If you can, I don’t have a problem with that. I understand and have some sympathy with the idea that one should be able to separate the art from the artist. Too many people take bad-faith positions to make it worth the time. *I’m not going to get into any debates about “cancel culture”. Swedien stood among the very best, an artist and an artisan, a genius of microphone and mixing desk. That philosophy is immediately apparent when listening to any of the records he recorded or produced, whether they’re big band, or pop, or R&B, from the fifties through to the nineties, when he began to slow down. “Compression is for kids,” as he was fond of saying.
He was unrepentant, and would pretty much write off modern mix topologies as bad – or at least amateur – engineering. If you compress that, you start to suck the life out of it. He always retained the belief that the transient energy of uncompressed percussion was where the excitement in music lived.
The drums, meanwhile, have a glorious, irrepressible energy that just leaps out of the speakers because Swedien, more than almost any other engineer, refused to rely on compression to make his drum tracks fit inside the mix. Throughout that album, Swedien and Jones employ the arrangement style they developed for Off the Wall, filling every part of the frequency range with details and ear candy, sculpting a sound heavy at the bottom and airy at the top, mixing the latest synth sounds with brass fanfares that could have sat happily on a Sinatra swing record from the fifties. If you can’t listen to Jackson anymore (and if so, I understand I don’t either*), try the work Swedien did around the same time on George Benson’s Give Me the NIght. And, bringing everything together, the audio engineering and mixing of Bruce Swedien himself. Off the Wall and Thriller, in particular, are wondrous sonic achievements, and for all Jackson’s own artistry, they are what they are because of the contributions of Quincy Jones, of songwriter Rod Temperton, and of gifted musicians such as drummer John JR Robinson, guitarist Steve Lukather and pianist Greg Phillanganes. But almost no music is made by a single individual, and those records by Jackson are the product of extraordinary labour by a whole team of vastly talented individuals, most of whom are blameless. Swedien’s legacy being tarnished through no fault of his own is of course nothing compared to what happened to Wade Robson and James Safechuck. I understand that many are queasy talking about Jackson’s music, in the light of 2019’s Leaving Neverland. In the 1970s, he recorded the Brothers Johnson and Chi-Lites, and did his most enduring work with George Benson and Jackson. In the 1960s, he moved into pop and rock ‘n’ roll, recording Jackie Wilson, Lesley Gore and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, as well as collaborating with Q on his soundtrack work. In 1957, he moved to Chicago to work for RCA Victor and then Universal (at the invitation of the legendary Bill Putnam), working with numerous jazz legends in the process, among them Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington and Quincy Jones, with whom he forged a partnership that would endure for the rest of his career.
He did well enough to buy it from them not long after, recording artists including Tommy Dorsey there. He’s best known, of course, for his work alongside Quincy Jones recording Michael Jackson, but his career stretches back to 1950s Minneapolis, where he ran the recording studio owned by the Schmitt Music Company while still in his teens. Bruce Swedien, who died on Monday at the age of 86, is straight-up one of the greatest to ever move a fader or hang a microphone.