This video captures a live performance on the Midnight Special by Billy Preston, Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff on The Original New Timbral Orchestra, aka T.O.N.T.O.
Cecil & Margouleff were some of the first musicians to bring modular synthesizer to popular music. They produced the classic albums of Stevie Wonder, and worked with variety of musicians, ranging from Billy Preston to Ravi Shankar.
Check out the video and share your thoughts on it in the comments!
Its a legendary beast, made up of bits of almost everything available at the time it was built. They added to it over time, too. Its the modular version of a prog rock stack. It even had some polyphonic capabilities, which was super-rare at the time. It was used in “Phantom of the Paradise,” but you know something has arrived when it appears on “The Simpsons.” A Halloween special opening once included the music teacher before it in a Phantom costume. 😛
The very first thing I’ve noticed and couldn’t stop noticing is the hair 😉
Music wise, not crush hot I’m afraid… There are other artists from that era creating more influential music…
Yeah like Stevie Wonder?… who used TONTO! They were not musicians before everything else, they produced and made their insane invention available for studio use.
Cecil & Margouleff were also very talented and influential musicians.
While they did not achieve mainstream success as performers in the US, their albums like Zero Time were way ahead of their time, and this led to them becoming the catalyst for some of the most important electronic funk and soul music in the ’70s.
TONTO’s Expanding Head Band was three to five years ahead of groups like Tangerine Dream and Jarre. It makes you wonder how different things might have been if this type of music had been embraced in those days by a US audience, instead of being more of a European phenomenon.
Can only imagine the pain in the ass breaking that down, transporting it, and then setting it up again.
I’m sure this conversation took place at least once…
Malcolm: “Bob, why don’t we tour more?”
Bob slowly looks over at TONTO.
Malcolm: “Ah, yes…”
Have to say it always looks a lot larger in pictures.