Composer & Producer Ilhan Mimaroglu Dies at 86

Ilhan Mimaroglu, a composer best known for its music and electronic music producer best known for his work with Charles Mingus, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 86 years.

The cause was pneumonia, said Mehmet Dede, a spokesman for the family.

During his career, Mr. Mimaroglu (pronounced mee-ma-loo-ROE) was both a researcher and advocate of musical experiments of others.

As a composer, he was involved in electronic music in 1950 when the genre was in its infancy and the recorder was still his main instrument. He remained one of his most important professional synthesizer era.

As a producer of Atlantic Records, has worked with Mingus, jazz bassist and composer idiosyncratic, recently concluded after a long pause the execution and recording in the early 1970 until shortly before his death in 1979. And as the president of his label, Finnadar, has recorded the music of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen iconoclast.

Although music was his first love, Mr. Mimaroglu was also an expert photographer and author of several books in Turkish, his mother tongue, more recently, a book of film criticism published in 2010.

He once said his main achievement was that he wrote "Utopia Project", a philosophical guide.

Mimaroglu Ilhan was born in Istanbul March 11, 1926, son of a prominent architect, Mimar Kemaleddin Bey, who died shortly after his son was born.

After establishing himself as a music critic and radio producer in Turkey, Mr. Mimaroglu has received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study composition and musicology at Columbia University. Later he returned to Turkey, but in 1959 moved to New York.

He studied with the composer Vladimir Ussachevsky Center of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music and privately with the composer Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe.

It has also produced programs for electronic music and social commentary for non-commercial WBAI radio in New York. In mid 1960, he began working for his fellow migrants and Turkish Ahmet Ertegun Nesuhi, two executives of Atlantic Records.

Mr. Mimaroglu was involved mainly in the compilation of jazz for reprints to the Atlantic 70's, when he became a staff producer. Its main task was to work with Mingus, who took some of his most important recordings for the Atlantic label and returned after over a decade.

Mr. Mimaroglu oversaw all but one of the album Mingus made for Atlantic in recent years, an artistically fertile period, which ended with two albums, "Something Like a Bird" and "I, myself an eye "where Mingus took a great set, but did not play due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, which had lent him almost motionless.

Mr. Mimaroglu also composed the music of 1971, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard album "Cántame Songmy a song," an unusual blend of jazz, electronic music and more traditional writing for voices and strings.

In 1969, he was one of four composers music was used in the score of the films of Federico Fellini's "Satyricon."