Grammy-winning producer dies at 79
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Joel Moss, a Grammy-winning producer and recording engineer whose career spanned more than six decades and included work with some of music’s biggest names, died Monday, Sept. 15, after suffering an aortic dissection. He was 79.
Moss spent his life in sound. He carried his work from the studio booths of Los Angeles and Broadway into the small wooden room of Caffè Lena, where he insisted that every performance mattered. Whether the artist on stage was a household name or a teenager clutching a first guitar, Moss believed the show deserved to be captured with the same care he once gave to Johnny Cash, Tony Bennett, or Ray Charles.
Born in Detroit in 1946, Moss was already chasing music at 12, leading a Hebrew folk quintet called The Hi-Liters. That group brought him to Saratoga Springs in the early 1960s, where they played Caffè Lena — a connection that, decades later, would circle back into one of the defining chapters of his career…