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| RAYMOND SCOTT: Biography by Irwin Chusid |
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| RAYMOND SCOTT: Biography by Irwin Chusid |
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If the melodies of Raymond Scott sound familiar--they should. You've heard them countless times underscoring the mayhem of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and other Warner Bros. madcaps.
- - To modern ears, Raymond Scott Quintet recordings sound like classic cartoon music. The producers of Ren & Stimpy felt so, and added Scott's novelties to their anarchic creations, thereby introducing Scott to a new generation of cartoon cultists. The Simpsons, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, and Duckman and have also featured Scott melodies.
- - Ironically, Raymond Scott never wrote a note for cartoons. He had moved on to other projects by the time his early compositions acquired a new life through the craftsmanship of Carl Stalling, the music director for Warners. Stalling adapted many familiar strains in his soundtracks, concocting a slice'n'dice gumbo of jazz, pop, classical, folk, and country-western flavorings. He used operatic motifs, marches, anthems--and a lot of Scott.
- - The Raymond Scott Quintet recorded from 1937 to 1939. In 1943, Warner Bros. bought Scott's publishing; thereafter, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes rolled off the assembly line with liberal splashes of Scott. These cartoons, in effect, immortalized his early work, preserving it for future generations.
- - The most familiar and oft-used was "Powerhouse." The original composition contains two distinct, unrelated melodies, which found their ways into numerous scores by Stalling (and his successor, Milt Franklyn, who did many of Stalling's orchestral arrangements). "Powerhouse" weaves maniacally through "The Swooner Crooner," makes five cameos in "It's Hummer Time," and surfaces in "Baby Bottleneck," "Porky Pig's Feat," "Little Red Riding Rabbit," and at least 35 other features. Scott tunes quoted in WB productions include "The Penguin," "In an 18th Century Drawing Room," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "Huckleberry Duck," "The Toy Trumpet," "War Dance For Wooden Indians," "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner," and many more. That Scott's melodies have become world renowned through their association with animation is doubly ironic. Not only didn't Scott compose for cartoons--according to his widow, Mitzi, he didn't even watch them.
| ''My group won't be ready for a couple of years. I've written the music but it's taken us eight months just to get one song right.'' -Raymond Scott to recording executive, early 1937 |
Raymond Scott was a product of the Machine Age--which was a blessing (for him) and a curse (for his colleagues). A brilliant engineering student at Brooklyn Technical High, he might have taken over where Edison left off if not for the intervention of his brother, who steered him to a career in music.
- - Scott was born Harry Warnow on September 10, 1908, in Brooklyn. His parents, Sarah and Joseph Warnow, were two years off the boat from Russia. Despite a lack of early formal training, Harry and his older (by eight years) brother Mark were musical prodigies; Raymond was playing piano by age two, and Mark displayed a flair for the violin. Their dad was an amateur violinist who owned a music shop, where the adolescent Harry indulged his curiosity by playing records and tinkering with the turntables. At home, the boys' bedroom served as an ad-hoc audio lab.
- - After high school, Harry planned to study engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic. Mark had other ideas--his kid brother was too musically gifted to spend his life hunched over drafting tables. Mark, by then a well-paid conductor and violinist, bribed Harry by purchasing him a Steinway Grand and paying his tuition to the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School). Harry graduated in 1931, and was hired as staff pianist for the CBS radio house band, which Mark conducted.
- - Since youth, Harry had harbored strange ideas about composition, and sought ways to reflect the world around him in musical portraits. Given such curiosity, he found the CBS standard repertoire uninspiring. Between performances, Scott presented ideas to the band, who casually rehearsed and developed his themes. With Mark's encouragement, Harry began to contribute compositions for broadcast, eccentric pieces with unwieldy titles like "Confusion Among a Fleet of Taxicabs Upon Meeting with a Fare." To disguise the nepotism--Mark performing his brother's tunes--Harry adopted the name Raymond Scott, which he picked out of the Manhattan phone book. "It was a nice sounding name," he thought. "It had good rhythm."
- - After five years at CBS, Scott couldn't suppress his ambitions. He had gained notoriety both for his offbeat numbers and a near-fanatical devotion to his art. Louis Shoobe, bassist with both the CBS orchestra and the Quintet, said Scott would "eat, sleep and drink the piano." Dave Harris, who played tenor sax in both bands, called Scott a "loner, and not a very social person, because his mind was so preoccupied with music."
- - Scott pleaded with CBS producer Herb Rosenthal for more creative leeway. Rosenthal finally offered him a chance to form a satellite ensemble to explore his own musical universe. Scott drafted CBS confreres Shoobe and Harris, clarinetist Pete Pumiglio, drummer Johnny Williams, and trumpeter Bunny Berigan (who quit within a short time, replaced by Dave Wade). He dubbed his six-piece unit a "quintet," because he felt the word had a "crisp" sound.
- - The Raymond Scott Quintet (sometimes spelled "Quintette") debuted December 26, 1936, performing "The Toy Trumpet" on the Saturday Night Swing Session. Their success was meteoric, and a recording contract was extended by Master Records (owned by Irving Mills, Duke Ellington's manager).
- - Scott's relentless--some would say tortuous--system of practice, practice, and more practice alienated his sidemen. Berigan, in particular, complained it took up too much time, and wanted no part of Scott's inspired lunacy. A characteristic which distinguished, and often personally distanced Scott from his contemporaries was his perfectionism. He allowed some improvisation on solos during rehearsal, but once a part was played to his liking, it became fixed, and alterations were prohibited.
- - "We really didn't want to do any of it," recalled Williams. "We were doing what he called 'descriptive jazz,' and which we thought was descriptive all right, but not jazz. Jazz is right now, not memorized note for note." If Scott's methodology was unusual, his titles were hallucinatory, e.g., "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "Celebration on the Planet Mars," and "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House." Journalist George T. Simon, in his memoir The Big Bands, expressed backhanded admiration for what he called Scott's "kittenish, pseudo-jazz." Simon said the Quintet "displayed a naive charm, probably appreciated more by grade school music teachers than by jazz fans." Harold Taylor, in a January, 1939 Rhythm magazine article entitled "You Can Keep Raymond Scott," called the music "silly," "screwy," and "smart-alec." "You get the old tom-tom out and bang it a bit," grumbled Taylor, "and then play those oriental figures over it, and there you have what Scott calls an experiment in modern jazz." But there was one aspect that no one could question: in the words of Johnny Williams, "It sold like hell."
- - Regardless of what you thought of the man's technique, there was nothing like it. Al Brackman, an Associate Producer under Mills, said, "If you liked Scott, you had to buy Scott." The composer's classical training gave his tunes a unique fabric. And though others, notably George Gershwin, Bix Beiderbecke, and John Kirby, had mingled elements of "serious" music with jazz, Scott had apparently tapped into a fourth dimension. The New York Times, in 1937, called it "a brand of music that is at one and the same time as free as a 'jam session' and as authoritatively formal as a Debussy cake walk--and not unacquainted with the humor of both."
- - Another unusual aspect of Scott's technique, considering his rigor and obsession with form, is that he didn't write anything down. "They were strictly head arrangements," recalled Harris. "Not one note was written." Johnny Williams added, "He didn't write anything, but he edited everything." As Michele Wood pointed out in an excellent profile on Scott from a big band anthology, "He composed, not on paper, but on his Quintet." He would tickle a few notes on the keyboard, tell Pete Pumiglio to imitate the riff on clarinet, and do the same for each instrument, including drums. The ensemble would develop these cues, with Scott painstakingly trying to articulate each quirky notion for his sidemen, one phrase at a time. He felt strongly that written scores inhibited players. "There's a tremendous difference in performance," he insisted, "if you skip the eyes." On a surviving rehearsal acetate from 1940, Scott, teaching the melody of "Powerhouse" to a clarinetist, stressed: "Play it like it's something you made up."
- - Leroy (Sam) Parkins, who played clarinet in a later incarnation of the Quintet, explained: "His music was not easy to play because he wrote it right off the piano keyboard. He didn't give a damn if it was hard on the clarinet or saxophone. He didn't write music that was idiosyncratic to the instrument you played. But he had such good players, who could do anything."
- - All rehearsals were recorded on acetate discs, which Scott would study, then play cut'n'paste with favorite passages. This could explain why many of his compositions contain juxtaposed non-sequiturs (e.g., "Powerhouse" and "Oil Gusher" consist of unrelated melodies and unanticipated rhythmic shifts, in A-B-A sequence). This technique, too, set Scott apart from his big band rivals. The Quintet knew how to swing, but its choppy, green-light/red-light arrangements weren't fit for foxtrots.
- - Nevertheless, Scott's euphonious tunes attracted a wide audience over the CBS network, and among record buyers. Igor Stravinsky and Jascha Heifetz were fans. Hollywood beckoned: seven months after their radio debut in New York, the Quintet signed a contract with 20th Century-Fox. They spent a year out west, providing tunes for, and occasionally appearing in, Nothing Sacred, Happy Landing, Ali Baba Goes to Town, and Sally, Irene, and Mary. In Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the Quintet performed "The Toy Trumpet" to a memorable Shirley Temple-Bill "Bojangles" Robinson tap-dance finale.
- - Within a year, however, Scott was back in New York, complaining that Hollywood held no challenge. "They think everything is wonderful," he sneered. His acting career had ended abruptly during Sally, Irene, and Mary when he and his cohorts were asked to don powdered wigs for a performance of his baroque-inflected "Minuet in Jazz." Scott walked off the set. "We are musicians," he asserted, "not comedians."
''This big show came in from New York - they had special music written by Raymond Scott. It was called 'Powerhouse.' Really impressive stuff - bamp, bomp, be-doodle-lee-doo-doo-de-lee. All written out. Looked like fly shit on those sheets. It scared the hell out of me.'' -Art Blakey (quoted in Downbeat, March 18, 1971), on why he gave up the piano and switched to drums
In the late '30's, Scott music was everywhere. The Quintet were regulars on Your Hit Parade, and appeared on such programs as This is New York and The Rhythm Roundup. Dozens of ensembles interpreted Scott, including the famous Paul Whiteman band, which commissioned 17 full orchestral arrangements of RS titles. Columnist Walter Winchell called Scott's music "instrumental literature," and described the Quintet as "positively zzymzzy"--meaning, "the last word."
- - In 1938, Scott was named music director for CBS. The following year he expanded the Quintet into a big band, for several reasons: large dance bands were in vogue; a larger ensemble presented a challenge to this restless musical nomad; and Scott probably wanted to follow the example of one of his idols, Glenn Miller.
- - In 1940, he left CBS to take his orchestra on the road. They were a good drawing card, on a par with popular outfits of the day. In 1942, Scott returned to CBS, where he broke the color barrier by recruiting the first racially-mixed network studio orchestra. He had some prodigious talent on board, including Cozy Cole, Benny Morton, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Emmett Berry, and Charlie Shavers. Critic-producer John Hammond, in the New York Times, called the Scott outfit "probably of a higher caliber than that to be heard in any of the large commercial bands today...[J]azz aficionados are talking more about Scott than about such bands as Tommy Dorsey's and [Benny] Goodman's."
- - Meanwhile, in 1943, Warner Bros. studios, under Carl Stalling, began seasoning their Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animation with adaptations of Scott's Quintet compositions. More than Scott could ever have realized at the time, a rabbit named Bugs and a duck named Daffy would immortalize his "screwy pseudo-jazz."
- - Maintaining a hectic schedule, Scott launched a lucrative sideline composing jingles for radio commercials. For personal appearances, he was billed as "America's Foremost Composer of Modern Music." He continued to perform such early hits as "War Dance for Wooden Indians" and "Powerhouse," re-tooled for expanded format, or performed by an all-new Quintet. He also retained a penchant for unusual titles: "Careful Conversation at a Diplomatic Function" and "Wedding of the Radio Announcer" were written during the 1940s. And, in what seem like parodies of Scott nomenclature, his titles included "Pre-Festival Music for the Coming Merger of Two Professional Marriage Brokers" and "Dedicatory Piece to the Crew and Passengers of the First Experimental Rocket Express to the Moon."
- - Scott's personal life was what one would expect of a busy public figure devoted to his art: he wasn't around the house a lot. He married Pearl Zimney in 1935, and they had two children, Carolyn and Stanley. In 1940, a talented 13-year-old Canadian named Marjorie Chandler came to live with the family. Recommended to Scott by road manager Frank Herz, the girl had a lovely voice and became Scott's protegee. By age 16, Chandler, re-named Dorothy Collins, was lead vocalist in Raymond's big band. They toured together (often with Pearl along as stage-mom), and a mutual chemistry developed. In 1950, Scott and Pearl separated; two years later, he married Dorothy (with whom he had two daughters, Deborah and Elizabeth).
- - In 1945, Scott composed incidental music for the Broadway play, Beggars are Coming to Town. A year later, he collaborated with lyricist Bernard Hanighen on a Broadway musical, Lute Song (starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner), which introduced what would become one of his most internationally renowned songs, "Mountain High, Valley Low." In 1949, Scott wrote ballet scores for Mike Todd's Peep Show and for Billy Rose's Six Characters in Search of an Author. His "Suite for Violin and Piano" was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1951.
- - After the death of his brother Mark in 1949, Raymond replaced him as bandleader on the syndicated radio program Your Hit Parade, a song chart countdown sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. In 1950, the show jumped to NBC-TV, where Scott continued to lead the band, with Dorothy as a featured vocalist.
- - When the 12" vinyl LP supplanted 78's, Scott began working in that format. Releases included The Unexpected (by RS & the Secret Seven), This Time with Strings, At Home with Dorothy and Raymond, and Rock and Roll Symphony. On This Time with Strings, Scott reprised his best Quintet numbers with silky violins and orchestral grandeur. The Unexpected is cool exotica-jazz by a small ensemble performing whimsical Scott compositions and a few covers. At Home... featured the 1948-49 edition of Scott's quintet performing a weird hybrid of instrumental chamber-jazz; Dorothy contributed several vocal numbers. Rock and Roll Symphony is neither rock nor symphony (and probably was not titled by Scott); it was a pillowy confection of feather-weight fluff in the manner of Mantovani, with a bit of a beat. (It was later reissued as Amor, and again as Warm Rain.)
- - During the 1950s, Scott kept busy recording jingles for cigarette, automobile, and shampoo commercials, designing electronic instruments, and composing film scores (such as Never Love a Stranger, in 1958). He also founded his own record labels (Audivox and Master--the latter a tribute to Irving Mills' company). He served as A&R director for Everest Records, for whom he discovered a soulful singer named Gloria Lynne, whose debut album he produced in 1958. That same year, Scott auditioned a hot young R&B artist: Bo Diddley. An existing tape of that encounter captures Bo tuning his guitar and strumming that patented chukka-chukka rhythm as Raymond banters and adjusts sound levels. With Scott on piano, they perform an impromptu duet of "Stormy Weather."
- - Throughout his career, Scott formed different 6-man quintets, playing new material, or reworking the old. Besides the 1937-39 team, he led quintets from 1942-46 (alongside his big band), 1948-49, and lastly, in 1962. Clarinetist Sam Parkins was recruited for the '62 ensemble to play live on NBC-TV's Bell Telephone Hour. Parkins remembers Scott had a rather strange way of judging ability: "He was a loon, audition-wise. He invited me out to his home and told me to play 'Tiger Rag' as fast as I could. A guy who worked with him in the early '40's told me that when he auditioned, Raymond just said, 'Play a high B-flat and hold it as long as you can'.
- - Scott's insistence on perfection was notorious. His third wife, Mitzi, said that though Raymond could be a bully with players who didn't attain his exacting standards, he respected musicians who met the challenge. "One sideman gave Raymond a large, rubber shrunken head," she recalled, "and above it was a banner inscribed, 'I forgot to play at Letter X'."
| ''Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.'' -Raymond Scott, 1949 |
Scott never abandoned his childhood obsession with technology. No success in the music business could deter him from indulging a professional interest in electronics, engineering, and inventing. He was half-Ellington, half-Gyro Gearloose.
- - Al Brackman recounted Scott's first sessions for Master in 1937: "Our studio at 1776 Broadway was basically just an office with a seven- or eight-foot ceiling. There was one hall leading to it from the elevators and, opposite the office door, a men's room lined with tiles. Scott insisted on recording at night so he could put one mic in the hall and another in the men's room. With that and the other mics in the office, he achieved what they call 'echo' and gave the recordings a big auditorium sound."
- - Scott was one of the few bandleaders who owned a recording facility: Universal Studios, in the RCA Building. (His first wife Pearl was an engineer there.) In 1946, he founded Manhattan Research, Inc., which was later based in Manhasset and Farmingdale, Long Island. Like his contemporary, Les Paul, Scott treated a recording facility as a music studio-cum-science lab. And, like Paul, he caught the knack for multi-track overdubs early: his '48-'49 Quintet recorded a number of tunes featuring a multi-layered choir of Dorothy Collinses.
- - Scott was on the frontier of electronic music, his efforts only recently drawing recognition. Around 1948, he began work on a $100,000 sound effects generator (later dubbed "Karloff") that could imitate a chest cough, kitchen clatter, the sizzle of frying steak, and jungle drums. Another Scott invention, begun around 1952, was the Clavivox, a keyboard which produced an eerie, sinuous whine. Originally designed to simulate the difficult-to-play theremin (which was controlled by manipulating one's hands around a pair of electronic wands), the Clavivox was really a synthezier that could slide smoothly in pitch from one note to any other on the keyboard without a break.
- - A 1959 Popular Mechanics article, entitled "Musical House for a Musical Family," explored the "equipment which has turned [the Scott] household into a conservatory of music": For writing film scores, Scott has developed an instrument which he calls the "videola." From its place on top of the living-room piano, the mechanism operates a movie film in a projection room in another part of the house by remote control. The movie is flashed on a television screen on the piano, so that Scott can watch the film as he composes appropriate music. A recording apparatus is hooked up to the videola, as well, so that he can stop, play back, listen, rub out, and rewrite. Scott also holds a patent on an automatic scanning radio, which tunes in on stations around the country and changes frequency by itself at any given interval, enabling him to catch most of the nation's disc-jockey shows in a brief span and find out what tunes are being played.
- - In 1963, Scott recorded three volumes of synthesized lullabies entitled Soothing Sounds For Baby, designed for infants aged 1 to 18 months. The pieces are repetitive, minimalistic, keyboard and electronic-rhythm compositions, pre-dating similar recordings by Philip Glass and Terry Riley. Some are soothing, others a bit spooky, a few no more than skeletal, amelodic beats--Kraftwerk for Kiddies. (Upon their CD reissue in 1997, SSFB was hailed as the forerunner of a musical genre now popularly called Electronica.)
- - In 1964, Raymond and Dorothy divorced. In 1966, Raymond met Mitzi Curtis, whom he married in January, 1967. Scott's last orchestral work was a 1969 industrial musical celebrating the 100th anniversary of Kentucky Bourbon. From then on, he concentrated on electronic design and composition full-time.
- - With electronics, Scott was in complete control. He didn't have to worry about temperamental artists. Machines didn't talk back, they followed the most difficult instructions, and they never got tired. He could at last achieve the perfection he sought. Herb Deutsch, author and Hofstra University music professor, visited Manhattan Research many times during the '60s, before electronic components were miniaturized, when complex technology took up excessive square footage. Deutsch credits Scott with developing the first programmable polyphonic sequencer (the foundation of modern dance music). In an article for Music, Computers, and Software, Deutsch described something out of a loopy sci-fi flick:
Standing six-feet high and covering 30 feet of wall space, the sequencer consisted of hundreds of switches controlling stepping relays, timing solenoids, tone circuits... (and) 16 individual oscillators....If you walked behind the wall during the operation..., the music produced would be all but drowned out by the cacophonous klickety-klack of the relays as they switched positions.
- - Tom Rhea, an authority on the history of electronic instruments, feels that Scott's contributions to the field have been overlooked. He points out that Scott performed "some of the first applications of Artificial Intelligence" to music. Rhea (Associate Professor of Music Synthesis at Boston's Berklee College) visited Manhattan Research in 1970, where he witnessed "all kinds of crazy equipment. Raymond had invented early trigger delays and dual delays and variable envelope generators. He had an analog waveform generator that was this crazy whirling-dervish thing: it had a ring of incandescent lamps, each with its own rheostat, and a photo-electric cell on a spindle that twirled in a circle above the lights. It was wild stuff, all bizarre. But the most astonishing was the Electronium."
- - The Electronium was an "instantaneous composition-performance machine" which could, Deutsch explained, "synchronize entire musical compositions through the complex random generation of sequenced tones, rhythms, and timbres." In Scott's words: "The Electronium has no keyboard [it was manipulated with knobs and switches]." One journalist who viewed the prototype said, "It looks more like the instrument panel of a space capsule....Lights flash and the entire panel glows with an orange light." Though Deutsch agreed that the Electronium "has since been far exceeded by computer devices," he acknowledged that "the concept of what he was trying to do was in effect what is now a MIDI-composition studio."
- - It was also a groove machine. The foundation of many Electronium recordings was a funky pulse that foreshadowed modern electronic dance music from the mid-1970s to the present. Primitive disco, hip-hop, house, bass-&-drum, and jungle beats predominate, with an overlay of simple melodies or musique concrËte. Naturally enough, it caught the attention of one of the great purveyors of dance music from the 1960s, Motown Records impresario Berry Gordy.
- - Gordy had been tipped off about Raymond's experiments, and visited Manhattan Research around 1969. In August, 1971, Gordy invited Scott to Los Angeles for six weeks, which turned into six months. Raymond and Mitzi permanently relocated to the west coast in June, 1972, as Scott undertook electronic music research and development for Motown.
- - Guy Costa, who worked under Gordy from 1969 to 1987 as Head of Operations and Chief Engineer, said in a 1996 interview, "Berry was always one to invest in talent, and he recognized that right off with Ray. He felt that the ability to numeralize the process of musical sequence was important. Berry was always a formula man--he'd find a rhythm or a progression and build on that. The Electronium gave the ability to play a chord like an accordion, to store rhythms, to resequence. To have all these new effects was a turn-on. But the unit never got finalized; it was always being developed. Eventually Ray took the thing to his house and kept working on it, while Berry was off doing Diana Ross movies. It just never jelled. It was genius meeting genius. Berry respected Ray and his knowledge, and I think Ray had an admiration for Berry. But they were on two different planets."
- - After he retired from Motown in 1977, Scott continued to compose with machines. But most of his existing Electronium and later computer recordings are in no way recognizable as having emanated from the same musical mind that gave the world "Powerhouse" and "Mountain High, Valley Low." Considering Scott's roots in the heyday of swing bands, this was a remarkable progression. He foresaw the advances of music technology, and never stopped evolving.
- - A MIDI creation from 1986 called "Beautiful Little Butterfly" was Scott's last known composition. Having come full-circle from his earliest works, "Beautiful Little Butterfly" is a "descriptive" piece: the airy melody swirls coyly and perches, before fluttering away--like a butterfly.
- - In 1987, Scott suffered the first of several crippling strokes, leaving him unable to work or speak coherently. He passed away on February 8, 1994, at the age of 85.
- - Much of Scott's influence on late 20th-century music is subliminal. You can hear echoes in such upstarts as Frank Zappa, Danny Elfman, They Might Be Giants, John Zorn, and Devo. They were all too young to have heard the Quintet in its heyday; but as part of their postwar birthright, you can bet they spent endless childhood hours absorbed in the hijinks of wacky wabbits and puddy tats. By osmosis, they absorbed a lot of Scott.
- - Discovering Raymond Scott is like stumbling across the Dead Sea Scrolls of 20th- and 21st-century music. If it seems astonishing that this visionary should have been neglected for so long and, prior to the original US release of this album in 1992, be near-forgotten and unknown, consider: Scott was sneered at by the jazz community because he didn't encourage improvisation; he wasn't respected by many "serious" musicians because he was a pop composer; his groundbreaking work with electronic music was largely unrecognized because he was sequestered away in his lab; and his contributions to cartoon soundtracks went unacknowledged for years because animation itself was considered frivolous kids' stuff.
- - A reevaluation is in order, and a resurgence of interest underway. There have been two CDs of Scott Quintette recordings released, and his electronic works are being issued. Orchestras, jazz and rock ensembles, surf bands, even rap groups are reconfiguring his tunes. Soul Coughing has sampled Scott three times. Clarinetist Don Byron has recorded and performed his music, as has the Kronos Quartet. In Holland, The Beau Hunks Sextette recorded two entire albums of Scott's Quintet masterpieces, and have performed this repertoire around Europe.
- - This activity makes all the more prophetic a caption which appeared beneath a photo of Scott and his Quintet in the Nov. 27, 1937 issue of Billboard: "Scott's music evolved as something more substantial than mere jazz. Its ultimate worth can only be judged by the future."
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Original sessions produced
by: Master Records, Inc. - CD Credits - Mastered at Sony Studios by: Debra Parkinson Executive Producer: Hal Willner Producer: Irwin Chusid Columbia A&R: Steve Berkowitz Package design: Risa Zaitschek Art direction: Piet Schreuders The producer expresses great thanks to: Mitzi Scott Steve Berkowitz Don Brockway Theo van der Schaaf Gert-Jan Blom Piet Schreuders Jeff Winner and tips his hat to: Barrence Whitfield; David Garland; Josh Grier, Esq.; Will Friedwald; Barrie Edwards, Yolanda Blum, Marlies Dwyer, Kalen Rogers, Flip Black, and Ellen Frank of Music Sales Corp.; Paula Perry; Marc Wilder; Jeroen van der Schaaf; David Fairweather; Morris & Jean Chusid; Chuck Haddix/Marr Sound Archives; Michelle BoulÈ; Wanda Snell; WFMU The world owes a great debt of gratitude to Byron Werner for helping launch the rediscovery of Raymond Scott The Raymond Scott Quintet: Raymond Scott (piano, celeste); Dave Wade (trumpet); Pete Pumiglio (clarinet); Dave Harris (tenor sax); Louis Shoobe (bass); Johnny Williams (drums) Russ Case (trumpet) replaces Wade on tracks 3,4,5,11,12,13,14,16,20 Fred Whiting (bass) replaces Shoobe on tracks 8,17,22 Ted Harkins (bass) replaces Shoobe on tracks 10,19 Tracks 15 and 21: Raymond Scott and His New Orchestra |
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