George Martin

LONDON — George Martin, the Beatles' urbane producer who quietly guided the band's swift, historic transformation from rowdy club act to musical and cultural revolutionaries, has died, his management said today. He was 90.

“We can confirm that Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home yesterday evening,” Adam Sharp, a founder of CA Management, said.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney said Martin had been “a true gentleman and like a second father to me.”

“If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle it was George,” McCartney said. “From the day that he gave the Beatles our first recording contract, to the last time I saw him, he was the most generous, intelligent and musical person I've ever had the pleasure to know.”

Beatles drummer Ringo Starr tweeted earlier: “God bless George Martin peace and love to Judy and his family love Ringo and Barbara”

The tall, elegant Londoner produced some of the most popular and influential albums of modern times — “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” “Abbey Road” — elevating rock LPs to art forms — “concepts.”

He won six Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1999. Three years earlier, he was knighted.

Martin both witnessed and enabled the extraordinary metamorphosis of the Beatles and of the 1960s. From a raw first album in 1962 that took just a day to make, to the months-long production of “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beatles advanced rapidly as songwriters and sonic explorers. They composed dozens of classics, from “She Loves You” to “Hey Jude,” and turned the studio into a wonderland of tape loops, multitracking, unpredictable tempos, unfathomable segues and kaleidoscopic montages.

“Once we got beyond the bubblegum stage, the early recordings, and they wanted to do something more adventurous, they were saying, 'What can you give us?”' Martin told The Associated Press in 2002. “And I said, 'I can give you anything you like.”'

Besides the Beatles, Martin worked with Jeff Beck, Elton John, Celine Dion and on several solo albums by McCartney. In the 1960s, Martin produced hits by Cilla Black and Gerry and the Pacemakers. For 37 straight weeks in 1963 a Martin recording topped the British charts.

Martin started producing records for EMI's Parlophone label in 1950, working on comedy recordings with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and others, Sharp said. He had his first No. 1 hit in 1961 with The Temperance Seven.

But his legacy was defined by the Beatles, for the contributions he made, and for those he didn't.

When he took on the Liverpool group, Martin was very much in charge, choosing “Love Me Do” as their first single and initially confining the newly hired Ringo Starr to tambourine — a slight the drummer never quite got over.

Before the Beatles, producers such as Phil Spector and Berry Gordy controlled the recording process, choosing the arrangements and musician.

Martin was endlessly called on to perform the impossible, and often succeeded. By the early 1960s, Martin was anxious to break into the pop market when a Liverpool shopkeeper and music manager, Brian Epstein, insisted that he listen to a local quartet. The Beatles already had been turned down by Decca Records and told that “guitar groups are on the way out.”

Martin later said he didn't think much of the band's music, but “fell in love” with the four Liverpool lads.

After “Let It Be,” an unhappy process for all involved, Martin assumed he was done with the Beatles, but they asked him back for “Abbey Road.” Released in the fall of 1969, it was their final, slickest record. The band officially split the following year.

Artistically, Martin would never approach such heights again.

McCartney said that with his passing, “the world has lost a truly great man who left an indelible mark on my soul and the history of British music.”