Stevie Wonder and TONTO: The Synth Orchestra and Production Duo Behind His Pivotal Albums
“The most undersold part of Stevie’s legacy may be the collaboration with two producers, Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, and the pair’s massive synthesizer, TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra).”
“With an instrument like TONTO you can’t write a line ahead of time, because until you get the sound up, you don’t know how it’s going to react with the other sounds. Everything was done sort of jazz fashion, it was all head arrangements… sometimes some of the lines would be suggested. That horn line [from “Superstition] I was singing it… and then Stevie started playing it. That was how we worked.”
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