Dexter Wansel Brought the Synthesizer to the Sound of Philadelphia

Dexter Wansel’s four solo albums chased the cosmos; his most durable songs went out under other singers’ names.

This building at Sigma Sound on North 12th Street, the Sound of Philadelphia played with a live band, they hired string section players by the dozen and a horn arrangement to every chorus, Gamble & Huff’s house band filling arrangements ready for a ballroom. In 1976, Dexter Wansel sat in this room with a synthesizer and a board crammed with patch cords. He had been associated with this music his entire life, working food and dry-cleaning for his uncle, the DJ Georgie Woods, in backstage rooms at the Uptown theater. He had learned this building a full decade before playing it, when the label decided to release records under his own name, he was the studio player that other arrangers sent for. The one other arranger called for when the string section simply could not provide what the track needed, and what he took to this room ran on electricity.

Under his own name, over a four-album stretch from 1976 to 1979, that instrument sat at the forefront. Most of the title track of Life on Mars featured his keyboards beneath a Terri Wells vocal, with the Instant Funk rhythm section keeping time. His own band, The Planets, were on the majority of the other tunes; he answered the Bowie question in the title without any qualification, an entire album said yes. He went into the making of “Rings of Saturn” intending to determine what the rings of Saturn would sound like as they rotated, explaining to one writer he was “trying to merge the two paths of thinking”—the circuitry of an ARP 2600 on one side, and the solar system on the other. “Theme from the Planets” sheds words entirely, the song a full orchestral workout fronted by a drum break designed for playing extremely loud and dancing to in the dark.

The furthest-traveling songs all bore his name in the credits and someone else’s in the microphone, so that Cynthia Biggs-whose partnership with Wansel had produced a longing song called “The Sweetest Pain” that Jean Carn would cover as a duet on the 1979 album “Time Is Slipping Away,” was singing to an ache wanting a person so badly, just as Patti LaBelle would express through Wansel and Kenneth Gamble the inner monologue of someone so completely devoted they can’t say what they want to their object (“If Only You Knew” topped the R&B chart for a month in 1984). The Stylistics took “Hurry Up This Way Again,” a lover’s plea that Patrice Rushen herself would eventually cover, from Wansel. For only a fraction of his best-known work did he hold the microphone; his clearest signature is in moments where someone else expresses a sentiment that charts, and charts are what Wansel provided.

One record bridges his two poles. Wansel produced and arranged “Nights Over Egypt,” one of the Jones Girls’ strongest songs in 1981, which drew the expansive energy of the albums back down toward the earth but removed them all from Philadelphia, three sisters chasing a melody, each carrying it a little farther, nowhere but upward and outward.

He was also the person who made it happen. It was his day-job job that placed him at the center of all of this, leading the MFSB-the studio band that made Philadelphia the home of the kind of records that filled dance floors around the globe, he ran the label’s A&R office at the end of the 70s and produced the soundtrack for the first Black Music Month celebration at the White House in ‘78-and a synthesist operating in the very core of Philadelphia dance music. Writing and producing for the young Pieces of a Dream gave them the jazzy polish that the house sound produced but gave the band its own freedom; “Disco Lights” of ‘77, with its synthesized pulsing beat, and “(I’ll Never Forget) My Favorite Disco,” the other song Wansel wrote with Biggs, were pure up-tempo floor anthems, their reach encompassing only the room, not the planets.

When the dance floors cleared, sampling gave the old cuts another gig. The drum break underpinning “Theme from the Planets” found itself on Ultimate Breaks and Beats—the compilation from which an entire generation of hip-hop producers cribbed, and wound up sampled into more records than anyone’s ever kept track of. “The Sweetest Pain” also wound up sliced up for parts; its carcass underpins Tyler, the Creator’s 2009 “Seven,” as it does under Mac Miller, and a host of other artists whose hearts leaped at the loop within the ache. Wansel made tunes that singers sang, and then producers two generations his junior took those same tunes and stripped them for spare parts, and according to all accounts, reveled as much in their new, remixed existence as they had in the old.

The new life became a more tangible second act late in the game. For the last few years, he could be at the boards, Wansel arranged for horns, strings and guitar to be recorded without a specific track, to be cut specifically for his son, the producer Pop Wansel, so that he could be given pieces from which to cut new records. Wansel died May 31 at age 75 after, his family said, an extended illness he had been fighting for years. His son’s singular request, in remembrance of his father, is this: “Keep sampling his music.”