{text and discography revised/expanded from a profile originally published in the Billboard Encyclopedia of Record Producers, 1998}

Although he's still hard at work cultivating his studio tan, Bill Laswell was one of the world's most fearless and fertile musical alchemists at his incredibly prolific, decade-long peak from the late-'80s to late-'90s. A master catalyst, he juxtaposed disparate international players to create unheard of combinations of sound and sensibility -- from searching post-jazz hybrids and fierce fusions of rock with hip-hop to dogma-free African field recordings and indescribable out-of-this world music. To Laswell, music really is a universal language, and in his heyday, he had few peers in the bringing together of great musicians from around the world for true cross-cultural communion. Voicing his credo in the mid-'90s, Laswell told me, "Ultimately, musicians are not about instruments, and making records is not about equipment. It's about people. It's about ideas. It's about expression."

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