Patrick Gleeson, who made synthesizers a part of jazz, has died at the age of 91

Under the marmalade sky of the psychedelic 1960s, Patrick Gleeson was working as an English instructor at San Francisco State when he had an epiphany.

“I drop acid and listen to Bartók’s First Violin Concerto,” he recalled in a 2023 video interview. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? This is not my life. I want to make music like this’.”

“I was like, ‘I have to change everything,'” he added. “And I did.

He dropped out of college and threw himself into electronic music, learning to coax the sounds of a new generation of synthesizers. Over the years he played synthesizer with Herbie Hancock and other jazz musicians.

Mr. Gleeson became a recording artist, songwriter, producer and founder of the renowned San Francisco recording studio Different Fur Trading Company.

He died on July 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. The cause was arterial stenosis, said his wife, Charmaine McClarie.

He estimated that he played on more than 80 albums by a variety of artists, including jazz luminaries such as Mr. Hancock and Joe Henderson, as well as pop and rock acts such as Pablo Cruise, Dr. Hook and Sammy Hagar.

“With the people who make them,” UK audio magazine Sound on Sound he remarked in 2021, “Patrick Gleeson probably did more than anyone else to introduce synthesizers into popular music.”

He released six solo albums, starting with “Beyond the Sun: An Electronic Portrait of Holst’s The Planets” (1976), which was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Arranged Album – Classical.

Wendy Carlos, whose landmark 1968 album “Switched-On Bach” was an inspiration for Mr. Gleeson, wrote in the album’s liner notes: “Our eight-year wait for someone else to explore the realization of electronic music with what we consider appropriate technical standards and musical taste is over.”

Unlike compact modern keyboard synthesizers, soon modular synthesizers — independently developed by inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla starting around 1963 — were large, complex instruments with multiple individual modules that together looked like an old telephone switchboard that required the player to plug in connecting cables by hand to produce sounds.

Mr. Gleeson’s breakthrough came when he brought his rich sonic contours to Mr. Hancock’s two pioneering avant-garde jazz fusion albums — ”Crossings” (1972) and ”Sextant” (1973).

Mr. Gleeson helped establish the synthesizer as a stage instrument in jazz when he toured with Mr. Hancock’s Mwandishi band with the ARP 2600.

“When I think back, what I did when I was with Herbie was just terrifying,” he said in 2021 interview with the Copper sound page. “Going out there with six incredible jazz musicians – probably some of the best in the world – with an instrument that played one note at a time, was not sensitive to touch, had no patch memory and the whole set was improvised.”

Patrick Gerald Gleeson was born on November 9, 1934, in Seattle, the only child of Francis Gleeson, who owned a savings and loan association, and Ileene (O’Leary) Gleeson, who managed the house.

He started piano lessons at 6 and developed a passion for jazz in the third grade. After graduating from Seattle Preparatory School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington. He later earned a doctorate in 18th-century English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his dissertation at his undergraduate alma mater.

He encountered his first synthesizer—a Buchla Box — in a Bay Area experimental music studio in the mid-1960s. “They told me there was no one to teach me, no instruction manual, that I had to figure it out on my own,” he told Sound on Sound. In 1967 he performed for over 500 people at Mills College in Oakland.

Mr. Gleeson was facing a tenure hearing at San Francisco State College (later University) over his campus activism when he decided to act on his drug revelation.

“I went home for Christmas break in 1967,” he told Copper, “and I didn’t even come back to clear my desk.”

With friend John Vieira, who had a Moog IIIc synthesizer, he opened Different Fur, which over the years has attracted artists including Taj Mahal, Van Morrison, David Byrne and Brian Eno.

Mr. Gleeson also made his presence felt in Hollywood as lead synthesizer, leading an all-star team of renowned synthesizers for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now.”

In 1985 he sold his stake in Different Fur to concentrate on film and television scores and composition.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Gleeson is survived by a daughter, Sydney Santillana Gleeson.

Speaking to Sound on Sound, he recalled the dangerous performance with Mr Hancock: “When we finished, Herbie looked at me and said, ‘So what were you thinking?’ I said, ‘Well, pretty terrible.’ He said: “I didn’t hear anything else, it sounded pretty much the same.” That’s when I realized that it’s not really about the instrument, it’s about what you think and how you approach music.”