Product Description
For the previous nine months, as Harry Belafontes musical director, Tony Scott had not touched his instrument. Now he used the occasion to concentrate on his two principal role models: Charlie Parker, whose polyrhythmic playing and asymmetric phrasing fascinated him, and Ben Webster, who had taken him under his wing as a young musician and whose emotional, melodious ballad playing had inspired him to adopt the same unusually warm and gentle tone on the clarinet. Both sides came across significantly in Scotts playing: the thin, brittle, almost shrill tone of his virtuoso, up-tempo bebop lines contrasted with the inimitable intimacy and warmth of his legato ballad style, a sound Scott literally breathed into the clarinet unlike anyone. The two approaches are equally characteristic of the recordings Scott made in April 1957 as a guest at the Stuttgart radio broadcaster SDR, as well as the live performances recorded for posterity by Joachim-Ernst Berendt on behalf of SWF in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1962 under far from ideal conditions using a portable tape recorder and a single microphone. Despite certain acoustic deficiencies, most notably audible on the track from Singapore, these recordings are deserving of our attention as rare testimony to a hitherto little documented phase in Scotts career.
Review
Calling all jazz-heads and bop addicts: Here are two gifts that keep on giving - a collection of some of the real (as in literally) gone daddies of the art of jazz, heard in live and hitherto unreleased live contexts: Bud Powell, who in the development of bebop was arguably to the piano what Charlie Parker was to the saxophone, and Tony Scott, one of the few to play bebop on clarinet and went on to be a pioneer in what today is known as world music (or world fusion, a coming ling of jazz and ethnic sounds). Live captures Powell at the twilight of his career but he's in fine form here. He swings like nobody's business and as two extra added attractions, the drummer is fellow bop innovator Kenny Clarke (one of the few drummers to dislike long drum solos, btw) and tenor sax ace Zoot Sims, one of the greatest acolytes of Lester Young (silky-smooth yet with punch) to ever pick up a horn. The program is all familiar standards, but they're performed with plenty of spunk and succinctness.
Perhaps the clarinet was seen as a relic of the Swing era - few modernist seem to have embraced it. But if you've never heard the blues on clarinet, you must hear how Scott navigates the standards "Moonlight in Vermont" and "The Man I Love" - his bluesy ballad playing should be taught in schools, in regard to saying a lot with the least amount of notes. But he can and does wail like a mofo ala Charlie Parker on "Lover Come Back to Me." Scott is accompanied by European cats unknown to this writer but credit themselves admirably. No exotica here, but some swell swingin' sounds by a fellow that deserves to be heard by new generations." --Mark Keresman, Icon Magazine, February 2015
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