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Board Certified
Producer Arif Mardin has spent 40 years bending raw talent into hit songs.
By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
March 4, 2004
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Arif Mardin speaks to students just days after Norah Jones's latest CD passes one million in sales. |
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Farnsworth/Blalock Photography |
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Well before Arif Mardin became a Grammy Award–winning producer, he was a young arranger standing at Logan Airport in January 1958. It was four o'clock in the morning, and Mardin was fresh off the plane from Istanbul, Turkey. To save money, he decided to stay in the waiting lounge for the remainder of the night, snacking on chocolate and Coca-Cola from vending machines. When the sun came up, Mardin, who had traveled to the United States as the winner of Berklee's first Quincy Jones Scholarship for composers and arrangers, headed into town.
"I was wearing a wide-brimmed borsalino hat and a very long coat," said Mardin, on hand at Berklee's David Friend Recital Hall to deliver the James G. Zafris Distinguished Lecture for Music Business/Management. "I was carrying a big, battered suitcase. I must have seemed like a World War II refugee from Lower Slavonia."
In more than four decades as a producer, Mardin has collaborated on over 40 gold and platinum records; worked with artists such as Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, and Barbra Streisand; and earned 11 Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year, an honor he won twice, most recently for Norah Jones's 2002 smash debut, Come Away with Me. But with all the prominence he's achieved in the music industry, Mardin never really left his alma mater behind, having been a Berklee faculty member, trustee, honorary degree recipient, and a member of the school's board of overseers, a post he holds to this day. He told the audience that cutting ties with the college just wasn't an option for him.
"My spiritual bond to Boston is permanent," he said. "The help that I got at a very crucial time in my life and the friendship that was extended to me has been with me always."
After his prepared remarks, Mardin fielded questions from Music Business/Management Chair Don Gorder and from the students, faculty, and administrators who filled every seat of the recital hall. When asked by Gorder to weigh the importance of talent versus imaging among artists, Mardin said that talent is essential—but more and more contemporary artists try to get by without it.
"The Beatles were wonderful performers, wonderful songwriters," Mardin said. "But they also had the mod hairdo. So, imaging is not bad. It's good as long as you have talent...today's no-talent singers have all the image, and the pitch-correction software is there to the rescue."
But Mardin is encouraged by the emergence of new artists and the durability of veterans who don't lean on electronic enhancement. Newcomer Norah Jones managed to sell millions of records built around honeyed acoustic ballads, tinged with jazz, r&b, and country, while vocalists Michael McDonald and James Taylor have managed to sustain their careers over several decades.
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President Lee Eliot Berk (right) congratulates Mardin after his talk. |
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Farnsworth/Blalock Photography |
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"You have natural singers being successful," Mardin said. "Maybe there's a movement toward good songs and heartfelt singing."
When a student asked Mardin for advice for someone just preparing to enter the music industry, he told her that she might want to pick up a couple of essential supplies before she got started.
"Get a lawyer and a knife-proof vest on your back," Mardin joked. "You really have to know the rules. Know the laws. Be savvy."
Mardin could never have achieved the success he has without the ability to build a rapport with the artists he works with. In response to a question about his studio demeanor, Mardin said he learned at Berklee from Herb Pomeroy that a producer needs to keep everyone relaxed, but mustn't be afraid to yank the reins to keep a project on schedule.
"Create an electric atmosphere, something very creative," Mardin said. But don't waste time.
Forty years and counting into his career, Mardin said he had no regrets, that he had been blessed to have produced artists such as Patti LaBelle, Jewel, and Queen Latifah. But when he thought about it for a moment, he said it really might have been nice to have worked with Pretenders' lead vocalist Chrissie Hynde. When you're Arif Mardin, that's what passes for a professional disappointment. The young arranger from Istanbul really has come an awfully long way.
The annual James G. Zafris Distinguished Lecture Series for Music Business/Management is Berklee's first endowed visiting lecture series, founded by the college's board of trustees in 1992 and named after James G. Zafris, a founding member of the board and its longtime chairman.
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