, not exactly, but it's worth noting perhaps that, while some pop producers definitively mold the sound of the artists they work with, others bring genius to the table mainly by providing space for the artist to express him or herself—to help them realize the sound they're already after. I have to stress here that I'm only guessing that Mardin's methodolody was closer to the latter; judging by the few brief accounts I've read of his life, he was an amiable person and a nurturing presence in the control room, not at all a producer in the "megalomaniac" mode. (There's a great exchange in this interview with Todd Brown in All About Jazz, where, with admirable grace and without so much as a harrumph, the producer deflates the snobby interviewer's condescension towards Boy George—another collaboration, by the way.) But to go back for a minute to my list of favourite Mardin productions at the top of this piece, it's interesting to note that many of these were, from the artist's perspective, transformative works. I mean, literally. Dusty in Memphis transformed a peppy British pop idol into a white soul queen; Cupid & Psyche transformed a spindly post-punk project into a divinely digitized New Pop outfit; "I Feel for You" transformed a jazzy R&B songstress into a mind-fucking hip-hop-savvy superstar; "She's Gone" transformed an erratic and somewhat tepid folky-soul duo into a dapper new Righteous Brothers; and as for the Bee Gees—well, I assume I don't really need to spell that one out. Is there a defined "sound" to these recordings? Absolutely—they wouldn't be what they are (that is, among the finest records of their respective eras) otherwise. Is there a commonality to them? Can you trace a line from "Son of a Preacher Man" to "Nights on Broadway" to "Perfect Way" the same way, for instance, you can trace a Spectorian line from "Be My Baby" to "Instant Karma" to "Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio"? Perhaps, though I admit I'm not clever enough to do it—because truthfully, I'm not really sure I hear it.

Trying to accurately account for who did what in almost any classic pop recording is a crapshoot at best, and just how much of the resulting music from those Mardin-affiliated tracks is attributable to the performers themselves and how much to the man behind the boards (and how much to the guy who poured the coffee that day) is a chicken-egg conundrum with no completely satisfying answer. And certainly, to even suggest that the aforementioned transformations were solely the result of Mardin's production—or that they were even a wholly clean break for the artists—would simply be false, if not an insult to everyone involved. But in lieu of, or perhaps as a supplement to, positing theories and playing guessing games and reading between the lines of what he says about his collaborators in various interviews (and what his collaborators in return say about him), we can at least point to one black and white fact, which is that Arif Mardin's name appears on every single one of those recordings. The same cannot be said for one other human being, dead or alive.