“Bruce Haack (1931/1988) was a Canadian composer who moved to NYC in 1954 and became famous for much of the homemade gear he invented.”
Like the analog Synths "Peopleodian," used to play tones and pitches on people, "Mr C," looked like a robot and was programmed to play music for live performances, and "The Musical Computer," a home-built digital/analog synthesizer which was also a digital sampler, a Theremin, and a clapper, encased in a suitcase.
Haack was born in Nordegg, Alberta, Canada, he grew up playing piano as a child, and by age 12, he was already offering piano lessons. When he moved to Edmonton to study at the University of Alberta, he began performing with The Swing Tones, a then-popular local band with which he performed primarily modern and old-time music. Still, they also performed Ukrainian Folk music, which introduced Haack to Eastern music and interest in non-conventional music genres. When invited by Aboriginal people in Canada to participate in their pow-wows, he discovered peyote.
This mix of living in the isolation of Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, Canada, and the blend of musical styles and psychedelic experiences, heavily influenced his musical journey. He finally received a degree in psychology from the university. He moved to New York in 1954 to study at the private performing arts conservatory Juilliard School with composer Vincent Persichetti, an experience that lasted only eight months. Haack rejected the school's restrictive approach as he did throughout the rest of his career. He loathed restrictions of any kind, often writing several different types of music at one time.
Haack spent the rest of the 1950s writing music and scoring dance and theater productions.
In the 1960s, because of the public's growing interest in technology and innovation, Haack appeared on TV shows like I've Got a Secret and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, usually performing as a duo with his friend, Ted "Praxiteles" Pandel who he met at Juilliard school. The pair often played the Dermatron, a touch- and heat-sensitive synthesizer, on guests' foreheads.
Haack started working with children's dance teacher Esther Nelson on educational, open-minded children's music. With Pandel, they started their record label, Dimension 5 Records, releasing Dance, Sing, and Listen, a series of three records they composed between 1963 and 1965. The music moved between country, medieval, classical, and pop, and mixed instruments like piano, synthesizers, and banjo. The recording technique he developed with the Dance, Sing, and Listen series stood out. Haack made synthesizers and modulators out of any gadgets and surplus parts he could find.
This extremely experimental approach to composition soon became Haack's trademark and his friend and business manager, Chris Kachulis, started to find many mainstream clients showing interest in working together. Haack started scoring commercials for clients like Parker Brothers Games, Goodyear Tires, Kraft Cheese, and Lincoln Life Insurance.
When, in 1969, inspired by Kachulis' love for psychedelic rock, Haack released his first rock-influenced album, The Electronic Lucifer, his musical career changed completely. The album featured a heavy, driving sound complete with Moog synthesizer, Kachulis' singing, and Haack's homegrown electronics, including a prototype vocoder and lyrics. Thanks to Kachulis negotiations, the album became Haack's major-label debut and was released by Columbia Records.
In 1971 he released his second rock-influenced album with Dimension 5 Records. Together, it was released under the name Jackpine Savage. He used this pseudonym only on this occasion, probably to differentiate the album from his previous Children's music series with the label. He spent the rest of the 1970s releasing children's music like in 1972's Dance to the Music, 1974's Captain Entropy, and 1975's This Old Man.
Haack then moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania, to spend more time with his friend Pandel and focused on children's music, almost exclusively writing music for Scholastic Corporations. He released two more albums, Funky Doodle and Ebenezer Electric (an electronic version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol), in 1976. 1978's Haackula was never officially released, and the following year's Electric Lucifer Book II was released only in 2001.
In the early 1980s, his health conditions started failing, and his musical production slowed. His last works were Bite, a new version of Haackula, in 1981, and Party Machine, a proto hip-hop collaboration with Def Jam's Russell Simmons.
Haack died in 1988 from heart failure.