(Arif Mardin and Louis Armstrong)
Readers of my series on John Prine’s second album (“Diamonds in the Rough”) may want to know that Arif Mardin died yesterday. Mardin produced Prine’s first two albums, and his other credits are astonishing in their variety and notoriety.
Mardin gets the very last word on “Diamonds in the Rough.” If you turn up the volume quite loud just after the last note is sung in the album’s last song (the title song), you’ll hear Mardin turn on the loudspeaker in the studio and say to the assembled singers — John Prine, Dave Prine, and Steve Goodman: “Fantastic.”
Read about Arif Mardin in all the usual places — Wikipedia, Google, and NPR.