Producer, arranger and engineer Patrick Adams, who brought experimental, sophisticated and infectious grooves to countless soul and disco singles — his fellow producer Nile Rodgers called him “Ass on the Dance Floor. Called “Keep Master” — Manhattan, who died at home on Wednesday. He was 72 years old.
His daughter, Joy Sanchez, said the cause was cancer.
If you’ve spent the night at a disco or circled a roller link in the last 50 years, it’s possible that Adams played music that helped the shepherd exist, even if his name didn’t ring the bell. .. Despite being unobtrusive, he sat behind the mixing board for acting such as Gladys Knight, Rick James, and Salton Pepper, leaving fingerprints everywhere as an engineer and arranger.
But his greatest legacy was the numerous tracks he made for the New York underground disco scene in the 1970s. The energetic, transcendental, insanely creative corners of this genre were often noted as cheesy and uncreative. If the Cleveland and Topeka radio stations weren’t playing the music he produced, there’s no doubt that New York clubs like galleries and Paradise Garage were playing it.
“He was very underground,” Vince Aletti, who covered Record World’s disco, said in a telephone interview. “He was really popular at the club level. He rarely exceeded that, but that made him like ours.”
Adams’ style varies from album to album, but each release was cleverly crafted, irresistibly catchy, and at the same time noble and flashy. The most naughty record ever made. “
Like many of Adams’ studio acts, Musik was, in a sense, just the front line of his own musical talent. After the record executive hired him to create a disco hit, he wrote music and lyrics, arranged instruments (many of which he himself played), and hired a singer.
He did much the same with acting in Inner Life, Phreak, Cloud One, Bumblebee Unlimited, Universal Robot Band and more. It was a stable group of groups, and we were able to gather from the same pool and spread our creative wings in different directions.
But when Adams was in control, he was never a dictator. His studio has always been a collaboration space.
“He gave you room for development as long as he thought it was creative,” Christine Wiltshire, who sang Musik’s lead vocal, said in a telephone interview. “He was never’this is the way it’s supposed to go’.”
Unlike many disco producers of the time and many dance producers since then, Adams had little consideration for beats and loops. They came later. He emphasized the melody, the lyrics, and above all the story that his song was trying to tell.
“If you start with a great song with a fascinating melody, lyrics that tell a story that people can relate to, you’re far beyond the game.” He told the New York Observer in 2017.. “Starting with the beat, it’s really not much different from what others can devise using Fruity Loops and other computer software. You’re just one in a million noisy people.”
Adams, best known for his disco work, started the soul band in the early 1970s and was a major act engineer for emerging hip-hop in New York after the decline of disco in the 80’s. Hop scenes such as Salt-N-Pepa and Erik B. & Rakim.
“I always consider music to be music, and I don’t necessarily have a genre.” He told the Guardian in 2017.. “I wasn’t trying to make a disco record. I was trying to make a great record.”
Adams was born on March 17, 1950 in Harlem and grew up four blocks away from the Apollo Theater. His father, Fins, was a merchant sailor, and his mother, Rose, was a housewife.
Patrick has been obsessed with music since he was a child. His father bought a trumpet when he was 10 and he gave him an acoustic guitar when he was 12. He sang in the choir and played guitar in the band Sparks at the age of 16.
But his real interest was production. He tried his father’s open reel tape deck and mastered skills such as overdubbing. He went to the studio and learned about mixing boards. He analyzed the songs he heard on the radio and tried to understand their arrangement and structure.
“I always bought records for producers, arrangers and songwriters,” he said. Profile by Jason King, a journalist at the Red Bull Music Academy Website. “Currently, the way DJs buy records is to buy records as a kid.”
Later he was hanging around the back door of Apollo, so Ruben L. Phillips, who conducted the in-house orchestra, had him hand out the sheet music.
In the late 1960s, he began working at Perception Records as an entry-level jingle writer. By 1970, he was vice president. A year later, he discovered the first big act, the group Black Ivory. This group sang slow soul hits such as “Don’t Turn Around” and “Don’t Turn Around”.Time is love.. “
Adams became known around New York for his rich and energetic arrangements, and left Perception in 1974 to start his own arrangement and engineering company. A year later, he and music promoter Peter Brown founded the label P & P Records to release underground music.
Adams had never been married, but had a long-standing relationship with Sanchez’s mother, Wiltshire. They later separated, but the two remained close. With his daughter, he survived by his brother, Gus. Another daughter, Thira Adams. My son Malcolm Holmes. And six grandchildren. His brother Terry died in 2020.
Adams didn’t win the public praise given to fellow producers like Rogers and Quincy Jones, but among DJs who fell in love with his innovative work in the 1990s. Enjoyed the renaissance. He found similar fans among hip-hop artists such as Mac Miller, Raekwon and Kanye West. They all sampled his music.
Still, he seemed reassured by his relative anonymity.
“The Nile Rodgers records show that they’re a million miles away because of the traces that come from his guitar,” Adams said. 2017 Interview with Red Bull Music Academy.. “In my case, I tried to avoid it. I didn’t want my records to sound the same.
“I don’t know if it’s positive or negative. But at the same time, my music has its own characteristics. It can be harmonious or it can be in the eccentricity of things. And sometimes you don’t hear it until someone points it out to you and asks, “Oh, did he make that record too?”
