Marvin Schlachter, a music executive who helped launch Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in the 1960s and who a decade later created one of the world’s most influential disco labels, bringing acts like Musique and France Joli to the masses, died on Sept. 19 in Manhattan. He was 90.
The Ny Times reports his son Brad said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was intestinal cancer.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Schlachter played a crucial role in the emergence of Black musicians from genre-based appeal to become a force in the American music mainstream.
He spent nine years as an executive with Scepter Records, a New York label comparable in some ways to Motown in Detroit (although much smaller). The label brought in Black songwriters, producers and musicians and promoted their albums among white audiences — still an unusual idea at the time.
Among Scepter’s biggest successes was Warwick, whom the label paired with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The Bacharach-David team wrote many of Ms. Warwick’s early signature hits, including “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By” and “Alfie.”
In 1976, Schlachter founded his own label, Prelude Records, to promote a new sound coming out of the city’s clubs and underground dance halls: disco.
Schlachter did much of the early talent scouting himself (he later hired the D.J. François Kevorkian to fill that role). He had a keen ear for the new, combined with a veteran’s knack for bringing the raw material he found in clubs like Paradise Garage and Studio 54 to radio and commercial success.
At Scepter, Schlachter had tended to invest in acts for the long term. But he understood that the disco scene was different, demanding novelty above all else. He employed a stable of producers at Prelude who would bring in a rotating set of musicians, mix and remix tracks, and then push them out to D.J.s.
No comments:
Post a Comment