Richard James Burgess has been successful
as a studio drummer, music-computer programmer, major-label artist,
record producer, composer, published author, manager, marketer and
inventor.
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Contents
- 1 Artist/Musician
- 2 Innovations
- 3 Education
- 4 Awards
and Achievements
- 5 Educator
- 6 Productions
- 7 Mixes
and compositions
- 8 Current
activities
- 9 References
- 10 External
links
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Artist/Musician
Burgess co-produced, co-wrote, programmed, sang and played
drums for the European audio-visual, electronica group Landscape,
whose album From The Tearooms Of Mars To The Hellholes Of Uranus
yielded the international hits, Einstein A Go Go and Norman Bates. His
studio-drumming career includes albums such as Adam Ant’s
Strip and The Buggles’
The Age of Plastic. As a Capitol
Records solo artist he charted singles on the Billboard dance charts
hitting the #1 slot on the hip New York Dance Music Report charts. He
also recorded with jazz musicians Neil Ardley, Ian Carr and Nucleus
and played with Graham Collier OBE.
Innovations
He defined the computer programmers’ and samplers’ role in
modern music via his work in the seventies with the MC8 Microcomposer
and with Fairlight CMI firsts such as Kate
Bush’s Never Forever album and Visage’s
Fade To Grey. He conceptualized and co-designed the first standalone
electronic drum-set, the ground-breaking hexagonal shaped SDS5.
He appeared three times on the BBC TV program Tomorrow's
World demonstrating his prototype electronic drum invention which
became the SDS5; the use of the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer
computer in pop music; and the world's first digital sampling machine
the Fairlight
CMI. He coined the name for the New Romantic movement of the early
nineteen-eighties. His NYC production of Colonel
Abrams' which yielded the gold singles Trapped and I'm Not Gonna Let
are widely considered to have been the precursor to the House
Music phenomenon.
Education
His education includes music studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music
and the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama in London, private lessons with Alan
Dawson, Peter Ind, Tony
Oxley, James Blades, (London Symphony
Orchestra), David Arnold (conductor)
(Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra), Kurt Hans Goedicke (London
Symphony Orchestra), movement with Bruno Tonioli and drama with Uta Hagen.
Awards and Achievements
With the avant-garde electronic group Accord
he was featured on BBC Radio 3 programs Music In Our Time and
Improvisation Workshop. He played in the British National Youth Jazz
Orchestra, won the Greater London Arts Association’s Young Jazz
Musicians award, the Vitavox Live Sound award and was chosen for the
British Arts Council’s prestigious Park Lane Group Purcell Room concert
series. He is featured in The A to Z of Rock Drummers.
Educator
His book The
Art of Music Production (ISBN
1844494314), (originally titled: The
Art of Record Production, ISBN 37398832) published
by Music
Sales [1] (Omnibus
Press [2]) is in its third edition and he
has written many articles for technical and music magazines. He has
lectured on the subject of record production and the music business at
such colleges as UCLA, NYU, MTSU, Sheffield Institute for the Recording
Arts (Baltimore) and LIPA (Liverpool, England).He wrote and presented
the BBC World Service radio series Let
There Be Drums. He currently teaches drums at the Annapolis Music
School [3]
in Maryland, USA.
Productions
In the early eighties he emerged as a pre-eminent producer of
the New
Romantic movement, producing Spandau Ballet’s first two
gold albums and first six hit singles - a compilation of which is
double platinum. He won a Music Week sales award as a production and
has created 24 charted singles and 14 hit albums
Subsequent productions include: Adam Ant, King
(band), New
Edition, Melba
Moore, Colonel Abrams', America,
Kim
Wilde, Five Star, Tony Banks (of Genesis),
and Fish (Of Marillion),
Living in a Box, Princess,
Virginia
Astley, Errol
Brown (Of Hot Chocolate Fame), When In Rome, Shriekback,
Shock,
Barbie
Wilde and a pioneering ambient album by the award-winning British group
Praise.
He also produced, engineered and mixed albums by Rubicon and X-CNN under the pseudonym Caleb
Kadesh and did several mixes using the pseudonym Cadillac
Jack.
Mixes and compositions
Burgess’s mixes and remixes include tracks for the movies 9½ Weeks, About Last Night and artists
Thomas
Dolby, Lou Reed, Youssou
N'Dour, Luba and many others. His compositions
and productions have appeared in many TV shows and movies. Major-label
artists have recorded his songs.
Current activities
He is currently Director of Marketing and Sales for Smithsonian Folkways
Recordings [4] and Smithsonian Global Sound [5],
runs his own artist management company, Burgess
Worldco [6]
in the Washington DC area representing Jimmie's Chicken Shack [7],
Jarflys
[8]and
DZK[9]. He is on the Board of
Governors for the Washington DC Chapter of the National
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Board of
The Music Managers Forum US [10]He
also produces and plays drums for the blues band Electrofied
[11].
References
External links
