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Obituaries
Mizell brother dies
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 12 July 2011
One quarter of Motown’s sixties songwriting powerhouse The Corporation, and one half of the subsequent Mizell Brothers production set up, has died aged 68, according to the LA Times.
Alphonso ‘Fonce’ Mizell began performing music in his teens with his school band the Nikons and, once at Howard University, in a jazz quartet called the Vanlords. However, his rise to commercial success came after he was recruited by Deke Richards to join The Corporation, a group of songwriters and producers that also included Freddi Perren and Motown Records founder Berry Gordy. The group wrote many of the classic Motown label’s big hits, including early Jackson 5 songs like ‘I Want You Back’ and ‘ABC’.
After parting ways with Motown in the mid-70s, Fonce began working with his brother Larry, who had also been in that school band back in the day, and they formed their own production company Sky High. The duo wrote and produced a string of influential albums, especially for the Blue Note label, in many ways defining what would become the soul-jazz genre.
Their songs of this era, though probably not as commercially successful as Mizell’s Motown hits (though that’s not to say their output didn’t find a big audience), were hugely influential, and continue to be so, not least through frequent sampling by the hip hop generation.
As yet the cause of Mizell’s death is not known.
