Music: Great Scott Returns

Sharp-eared listeners to the CBS network this week sensed something out-of-the-ordinary. They were right. Good Morning, Blues, played by the Moanin’ Blowers (bandleader unannounced), was a sneak opening—the first of a dozen 15-minute broadcast spots scattered through the week, featuring a new six-man band led by the screwiest bandster in the business: Raymond Scott (real name: Harry Warnow).

Five years ago Composer-Bandleader Scott rose almost overnight from obscurity to become the talk of the smart jazz set. A staff pianist for six years in Columbia Broadcasting’s Manhattan studios, Scott formed a six-man “Quintet” in December 1936, began composing and broadcasting sharp, rhythmic, unsingable pieces with wacky titles (War Dance for Wooden Indians, Bumpy Weather Over Newark, Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals).

By spring he was heading west with a Hollywood contract. By summer his Quintet records had become the fastest-selling disks on the market. Scott branched out three years later with a 16-man orchestra, has spent the last 25 months playing theaters, parks, dance halls. What lured him back to CBS is an arrangement that gives him a chance to experiment, leisure to compose, and as free a hand in jazz as Norman Corwin has in drama.

In rounding up his new band, Scott was permitted, to pick Negro as well as white players. One of his programs, Jump Time, clings to the bouncier forms of jazz. Another, Pan American Hot Spot, has a Latin accent. Farthest off the beaten track is Secret Seven, a working laboratory for some of Scott’s more outlandish ideas, out of which in a few weeks may come a more imposing program: The CBS Academy of Hot Music.

Famed until now as a composer of descriptive fox trots that dash along in short, breathless musical phrases, Scott is working to broaden his style before his public types him for keeps, Scott never writes a note of music from one year’s end to the next: he dictates his compositions. This method, he admits, is prompted partly by laziness, partly by the fact that “if you have an audience around, it’s very pleasant to compose.”