- - - You
can keep Raymond Scott and his quintet. I can get along all right
without any part of it. Not that it is a bad quintet, but they
are always playing Raymond Scott compositions.
- - - I suppose they really have to, since Scott is the leader, but I think it would be wiser either to fire the leader and play something else, or to ask him to write some real jazz instead of the silly things he has been giving the quintet to perform.
- - - It's all very well to write screwy music, and imitate things like wooden Indians and powerhouses, but just writing screwy music isn't enough. If it's screwy music you want, there's plenty of that in Stravinsky...
- - - I don't think that those Scott compositions are sincerely jazz vehicles. Only occasionally do they swing, the rest of the time they are trying to get smart effects. ...[Scott] thought that there were a lot of things to be done to get swing music out of the rut into which it had fallen. He said that swing music suffered from stagnation, that it had settled down to a bunch of stereotyped riffs and licks which required no talent to play, and weren't much fun to listen to.
- - - So instead of just letting a soloist loose with a rhythm section, and allowing him to improvise with a background of the rest of the band, Scott figured that a great deal could be done with the orchestration itself, with novel rhythm patterns, and new methods of scoring ensembles. ...
- - - Myself, I'm afraid I find it difficult to distinguish between such tunes as Twilight in Turkey and War Dance for Wooden Indians. It all sounds the same to me. You get the old tom-tom out and bang it a bit, and then play those oriental figures over it, and there you have what Scott calls an experiment in modern jazz. ...
- - - Scott's main idea is probably that he wishes to do for jazz what some of the boys have done for modern painting. He wants to go surrealist, and let the wandering thought of the moment direct his pen when he writes. ...
- - - My own private little opinion (which I wouldn't want to spread around) is that although it is to a certain extent original, it is not the righteous jazz, and therefore, as far as I'm concerned, Mr. Scott can keep it. Or else, play strictly to penguins.
