It’s been a rough week for progressives; the mood’s a bit down. Time for something a bit lighter. Here’s a question for you:
What do Bugs Bunny, Motown Records, Kentucky Bourbon and Shirley Temple have in common with the Moog Synthesizer? The answer is here, in the story of one of the stranger musical figures of the 20th century; a “jazz” bandleader whose best-known groups never performed an improvised note, and whose influence turns up in the most unexpected places.
The Wacky, Paleo-High Tech World of Raymond Scott
You may never have heard the name Raymond Scott, but you’ve very likely heard his more famous music. It’s the background music of a large number of old Warner Brothers cartoons, and has since continued to live on in background music for The Simpsons, Animaniacs, Ren and Stimpy, etc. Go take this test – follow this link, or this one,and play the audio clips (especially “Powerhouse” and “The Toy Trumpet”) and see if you don’t recognize many of the pieces of music. I’m confident that unless you spent your childhood on an Amish farm, you’ll have at least one – and most likely several – “Aha! I know that tune!” moments.
So who is this guy? Well, that’s where the story gets really interesting…
First of all, that jazzy music you heard is jazz-like, but it’s pseudo-jazz. What do I mean by that? While it may sound improvised, those pieces actually were planned out and set in place, every single note, even the improvised-sounding parts. And to understand the why of that is to begin to enter the mind of Raymond Scott…
I meant to write a Jazz Jam diary about Raymond Scott early on, but I think it must have been preempted by hurricane Katrina, as I could find no trace of a diary on him either using Booman’s search engine or with Google. So I’m reasonably sure I’ve not told this tale before. If I have, humor me; it’s probably better written this time, LOL.
Scott was born Harry Warnow on September 10, 1908, in Brooklyn. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Despite receiving no formal training, Harry and his older (by eight years) brother Mark were musical prodigies; Harry/Raymond played piano at two, with Mark on violin. Their father was an amateur violinist who owned a music shop, where the adolescent Harry played records and tinkered with the turntables. At home, the boys’ bedroom served as an audio lab. But this electrical hobbyist was not to follow Edison into inventions in the world of sound, at least not right away (all quotes from source linked in title, unless noted):
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 Julliard School). Harry graduated in 1931, and was hired as staff pianist for the CBS radio house band, which Mark conducted.
In order to avoid the appearance of nepotism in having the CBS band playing the tunes Harry was composing, Mark suggested Harry adopt a stage name, which is how we came to know him as “Raymond Scott,” a name he found in the New York phone book and liked the sound of. After five years at CBS, he was permitted to form a smaller satellite band where he would have greater creative control.
Throughout his career, one oddity of Scott’s music was the strangely descriptive titles he chose for his pieces, which he thought of as evoking images, as with the tone poems of late 19th century composers like Debussy. But in his case it would be more like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun who was Hit by a Speeding Paddy Wagon full of Keystone Kops. Titles of his pieces, which he called “descriptive jazz,” include: “New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House,” “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” “Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner,” and the wonderfully evocative (not to mention difficult for the trumpet player) “Tobacco Auctioneer.”
Scott’s relentless–some would say tortuous–system of practice, practice, and more practice alienated his sidemen. Berigan [Bunny Berigan, on trumpet – K.P.], 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 [Johnny Williams, drums – K.P.]. “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.” [snip]
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.”
They hated it, but it was the Depression, so they did it, Scott’s way. The music proved wildly popular on CBS radio in the period prior to WWII, kind of like the way Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were everywhere in 1968-72 (Alpert’s TJB music is best known to the man on the street as the themes from “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game.”). Igor Stravinsky and Jascha Heifetz were fans. Scott’s Quintet didn’t necessarily have five members; Scott just liked the sound of “Quintette” (his spelling). He thought it sounded “crisper,” and puckishly told a reporter he feared that “calling it a ‘sextet’ might get your mind off music.” The group went to Hollywood for a year (His tune “The Toy Trumpet” was used for a memorable Shirley Temple-Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap-dance finale) before coming back to New York, complaining that Hollywood composing held no challenge: “They think everything is wonderful,” he sneered.
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, and the Quintet was expanded to a big band, the new popular sound of the times (Aside: as the depression ended, larger ensembles became economically viable; band size generally tracks the economic fortunes of jazz through the 20th century).
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.”
“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 1943, Scott’s music began turning up in Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons from Warner Brothers, and Bugs and Daffy would immortalize him. But at the time Scott hardly noticed. He was composing for Broadway, composing for commercials, touring, forming a new quintet… Naturally, this took a tool on his marriage (he married in 1935 and had two children); there was a lovely young Canadian singer in his band – whom he married in 1952, two years after divorcing his wife; with his second wife he had another two children.
When his brother died in 1949, Scott took over his band on the radio program “Your Hit Parade,” migrating with the program from CBS to NBC. However, the engineering end of the music business called to him increasingly strongly, even as he continued composing commercials and movie soundtracks in the 1950’s. And here’s where we get to the paleo-high tech part.
He had always retained his teenage fascination with the technical end of the musical business; in the `30’s the band would record on acetate disks that Scott would use to decide how to cut and paste favorite passages, which led to the abrupt melodic shifts in pieces such as “Powerhouse.” In 1946 he founded Manhattan Research, Inc. as his combined recording studio and science lab. They were recording multi-track over-dubs on tape by the late 1940’s, and the technical innovations continued into the jet age:
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 synthesizer that could slide smoothly in pitch from one note to any other on the keyboard without a break.
(Aside: It does not appear that the Clavivox is a direct forerunner of the Clavinet, popular with musicians in the late `60’s – early `70’s. The Clavinet was a device with roots going back to this same period in the inventions of a German, Ernst Zacharias, whose devices were eventually marketed by the German company Hohner.)
Scott developed a device called the Videola, which sat atop his piano and allowed him to watch a movie as he composed the soundtrack, the device included a tape recorder that allowed him to play back, listen, rub out, and rewrite. He also patented a scanning radio that was the forerunner of the police scanner of today. As the `50’s ended and the `60’s began, he gradually withdrew from the world of commercial music to devote himself increasingly to his electronic music experimentation – but not until after the episode of “The Secret Seven.” [It just gets stranger and stranger…]
In 1959, Raymond Scott assembled an anonymous all-star band and dubbed them “The Secret Seven.” With this group of top jazz musicians he recorded “The Unexpected” album in January of 1960. For nearly 45 years the identity of the Secret Seven line-up has remained a mystery, but now you can learn the identity of Raymond Scott’s all-star band by visiting a “secret website” whose location is revealed in the CD booklet on the reissue of the album.
Or I’ll just tell you, what the heck. Secrets are for Republicans, anyway. The “Secret Seven” are: Elvin Jones (drums), Milt Hinton (bass), Kenny Burrell (guitar), Eddie Costa (piano), Sam “The Man” Taylor (sax), Harry “Sweets” Edison (trumpet), “Wild” Bill Davis (organ/keyboards), and Jean “Toots” Thielemans (harmonica). At least that’s what they usually play. Who knows what paleo-high tech toys they played for Scott… There are some vocal tracks, too, by Scott’s second wife. As described by a reviewer at Amazon:
Then there are those vocal tracks. Dorothy Collins, (Scott’s wife at the time and a singing star on “Your Hit Parade”), sings on two songs. Her vocals are double-speeded, like the chipmunks, but sung very intensely, like her head is going to explode. It sounds like Alvin with rabies. It’s actually pretty funny in a deranged kind of way, and it’s reassuring to know that Scott never stopped being a little bit loony.
Alvin with rabies – I may have to track this CD down to hear that, LOL!
I suspect with a powerhouse lineup like that (did you catch the pun?), Scott may finally have had to relent and allow a bit of improvisation in his old age. But I do not know for sure one way or the other.
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. [snip]
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. [snip]
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. [Wikipedia compares this music to the works of Tangerine Dream or Brian Eno in the mid 1970’s. – K.P.] 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.)
He divorced his second wife, and married a third. The explorations continued in the sci-fi vein. By 1970 he had invented a device called the Electronium [You gotta love these names!] that was an early computer-controlled random music generator. An entire room in his home was filled with those old giant two-reel computers, whirling lights, etc. Reporters from magazines like Popular Mechanics would check in to see what was going on with the composer/inventor. One reporter said, “It looks… like the instrument panel of a space capsule… Lights flash and the entire panel glows with an orange light” …probably the orange glow of vacuum tubes! It was the forerunner of the MIDI composition studio device we know today. It’s sound would be picked up by Berry Gordy of Motown Records after a visit; he and others incorporated it into the funky groove sounds of 1970’s music. Scott was hired by Motown to do electronic music R&D in 1971.
A sound that entered the jazz world on albums such as Herbie Hancock’s “Headhunters.”
Scott retired from Motown in 1977, and continued research and composing until 1987, when he had the first of a series of severe strokes. He died in 1994 at age 85.
“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
Clearly NOT the prediction of someone who understood that jazz is about the group interaction and interpretation of the composer’s melody. But that’s beating a dead horse at this point…
There’s one part of the story I forgot. Back in the 1950’s, Scott had a young visitor to Manhattan Research. A young college student and builder of theremins; the evening went well, and at the end Scott ordered a theremin. Several months later the young man was invited back; the theremin had evolved into the Clavivox discussed above. The young man, who went on to work for Scott for a time, designing circuits for him in the 1960’s, was named Bob Moog. Who later went on to invent the Moog Synthesizer, building upon the technologies he had seen and worked on/with in Scott’s lab.
Recently, there’s been a bit of a Raymond Scott revival going on (from Wikipedia):
In the mid-1990s, the Beau Hunks (a Dutch ensemble originally formed to perform music created by Leroy Shield for the Laurel and Hardy movies) released two albums of Scott’s music. Clarinetist Don Byron has recorded and performed his music, as has the Kronos Quartet. A number of Scott’s original recordings have been re-released.
“Being introduced to the music of Raymond Scott was like being given the name of a composer I feel I have heard my whole life, who until now was nameless. Clearly he is a major American-composer.” – David Harrington, Kronos Quartet
XM Radio, Samsung & Pioneer to Develop XM – MP3 Hybrid Device
And in the spirit of the above, here’s a story for those of you who like your techno-toys. It may not be the biggest thing since sliced bread, but it may be the biggest news since the Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup: XM Radio has announced it is taking on iPod to produce a combined MP3 player / satellite radio receiver.
Yeah, yeah, I know – as a deep green kinda guy I’m supposed to eschew such things, but XM has several channels of excellent jazz programming, and the MP3 player is great not only for carrying music around, but also for podcasts, whether of Air America programs you missed or for jazz podcasts. (Actually, I use the iPod Mrs. K.P. gave me for my birthday last summer pretty much totally for podcasts). I may be deep green, but those who know me know that the only kind of hair shirt I’m really into is a nice wool sweater, LOL.
And I’m not reporting on this just because it’s my chance to be the cool kid on the block for once in my life, either:
Saghir [Ryan Saghir, satellite-radio expert and blogger at Orbitcast.com] said that these new devices are “for people who are really into their music. The music elite are the initial ones who will be attracted to this.”
Bonddad. Says. I. Must. Put. Credit. Card. Back. In. Wallet… [Shriek]
…So, that’s Jazz Jam’s foray into the world of the curious, the non-improvised, and the high-tech. Next week, back to our usual improvised music. 😉
