Isao Tomita, one of the progenitors of synthesized music, died Thursday. He was 84.
Some EDM fans know him as one of the reasons the genre exists. He’s generally regarded as a visionary for his 1970s electronic music albums.
But Tomita’s influence extends beyond what we traditionally think of as “electronic” music.
Stevie Wonder named Tomita as one of the artists he respected the most, and in a 1984 interview with the New York Times, credited Tomita for turning him on to Romantic composers like Mussorgsky and Debussy. Wonder even appeared as a space alien in one of Tomita’s concerts.
Michael Jackson famously visited Tomita at his home studio during his 1987 tour of Japan, apparently to ask him about how he created such realistic flute sounds. According to legend, Tomita, not knowing that Jackson didn’t drink alcohol, kept giving him sake. Jackson, out of respect, held the cup to his lips, but then passed the cup under the table to his translator, who would drink it for him.
There’s no video of that interaction, but there is video of Jackson playing keyboards at Tomita’s studio.
If you listen closely, the chords that Tomita plays for Michael Jackson sound very similar to the introduction of Jackson’s 1991 “Who Is It.”
The music that earned Tomita a place in music history didn’t sound much like Wonder’s or Jackson’s, though. Actually, a lot of it was pretty strange.
SOURCE: LA Time
