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Biography
Arif Mardin (March 15, 1932 - June 25, 2006) was a renowned Turkish-American music producer, who worked with a wide range of artists, across many different styles and genres of music. His is perhaps the most stunning C.V. of all contemporary record producers and links jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, disco, new wave, and everything in between. To study a simple list of Mr. Mardin's associations would be breathtaking if only one could be simply compiled. Such a task has yet to be accomplished.
He grew up listening to the likes of Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. He met his sister's friend bassist and Jazz critic Cuneyt Sermet, his mentor, and started listening to Jazz. After graduating from Marmara University in Economics and Commerce, Arif Mardin studied at the London School of Economics. He was influenced by his sister's music records and became a self-professed jazz fanatic, as well as an accomplished orchestrator and arranger, but he never intended to pursue a career in music. However, his fate changed in 1956 after meeting the American jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones at a concert in Istanbul. He sent 3 demo compositions to his friend Tahir Sur who worked at a radio station in the USA. Sur took these compositions to Quincy Jones and he became the first recipient of the Quincy Jones Scholarship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 1958 he and his fiancé Latife moved from Istanbul to Boston. After graduating in 1961, he taught at Berklee for one year and went to New York City to try his luck. Arif Mardin was later made a trustee of the school and awarded an honorary doctorate.
