"God," a certain musician-philosopher once sang, "is a concept by which we measure our pain." God is having a banner year in 2016. I guess they needed a producer up there. RIP SIR GEORGE MARTIN... He was far from the first producer to revel in the creative possibilities of the recording studio, but in applying the full Technicolor power of EMI's equipment to the music of THE BEATLES, MARTIN is essentially the godfather of all modern pop producers. "When I joined EMI," he once said, "the criterion by which recordings were judged was their faithfulness to the original. If you made a recording that was so good that you couldn't tell the difference between the recording and the actual performance, that was the acme. And I questioned that. I thought, OK, we're all taking photographs of an existing event. But we don't have to make a photograph; we can paint"... Also, everyone who knows him says he was unbelievably elegant, and nice... RIP also JOHN MORTHLAND and AARON HUFFMAN.