Fred Catero

We mourn the loss of our beloved Fred Catero; after a long, accomplished life he died on October 6, 2022. He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Madeleine Cornu Catero.

As a baby Fred was left on the doorsteps of a St. Augustine, Florida, orphanage in dire need for life-saving surgery. The orphanage took him in and gave Fred a chance to live - a gift for which he was always grateful for.

After his recovery Fred was adopted and spent his early childhood with his Mexican immigrant mother and his Italian immigrant father in Jacksonville, Florida.

Early on he showed a great delight in music - from Italian opera, his adoptive father would play during Fred's early childhood, to the sounds of music of Spanish Harlem when his adoptive mother Rosa and seven-year-old Fred moved to New York and lived in the tenements of Spanish Harlem.

Fred always dreamed of becoming a professional pianist. His dream was dashed during his teenage years, when he heard one of his friends play the piano in a way Fred realized he would never be able to. This opened the door for his long and extraordinary career as a sound recording engineer and producer - a career spanning over sixty years.

What also helped pave the way for Fred to become a sound recording engineer was a gift his mother gave him as a teenage boy in the 1940s - one of the first affordable sound recording machines for home use with a built in radio. Fred was in his element. He began to record his favorite radio shows off the air onto disk, and thus the preservation of sound recordings became Fred's mission in life.

At age 19 Fred started out working as a studio manager and then engineer in New York's Nola Studios. Eventually he was offered a job as a mastering engineer at CBS/Columbia Records in New York. Later he was encouraged to become a studio engineer and soon got to record some of Columbia's most famous performers.

In the late 1960s top New York record producer David Rubinson, with whom Fred had worked with at CBS/Columbia, offered him the opportunity to move to San Francisco to form the Catero Sound Company, as a subsidiary of the Fillmore Corporation, a promotion, production and recording enterprise comprised of promoter Bill Graham, producer David Rubinson, show-biz attorney Brian Rohan, with Fred in charge of the recording engineering - an all-star team which had an unprecedented influence on the San Francisco music scene.

In San Francisco Fred was fortunate to record exceptional artists such as Herbie Hancock, Malo, Patti Labelle, Santana, The Pointer Sisters, and Tower of Power, first as chief engineer of the Catero Sound Company and later at the famed Automatt sound recording studio.

During this time the Recording Academy nominated Fred for a Grammy Award in the category Best Engineered Recording (non-classical) for Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1969. In the years 1976 and 1977 awards for Best Local Engineer followed. In 1979 he received the Ralph J. Gleason Award, and later on, in 1989, Fred was voted Most Valuable Player by the Recording Academy.

Fred was always active in the music community and donated his time and energy for many purposes. He was a lifetime member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences / NARAS (Recording Academy), and a founding member of its New York and San Francisco Chapters. Fred served multiple terms as president of the San Francisco Chapter as well as being elected multiple times to the National Board of Trustees for the Recording Academy.

In the early 1980s Fred started his own independent record label, Catero Records, with a diverse roster of recording artists: Don Lewis, Roberta Vandervort, Ernie Mansfield, Mel Martin & Randy Vincent, Paul Spear, Terry Garthwaite, Cyrille Verdeaux, Daniel Goldberg & Pino Marrone, Dick Hindman Trio, Nick Lane Band, Chris James Quartet, Barbara Mauritz, Laurie Antonioli, Rhyth-O-Matics, Ernie Mansfield & Juan Bibiloni, Eric Muhler, Doug Mc'Keehan, Nuclear Whales Saxophone Orchestra, Skipper Wise and Edwin Cohen, and Mimi Fox. Facing distribution challenges Fred's record label folded in the late 1980s.

He teamed up with Mark Keller and Jeffrey Cohen and worked for years at Keller & Cohen's Boomtown recording studio in Sausalito. He also taught audio engineering at the College for Recording Arts, San Francisco, until the college closed its doors in 1994. As a freelance sound engineer Fred continued to work on recording projects, big and small, way into the 21st century and way into his seventies and early eighties.

Ever since he was a teenage boy Fred collected radio shows mainly from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. At some point he realized he had acquired almost everything that was available. He then switched gears and began to meticulously restore the radio shows to an acceptable audio quality as much of the material was of poor audio quality due to wear and tear in the aging process. Over the years Fred spent countless hours working on restoring his collection of almost 33,500 radio shows in his spare time.

During the course of his life, Fred had the privilege to work with many esteemed artists from various musical eras and genres, among them: Aaron Copland, Barbra Streisand, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Chamber Brothers, Chicago, Cleo Lane, Count Basie Band, David Brubeck, Janis Joplin, Linda Ronstadt.

Reflecting back on his life in recent years, Fred expressed again and again a deep gratitude for having had the opportunity to work with such superb musicians and singers over the span of his career. Thank you to you all! And thank you to the great producers, engineers and indispensable assistant engineers he had the fortune to team up with.

Fred's work was his life. He loved music, and he never stopped marveling at the miracle of recorded sound. He enjoyed sharing his knowledge and expertise, and showing the ropes to new generations of recording engineers. He was an enthusiastic long-time teacher, a frequent guest lecturer, and a supportive mentor to so many.

Fred was one of a kind, a true original, a self-made man, a man of faith. He was dedicated to his work, always ready to roll, always ready to share his experience. And he was always filled with stories; he was a storyteller par excellence.

Farewell. Be embraced with love.

If you wish to make a contribution to a charity in Fred's memory, please consider Musicares, musicares.org.

Photo (detail): Errin Pignetti, 2017