Before the release of The Raymond Scott Project, Volume One (Stash) and Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights (Columbia) Scott’s music was almost forgotten. His compositions could be heard only in Warner Brothers cartoons, where they had been appropriated by the brilliant film composer Carl Stallings. Scott’s music in the 1930s anticipated innovations that arose several decades later. Predating John Cage’s famous 34’33” composition by more than a decade, Scott’s group once played something called Silent Music at the Blue Note back in 1949 in which the musicians pretended to be making sounds on their instruments. Like Frank Zappa, Scott was fascinated with making an art out of performance. Sometimes he marched his band into the audience and conducted with the musicians scattered throughout the auditorium. Or he would instruct the band to play quieter and quieter, while making broader and broader conducting motions as if he were signaling a crescendo. Although his comedic touches and eccentricities point to Cage and Zappa and artists like John Lurie and John Zorn, Scott’s music also predates Charles Mingus’s work. Both were programmatic jazz composers in an idiom in which programmatic content is rare. Mingus’s A Foggy Day with its automobile sounds resembles Scott’s Confusion Among a Fleet of Taxicabs Upon Meeting with a Fare. There are also similarities in the way both composers approach harmony. In a few of his compositions Scott stays on the same chord for long stretches in a manner typical of Mingus’s forays into modal jazz.
Scott was born with the name Harry Warnow He changed his name to avoid charges of nepotism after his brother, Mark Warnow, conductor of the CBS house band, began playing his compositions. He picked the name Raymond Scott out of a phone directory because “it was a nice-sounding name, it had good rhythm to it.” Scott was apparently intrigued with making up humorous names. He called his six-member group the Raymond Scott Quintette and gave the name Eric Hoex to the group's saxophonist Dave Harris, because he thought Harris was too ordinary a name for such a talented musician.
Scott was Jewish. Joel Lewis, who wrote a 1993 article about him in the Jewish weekly, The Forward, believes that Scott, unlike his Jewish contemporaries such as Gershwin and Goodman, was unaffected by the desire to fit in:
“As a Jewish popular composer, he seems to be the missing link between Gershwin's attempt to be accepted as a "serious" composer and Benny Goodman's and Artie Shaw's desire to be accepted as “serious” jazz musicians, not white imitators. Mr. Scott, at his best, sought neither route; he pursued neither vision, producing a body of music that still defies categorization.”
Scott had little interest in sticking to the stylistic constraints of jazz. He turned away from jazz solos unless they were supported by orchestrated accompaniments. Although members of his group played solos, they were painstakingly rehearsed. As a jazz composer, he was alone in his mistrust of improvisation. In contrast to others in the jazz community, he thought that improvisation rarely fulfilled its promise of creating good music. He believed it had put jazz in a rut, with the routine precluding any ingenuity.
Innovation in jazz does not have an impact unless it quickly becomes the common property of many musicians. The evolution of jazz styles progresses less from one great artist to another than from generation to generation. As a result, innovations that do not come out of an entire generation’s style do not become anything more than a footnote to jazz history. This is what happened to Scott’s music. He failed to make any converts to his ideas about jazz. Although other jazz musicians respected him, they did not consider his music to be jazz. Consider the remarks of Johnny Williams, the Quintette's drummer and father of Star Wars composer John Williams:
“We really didn't want to do any of it. So there we were, doing what he called descriptive jazz and which we thought was descriptive all right but not jazz, because jazz is right now, not memorized note for note. And after all this compulsive rehearsal, suddenly it all caught on and we were making more money than anybody else in town, all thanks to him. We were doing records, public appearances, making movies, everything.”
Williams' statements remind me of a remark Jimmy Giuffre once made—that his sidemen would rather be playing bebop than Giuffre’s music. Such is the nature of most jazz musicians: They prefer to play the music of their own generation rather than that of an original composer without cachet in the jazz community.
Scott's unwelcome reception in the jazz community was not unique. There were several white musicians and a few African Americans, such as Herbie Nichols, who have gotten a similar response. But rather than blaming the jazz community for its excessive purism, it is better to take a closer look at the relationship between Scott’s music and that of the only other contemporary for whom he had complete respect, Duke Ellington. In a 1937 article Scott wrote for Billboard, he acclaimed Ellington for: "singularly [carrying] through musical ideas, theories and innovations in jazz despite the barriers that often confronted him because of lack of musical appreciation in the masses, petty prejudices and a general lack of comprehension of what he was trying to accomplish in jazz.”
From my 1998 book Jazz in Black and White: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Jazz Community.
Scott’s most famous piece with his Quintette is Powerhouse.