He enhanced some already beautiful music, and he created some beautiful music of his own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/arts/music/ralph-macdonald-pop-percussionist-dies-at-67.html?_r=2

Ralph MacDonald, a Grammy Award-winning percussionist and composer whose understated Afro-Caribbean rhythms were known as “the ghost” behind the hit records of a multitude of 1970s and ’80s pop stars and who was a co-writer on the hit songs “Where Is the Love?” and “Just the Two of Us,” died on Sunday in Stamford, Conn. He was 67.

The cause was lung cancer, his family said.

Mr. MacDonald’s touch on the conga drums and dozens of other percussion instruments was ubiquitous for many years in pop music. It supplied the intimate undertow of Bette Midler’s “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972), the drive behind David Bowie’s “Young Americans” (1975) and the Caribbean lilt in Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” (1977).

With a reputation in the industry as “the ghost behind the million-selling albums,” as The New York Times recounted in 1977, he made similarly defining contributions to records by Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Phoebe Snow, Rod Stewart, George Benson, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross and Amy Winehouse. “My approach is to work with melody by simply enhancing it,” he told The Times. Mr. Simon, with whom he made six albums, “sings such pretty songs,” he said, that “it’s a challenge to enhance that without overdoing it.”