Departures of note

Patrick Gleeson was an American musician, synthesizer pioneer, composer and producer. He abandoned a career teaching college English in San Francisco in the 1960s to pursue electronic music, experimenting at the San Francisco Tape Music Center before buying a Moog synthesizer and opening the Different Fur recording studio in 1968.

In the early 1970s he joined Herbie Hancock's band, pioneering the synthesizer as a live jazz instrument on the albums Crossings and Sextant and on subsequent tours. Hancock credited Gleeson with introducing him to synthesizers and teaching him the instrument's technique. Gleeson went on to work with many other jazz musicians, including Julian Priester, Lenny White, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Henderson and Joe Henderson.

He recorded several solo albums, including Beyond the Sun, an electronic portrait of Holst's The Planets, which earned a Grammy nomination for best engineered recording in 1976. He also produced and engineered the 1978 Devo album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!.

Gleeson scored numerous film soundtracks, including The Plague Dogs, Apocalypse Now, Crossroads and The Bedroom Window, as well as nine television series including Knots Landing. He retired from film and television scoring in 2017 and returned to live performance before his death in 2026 at age 91.