Engineer Bruce Swedien's résumé listed such names as Dinah Washington, Michael Jackson (the 30-million-selling Thriller LP, co-writing "Jam" on Dangerous and co-producing the album). He worked with everyone, from Mick Jagger, Muddy Waters, and Duke Ellington to Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, Missing Persons, Stan Kenton, and Paul McCartney, among others. The highly esteemed engineer recorded just about every type of music and worked on numerous movie scores such as Running Scared and The Color Purple. He won 13 Grammy Awards including those for his engineering of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous albums, and two for Quincy Jones, Back on the Block and Q's Jook Joint.

Born of Scandinavian descent in Minneapolis in 1934, Swedien's father gave him a disc recording machine when he was ten years old. As a child, Swedien would listen to the soulful sounds emanating from a black church in his neighborhood. When he was 14, he got a job at a small basement studio, and after high school, he bought a professional tape recorder. He majored in electrical engineering and minored in music while attending the University of Minnesota. When not in school, he recorded jazz groups, choirs, polka bands, and radio commercials.

His first break was engineering Frankie Valli the Four Seasons' million-selling single "Big Girls Don't Cry," which peaked at number one R&B for three weeks and number one pop for five weeks in late 1962 for Vee-Jay Records.

Swedien worked at a studio where he recorded such artists as Tommy Dorsey. Buying out the business, he moved it to an old movie theater, renovating it into a state of the art studio. In 1957, Swedien and his family moved to Chicago and the engineer worked at the city's RCA Victor studio recording the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Moving to Bill Putnam's new Universal Recording Studios, he engineered sessions for the top jazz acts of the day. Under the tutelage of Putnam, Swedien's engineering skills grew. As a show of belief in the young engineer, Putnam let Swedien finish a recording session for jazz great Stan Kenton. While recording a couple of albums with Duke Ellington, the jazz legend made him realize that the music business was a fun way to make a living.

Swedien was inspired by Les Paul Mary Ford's "How High the Moon," one of the first multi-tracked singles, to see that recording could do more than simply document a live concert. It could also be used to create and capture imagined soundscapes; the recording studio could be used to sculpt a "sonic vision." His best example of this is the title track from Quincy Jones' Back on the Block album.

During the late '50s and early '60s, record labels wouldn't invest in the more costly tapes necessary to record performances in stereo, believing that the two-speaker format would never overtake the then-dominant mono (one-speaker) sound format of record players. With his own money, Swedien bought stereo tapes and recorded some of music's greatest performers in stereo: Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, and other top artists. In time, the record labels contacted him about buying his one of a kind stereo master tapes.

In the late '60s, Swedien became a freelance recording engineer so that he could do more album projects and film soundtracks. He worked for producer Carl Davis, head of the Chicago branch of New York-based Brunswick Records. While there, he engineered hits by the Lost Generation, "Sly, Slick & the Wicked" (a number 14 R&B hit in the summer of 1970 which features some startling pre-sampling effects); the Chi-Lites ("Have You Seen Her" (number one R&B for two weeks, number three pop, late 1971); "Oh Girl" (number one R&B for two weeks, (number one pop, summer 1972); "A Letter to Myself" (number three R&B, early 1973); "Stoned Out of Mind" (number two R&B, summer 1973), and Jackie Wilson, Barbara Acklin, and other artists at Brunswick.

After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-'70s, he met Michael Jackson while working on the movie version of the Broadway hit The Wiz with Quincy Jones. Swedien had met Jones years earlier while recording Dinah Washington's "What a Difference a Day Makes" in Chicago.

Swedien conducted a master class in music engineering at UCLA as well as lecturing and hosting recording seminars at various universities, colleges, and industry organizations both in the U.S. and overseas. In 1994, Swedien moved his base of operations to Connecticut, where he continued exploring aural possibilities and taking on top-level engineering assignments. Bruce Swedien died on November 16, 2020 at the age of 86. ~ Ed Hogan, Rovi