Stevie Wonder's Super Synth: How TONTO Made History

Keyboard behind Wonder’s classic LPs finds new home

- Martin Porter And David Goggin

Stevie Wonder wanted to meet TONTO. He had just turned 21, was flush with cash and had a world of sounds in his head that he couldn’t get onto tape. He had recently come across a copy of an album called Zero Time that had been recorded using TONTO, an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra. It was the world’s most advanced synthesizer, and also the biggest: a six-foot-tall circular machine that could extend to 25 feet in diameter and weighed one ton.

The mastermind behind TONTO was an Afro’d English bassist-turned-studio-tech named Malcolm Cecil, who at the time lived above a midtownManhattan studio. “I heard a ring at the door and . . . stuck my head out of the window to see who it was,” Cecil recalled in 2013. Bounding down three flights of stairs, he encountered “this black guy in a pistachio jumpsuit who seemed to be holding our album underneath his arm”: Stevie Wonder.