…and even a little about Carl Stalling
Original position in magazine: pages 3-6
Contents: Laughing Violins, Hot jazz and swing, An extravagant way to compose, Skip the eyes, Stylised miniature movies, Discography
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Smart cookies who went to the Meltdown Festival at the South Bank some two summers ago will have heard the music of Raymond Scott as played by The Wooden Indians, a sextet of Netherlandish musicians from the Dutch Broadcasting Orchestra. This writer missed the show and had to have the ‘mystery’ of Scott explained to him. It’s still an intriguing tale. Remember the facts that don’t quite add up… Raymond Scott did not exist; he was a composer who never put pen to paper; The Raymond Scott Quintette never had five players; and his music is better known today through Carl Stalling’s cartoon scores than his own records. Let’s investigate…
Laughing Violins
The way in for most people is through the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. If you ever payed attention to the music for these cartoons, chances are you will have heard a Raymond Scott composition. Carl Stalling was the uncannily gifted musical arranger whose work has been brought to attention since about 1990, through the remarkable efforts of Hal Willner, John Zorn and other keen fans. Thorough research and hard work are the hallmarks of this rescue mission, and two CD volumes of The Carl Stalling Project have thus surfaced. This music is now redeemed from the halfway house of neglect - where it might have languished forever, perceived as mere ‘background music’ to the art of Chuck Jones and others, or due to its ‘lowbrow-culture’ connections, not taken seriously in the first place. Carl Stalling used what was in the air around him. His genius lay not simply in producing original compositions, but in collaging hit tunes or popular classics - known musical quantities - and condensing them down into intense miniatures (a format dictated by the length of the cartoon, the fast movement of the action), pressing as many buttons as possible for maximum audience response. The music had to assist in conveying an idea, an emotion, a setting - and do it fast. Hence, a large number of ‘musical quotes’ - of which Raymond Scott wound up being one more ingredient in the stew. His back catalogue of compositions had been licensed to Warner Brothers in 1941. If you want statistics, Carl Stalling made 133 uses of Scott music in 117 cartoons from 1943 to about 1960; ‘Powerhouse’ was used 43 times.
No denying these Stalling CDs are a fascinating, and at times a dizzying and alarming listen - half of the sensation comes from divorcing the music from its functional support-structure, the cartoon for which it was composed. It seems doubly wild and crazy. The compilers are more than aware of this phenomenon. In restoring this neglected great to the hall of fame, some have gone a little too far; John Zorn I think wants it to be something more than it is, reckoning Stalling a modern master composer on a par with Charles Ives. This says a lot about Zorn’s post-modernism. Personally I think the cartoons were great, and that trash culture of all sorts is entertaining and fun, and I’m not too concerned about slotting it into some hierarchy of High Art - this is a sickness we inherited from Art Historians who imposed a personality-based star system with the Renaissance at the centre. But I digress - this isn’t Carl Stalling’s story…
Hot Jazz and Swing!
Some of these ditties Stalling was using actually dated back to a slightly earlier period. The Raymond Scott Quintette produced several hit records in the late 1930s. These records sold phenomenally well (in the hundred-thousands, some say), in spite of the Depression and record sales generally being slow. Thanks to the Columbia CD compilation Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights we can have the chance to study these Scott records on their own terms. Here are 22 tiny masterpieces, each one more astonishing than the last (if you play them in that order). They are so compacted as to appear to be fully formed, bearing an almost unnatural perfection and polish, almost not composed at all. There’s whimsy and humour in the titles, and in the fast-paced music itself. You can see how these items would lend themselves to being used as cartoon music, even if they weren’t composed for that reason. But they’re more than simply novelty records; there’s intelligence and wit here and all of this makes them very very enjoyable indeed.
Harry Warnow was a gifted Jewish youngster who was born in Brooklyn New York City in 1909. His older brother Mark was five years old when the family arrived in New York from Russia. Their father Joseph was a violinist. Mark had become an established violin player with the Columbia Broadcasting S, when he encouraged Harry’s precocious piano skills, bought him a Steinway grand piano and paid for a scholarship at the Institute of Musical Art (later to become Juillard). Harry joined the CBS radio orchestra thereafter, and seemed to have a rewarding career assured, but after five years began to grow tired of the repertoire of tunes he had to play, and his rather corporate-sounding role as ’staff pianist’. He had in fact been working on his own compositions. Hand-picking players from the orchestra, he formed his own combo of five players (plus himself), took the name Raymond Scott from a telephone directory, and called it The Raymond Scott Quintette, retaining the ‘Quintette’ component because he liked the word.
In a way these records derive from the raw material of phrases and moments learned from Jazz and Swing records of the 1920s. David Ewen: ‘They are at times brilliant projections of hot-jazz styles and idioms which, up to now, had been confined almost exclusively to dance music.’ Warnow Senior had owned a record shop in New York, where Harry was able to hear records from all over the world. He listened intently and later was able to use this vocabulary to construct something new. An intense process of distillation; he could eat grapes and spit out 60% proof Grappa. The humble gramophone record became an important part in a remarkable communication system; Scott could seize the essence and suck out the marrow of a piece of music, just by getting to it through the grooves. Learning by feeling, and not just by studying the rules of music…when you think of the other ways he might have done it, he was certainly capable enough - reading sheet music, studying a combo’s playing techniques, the conduction method of the leader. But any of the conventional routes above would have simply been boring!
You know the great blues musicians (whose work was almost exclusively studied through records, the only way in most cases) can always confound people who did understand the rules of music. Charley Patton’s music is subjected to analysis by Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow in King of the Delta blues: The Life and music of Charley Patton; these scholars marvel at Patton’s ability to play an irregular number of bars with half-measures, switching between time signatures, or achieving a ‘descending cadence from the dominant to the subdominant to the mediant (major third)’. Of course, Patton (a self-taught guitarist, playing mostly by ear, feeling and songs memorised aurally) wouldn’t have known what they were talking about. A Radio 4 Desert Island Discs guest agreed. A slightly stuffy academic, he admired the barrelhouse boogie-woogie piano music of Meade Lux Lewis, and admitted defeat with the words ‘Of course, this music is impossible to play…’
An extravagant way to compose
Scott did not write any sheet music for a single one of these pieces. Each was composed mosaic fashion, working cheek by jowl with his musicians. He would play a fragment of music on the piano; the horn player would learn it, then practise it until it was memorised. In jigsaw-puzzle fashion, an entire tune could be built up. From then on it was a case of the musicians rehearsing and practising it - relentlessly - until completely learned. In the 1960s, Don Van Vliet would teach his music to The Magic Band in much the same way. Once learned, no variation from the piece would be permitted; similarly soul king James Brown, who would dock the wages of his backing players if they hit a single wrong note. Only the exquisite works of S J Perelman (the American humourist who is little read today) exhibit the same obsession with polish and perfection; his elaborate confections seemed to have rolled straight from his sardonic tongue, yet they were the result of endless, agonized-over rewrites.
Although called ‘kittenish pseudo-jazz’ by one critic, and using instruments associated with jazz, Scott’s music denied the heart of jazz - improvisation. Even if improvisation had been a determining feature at a more embryonic stage, even that fleeting gesture of freedom would end up cast in bronze. Not a shred of written score, charts or cues at any stage; everything was in the heads of the players.
This mosaic technique of composition is something, I suggest, very suited to the age of magnetic tape, the playback. Other great ‘naive’ talents - Brian Wilson, The Residents - have exhibited their talent for using playback as a compositional element. How else but through a constantly repeatable medium (a gramophone record) could Scott have taken to heart the little seconds of pleasure that so tickled his senses? His technique likewise made machines out of his players; he was using them as a live tape recorder. He was also using them as an extension of the piano. In the same way, Ornette Coleman ‘played’ The London Symphony Orchestra (on 1972’s Skies of America, with the help of David Measham) as though it was just the world’s biggest saxophone - since that was the instrument he mainly composed on.
Why has sheet music become perceived as ‘necessary’ to creating a work of music? Chris Cutler’s theory (in File under Popular) is that sheet music isn’t necessarily a good thing; it’s been around since the Middle Ages, but through mechanical printing it developed as a communication device in the 18th and 19th centuries with the spread of what is now called ‘classical music’. ‘Notation cannot organically adapt’, says Cutler; he champions the oral tradition, songs remembered and passed to the next generation by singing, memory and word alone. This tradition is what made Folk Music England’s pride (and to a certain extent, it spread to America in the early part of this century). Is Raymond Scott a sophisticated Folk musician? Cutler goes on to link sheet music to the commodification of music (reducing it to an ownable, sellable physical entity) which is a Marxist tack of no concern to us here. Of more interest is Milton Babbit’s view on 20th century composition generally: ‘This music employs a tonal vocabulary which is more ‘efficient’ than that of the music of the past, or its derivatives. This…make[s] possible a greatly increased number of pitch simultaneities, successions and relationships. This increase in efficiency necessarily reduces the ‘redundancy’ of the language, and as a result the intelligible communication of the work demands increased accuracy from the transmitter (the performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener).’
Machinery was also an integral tool in the whole Scott process. He learned music from records, and studied the records of his own music so he could make changes and corrections. He built a prototype music centre which could make tapes from records for his home use. He devised a special tape recorder so he could record one-minute bursts of improvisation at the piano, and use the instant playback facility to form compositions. His love of tinkering with electronic equipment would pave the way for his later innovations in electronic music, and indeed assist in the creation of his unusual sound on the 1930s recordings.
Skip the Eyes…
The original Raymond Scott Quintette was Louis Shoobe (bass), Pete Pumigilo (clarinet), Bunny Berigan (trumpet) soon replaced by Dave Wade, Dave Harris (saxophone) and Johnny Williams (drums). Scott himself played piano and celeste. Also heard on the Columbia CD are Russ Case on trumpet and Fred Whiting on bass; and two tracks from the later New Orchestra. As jobbing professional musicians, these men were not entirely comfortable with the Scott method. Learning the pieces by ‘head’ arrangement is not unheard of, but no band in history was called upon to memorise as much as they did . The rehearsals took up an inordinate amount of time, and the leader’s insistence on accuracy and perfection was incredibly demanding. Many of Scott’s ideas were piano-based, and not always easy to translate onto a wind instrument, which uses a different scale and a different way of playing.
Any difficulty was likely compensated in some way by the financial successes. For the time of their career the records sold well (Al Brackman, a producer for Irving Mills’s record label, spotted the appeal straight away); and the band was in demand: there were live shows, radio appearances, and lucrative work in Hollywood. CBS gave Scott whatever he needed in terms of studios, engineers, arrangers or musicians. And there was fun. The ’silent music’ routine was where each player mimed the movements of playing their instruments without actually producing a single note. Some have seen this as a precursor to John Cage; 1930s audiences were kept in stitches.
The visionary artist - composer at the centre; this pattern is so similar to other manifestations in American music, for example the Sun Ra Arkestra or any incarnation of Frank Zappa’s studio and touring bands. Not wishing to perpetuate any romantic ‘God-Artist’ perfect-creator myths, but one notes that the players - talented as they are - tend not to do quite so well when removed from the orbit of their avatar. Shoobe said: ‘I don’t think you could do it under another conductor. After I left Scott, I worked under another conductor who tried some of that music, and I couldn’t even do my own part’. Some of the original Mothers of Invention were superlative players, but outside of a few fringe projects why are there so few memorable solo records?
The original quintet lasted for two years, then Scott formed a big band; this later incarnation was a bit more conventional. This time it was music you could dance to (unlike that of the Quintette), although Scott continued to demand the same level of commitment and perfection from his players. This combo stopped in 1942 after a series of tours. Still bubbling with success, he became a music director at CBS where he formed the very first integrated band in America - black musicians and white musicians together in the same gig.
Stylised miniature movies
Each Raymond Scott miniature is a picture in sound. From an early age, he had been thinking of music in visual terms - ‘I’d see a cow and think How can I portray that cow in music?’ But unlike the tone-painting of say Duke Ellington, Scott’s approach is eccentric and strange. An elaborate title clues you in and suggests an incongruous image - ‘War Dance for Wooden Indians’, ‘Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals’, ‘Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies’. This was a continuous process, whereby ‘Scott would dream up an unlikely situation, compress it into a title and then describe it in numbers’ - inventing the music to ‘draw’ it. David Ewen: ‘He has tried to express in music the ‘feel’ of a thimble, a telephone, a hot ear of corn, and a bumpy air journey over Newark.’ This is an interesting sense-swapping phenomenon (a pre-Acid version of the rave light show, or amplified guitar solos approximating the LSD effect) and a very cinematic one. Who hasn’t been excited by the possibilities of putting the right music with the right fast-moving visuals? (Ask any bloody MTV director). Scott’s little game would be to visualise his own imaginary movies in miniature, with feature-length titles, and the music would do the rest. Unsurprising to learn that Scott worked in Hollywood for one year (in 1937), signed by David Selznick to do film music for 20th Century Fox; his compositions grace the films Happy Landing, Ali Baba goes to town, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. ‘Toy Trumpet’ was written for Shirley Temple to sing and became another hit record.
Another later musician who liked elaborate titles was Charles Mingus, great jazz composer and arranger who achieved remarkable story epics of his own such as ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’ whose theme was nothing less than the evolutionary progress (and regression) of mankind. A favourite title was ‘The Shoes of the Fishman’s Wife are some Jive Ass Slippers’, although you have to be a pretty imaginative listener to hear a story like that going on in the crazy music. ‘Free Cell Block F, Tis Nazi USA’ was a protest title tagged onto an instrumental which appeared to have no specific protest component. Mingus’ music is the main course, a hefty T-Bone steak meal with all the trimmings, for which Raymond Scott’s tasty canapés were the openers.
The ‘World Music’ aspect you can pick up on in the ‘Turkish’ and Eastern-sounding melodies is something that seemed to come naturally to Scott, accessing these records as soon as they hit his father’s record shop (important capital cities were often sites for exciting musical developments, as they got more records and sooner than anyone else - Liverpool was once a thriving port, hence they got more Motown records before the rest of the UK - hence Merseybeat and The Beatles). Scott’s interpretation of international music was essentially lightweight perhaps, but nowhere near as dire as the kitsch-ified schmaltz dayglo works of ‘Exotic’ Arthur Lyman in the 1950s. And the phenomenon of my own generation (when the ghastly term ‘World Music’ was first coined) isn’t much better, a combination of politically correct chest-beating (anything of the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ school) and the wretched and wanton culture-clashing of Bjork or Vanessa-Mae. I’m sure an essay is waiting to be written here…
Thank you for you kind attention. Next trip we hope to tell you something about Scott’s electronic music, his inventions the Clavivox and Electronium, and the Soothing Sounds for Baby CDs if I can find copies…
ED PINSENT
Records mentioned above
The Carl Stalling Project: Music from Warner Bros Cartoons 1936-1958
USA WARNER BROTHERS WB 9 26027-2 CD (1990)
Greg Ford Executive Producer, a Deep Creek Productions Inc item from Hal Willner. A classic item with the famous sliding intro to Merrie Melodies, a Road Runner epsiode in toto, and the distressing ‘Anxiety Montage’.
Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights: The Music of Raymond Scott
USA COLUMBIA CK 53028 CD (1992)
A US release only and a bit hard to find in the UK for some reason. Produced by Irwin Chusid, with Hal Willner as Executive Producer.
Sources for this article kindly provided by Irwin Chusid, PO Box 6258, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA. Write to him regarding further treasures from The Raymond Scott archives.