Raymond Scott

Raymond Scott, born Harry Warnow on September 10, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American composer, bandleader, pianist, and record producer. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph and Sarah Warnow, he grew up in Brooklyn and later attended Brooklyn Technical High School. His older brother, Mark Warnow, who was a conductor, violinist, and musical director for the CBS radio program Your Hit Parade, played a formative role in encouraging his musical development. Scott graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in 1931, where he had studied piano, theory, and composition.

Scott launched his professional career as a pianist for the CBS Radio house band, working under his birth name while his brother Mark conducted the orchestra. To shield Mark from accusations of nepotism once the band began performing his unconventional compositions, he adopted the stage name Raymond Scott. He married Pearl Zimney in 1935. In late 1936, Scott assembled a six-piece ensemble from among his CBS colleagues, which he named the Raymond Scott Quintette — deliberately misspelling the word and choosing it over a more numerically accurate term. The group's sidemen included Pete Pumiglio on clarinet, Bunny Berigan on trumpet, Louis Shoobe on double bass, Dave Harris on tenor saxophone, and Johnny Williams on drums. Their first recordings were made in New York on February 20, 1937, for Master Records, a label owned by music publisher Irving Mills.

The Quintette embodied Scott's effort to reinvigorate swing through densely arranged, tightly controlled performances that minimized improvisation, a style he called "descriptive jazz." He gave his compositions eccentric titles such as "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," and "Bumpy Weather Over Newark." Though popular with general audiences, jazz critics dismissed the work as novelty music. Among the Quintette's recordings were "Twilight in Turkey," "Minuet in Jazz," "Powerhouse," and "The Penguin." His composition "The Toy Trumpet" gained wide recognition when Shirley Temple performed a version of it in the 1938 film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and trumpeter Al Hirt recorded a rendition with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1964. Another piece, "In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Room," adapted the opening theme from Mozart's Piano Sonata in C, K. 545. Scott composed not from written scores but through a process of head arrangements, humming phrases to sidemen or demonstrating passages at the keyboard, recording rehearsals on disc, and reworking the material until a piece reached its finished form.

In 1939, Scott expanded the Quintette into a big band, and three years later CBS named him music director, a position in which he organized what is recognized as the first racially integrated radio band. Over the following two years he brought in musicians including saxophonist Ben Webster, trumpeter Charlie Shavers, bassist Billy Taylor, trumpeter Emmett Berry, trombonist Benny Morton, and drummer Cozy Cole. He also served as music director for the radio program Broadway Bandbox from 1942 to 1944. In 1941, he led a thirteen-piece orchestra in performances of what he called "silent music" in New York, among the earliest known performances in that near-silent canon.

Scott's Broadway credit came in 1946, when he composed and arranged the music — with lyrics by Bernie Hanighen — for the musical Lute Song, which starred Mary Martin and Yul Brynner. Following that production, he began recording pop songs using the layered, multi-tracked vocals of his second wife, singer Dorothy Collins, a technique developed contemporaneously with guitarist Les Paul's similar studio work with Mary Ford, though Scott's recordings did not achieve comparable chart success. In 1948, he formed a six-man ensemble that served as the house band for the CBS radio program Herb Shriner Time, and the group made studio recordings released on a short-lived label Scott named Master Records in tribute to the defunct Irving Mills enterprise.

When his brother Mark Warnow died in 1949, Scott took over as orchestra leader on Your Hit Parade, a position he held through 1957 as the program transitioned from CBS Radio to NBC Television. Collins was a featured singer on the show throughout that period. Scott regarded the role as a means of financing his electronic music research, which he pursued away from public attention. In 1950, he composed his only known classical work, Suite for Violin and Piano, a five-movement piece performed at Carnegie Hall on February 7, 1950, by violinist Arnold Eidus and pianist Carlo Bussotti. In 1958, while serving as an A&R director for Everest Records, he produced singer Gloria Lynne's album Miss Gloria Lynne, with sidemen including Milt Hinton, Kenny Burrell, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and George Duvivier.

Scott is today regarded as an early pioneer of electronica. In 1946, he established Manhattan Research Incorporated, through which he pursued his work in electronic sound design. Although he was never contracted to score animation, his compositions became deeply embedded in American popular culture through Carl Stalling's adaptations of his music in more than 120 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies films produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons. His music has also appeared in The Ren and Stimpy Show, The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, SpongeBob SquarePants, and other animated series. The only instance in which he composed music directly to accompany animation was a set of three twenty-second commercial jingles for County Fair Bread in 1962. Raymond Scott died on February 8, 1994.