Under the marmalade skies of the psychedelic 1960s, Patrick Gleeson was working as an English instructor at San Francisco State when he had an epiphany.
“I drop acid and listen to Bartók’s first violin concerto,” he recalled in a 2023 video interview. “And I think, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing? This is not my life. I want to make music like that.’”
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to change all this,’” he added. “And I did.”
He left the college and threw himself into electronic music, teaching himself to coax sounds from a new generation of synthesizers. Within a few years, he was playing synthesizer with Herbie Hancock and other jazz musicians.
Mr. Gleeson went on to become a recording artist, composer, producer and a founder of the renowned San Francisco recording studio Different Fur Trading Company.
He died on July 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. The cause was arterial stenosis, his wife, Charmaine McClarie, said.
He estimated that he played on more than 80 albums by an array of artists, including jazz standouts like Mr. Hancock and Joe Henderson, as well as pop and rock acts like Pablo Cruise, Dr. Hook and Sammy Hagar.
“Alongside the people who make them,” the British audio magazine Sound on Sound noted in 2021, “Patrick Gleeson has probably done more than anyone else to introduce synthesizers to popular music.”
He released six solo albums, starting with “Beyond the Sun: An Electronic Portrait of Holst’s The Planets” (1976), which was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best engineered album — classical.
Wendy Carlos, whose landmark 1968 album “Switched-On Bach” was an inspiration for Mr. Gleeson, wrote the sleeve notes for the album: “Our eight‑year wait for someone else to explore electronic music realization with what we judge to be appropriate technical standards and musical taste has ended.”
Unlike compact modern keyboard synthesizers, early modular synthesizers — developed independently by the inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla starting around 1963 — were large, complex instruments with multiple separate modules that together looked like an old telephone switchboard, requiring the player to plug in patch cords by hand to create sounds.
Mr. Gleeson’s breakout came when he brought his rich sonic contours to two groundbreaking avant-garde jazz fusion albums by Mr. Hancock — “Crossings” (1972) and “Sextant” (1973).
Mr. Gleeson helped establish the synthesizer as a stage instrument in jazz, touring with Mr. Hancock’s Mwandishi band with an ARP 2600 model.
“When I think back on it, what I was doing when I was with Herbie was just terrifying,” he said in a 2021 interview with the audio site Copper. “To go out there with six incredible jazz musicians — arguably some of the best in the world — with an instrument that played one note at a time, was not touch-sensitive, had no patch memory, and the entire set was improvised.”
Patrick Gerald Gleeson was born on Nov. 9, 1934, in Seattle, the only child of Francis Gleeson, who owned a savings and loan association, and Ileene (O’Leary) Gleeson, who managed the home.
He began piano lessons at 6 and, by the third grade, had developed a passion for jazz. After graduating from Seattle Preparatory School, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington. He later pursued a doctorate in 18th-century English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, finishing his dissertation at his undergraduate alma mater.
He ran across his first synthesizer — a Buchla Box — at a Bay Area experimental music studio in the mid-1960s. “They told me there was nobody to teach me and no instruction manual, that I’d have to figure it out myself,” he told Sound on Sound. By 1967, he was performing for more than 500 people at Mills College in Oakland.
Mr. Gleeson was facing a tenure hearing at San Francisco State College (later University) over his campus activism when he decided to act on his drug-enhanced epiphany.
“I went home for Christmas vacation in 1967,” he told Copper, “and didn’t even return to clear my desk out.”
With a friend, John Vieira, who had a Moog IIIc synthesizer, he opened Different Fur, which over the years lured artists including Taj Mahal, Van Morrison, David Byrne and Brian Eno.
Mr. Gleeson also made his presence felt in Hollywood as the master synthesist guiding an all-star team of synthesizer notables for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now.”
He sold his stake in Different Fur in 1985 to focus on film and television scores and composing.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Gleeson is survived by a daughter, Sydney Santillana Gleeson.
In the Sound on Sound interview, he recalled a perilous gig with Mr. Hancock: “When we finished, Herbie looked at me and said, ‘So, what did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, pretty awful.’ He said, ‘I didn’t hear anything different, sounded pretty much the same.’ I realized then that it’s not really about the instrument, it’s what you’re thinking and how you approach the music.”
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