RAYMOND SCOTT: WORKS FOR ORCHESTRA
A new series of four 20-track digital compilations presents remastered recordings — many never previously released — of Raymond Scott's Works for Orchestra. Spanning 1935 to 1957, these 80 tracks highlight Scott's adventurous and eclectic approaches to composing and scoring for large ensembles. Most tracks were transferred from discs in the Scott collection at the Marr Sound Archives, with digital restorations produced by Scott historian/curator Irwin Chusid. The four sets include dozens of Scott originals — including some early Quintette titles arranged for orchestra — and a handful of cover versions. These collections are available on Spotify, Apple Music, and all digital retail and streaming platforms. On Spotify, here's Volume 1, here's Volume 2, don't miss Volume 3, and Volume 4 will be released March 29. (There are no plans at present to release these on LP or CD.)
RAYMOND SCOTT REIMAGINED
Now available — an unprecedented collaboration between violinist Jeremy Cohen's Quartet San Francisco, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, the vocal ensemble Take 6, and the Raymond Scott family. Raymond Scott Reimagined is a thrilling 14-track set which features Goodwin’s inspired arrangements of Scott classics, including “Powerhouse,” “Twilight in Turkey,” and “In an 18th Century Drawing Room.” The album also introduces a posthumous Scott composition, “Cutey and the Dragon,” which was crafted from an unfinished sketch Scott made in 1982 for his granddaughter Kathy, with Goodwin completing the composition in a manner that honors the great composer’s style and verve. Watch a short film about the evolution of this historic collaboration, and read Jonathan Widran's feature story about the project .
RAYMOND SCOTT'S JINGLE WORKSHOP
A lavish 2-LP and 2-CD set of 120 TV and radio commercials from Scott's enormously successful Jingle Workshop, 1951–1965 was issued in 2019. For over a decade Scott earned a solid living composing, arranging, and recording catchy ditties for Revlon, Delta Airlines, Stuckey's, Alka-Seltzer, Sprite, the Ford Motor Company and other sponsors. Hear Dorothy Collins, Mel Tormé, and dozens of unnamed session vocalists and musicians serenade you about beer, ice cream, gasoline, cigarettes, more beer, bread, cars, mouthwash, and MORE beer. The album includes finished spots, outtakes, rehearsals, alternates, demos, studio chatter, and irresistible earworms about mid-20th century consumer goods. The styles range from cool jazz to percolating Latin, from lush orchestrations to piano & voice; and even some stray electronic works. Collection produced by Irwin Chusid for Modern Harmonic.
Raymond Scott News
A new digital-only series, Raymond Scott's Merry Melodies, features vintage renditions of Scott's best-known Quintette titles. The recordings, from the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, feature the well-known (Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey), the not-so-well-remembered (Milt Herth, Hal Kemp, Adrian Rollini), and the obscure (James Kok, Shay Torrent, Gaylord Carter). Volume 1 can be found on Spotify, and it's available on all streaming and digital retail platforms. Vol. 2 will be issued shortly.
In November 2023, Raymond Scott received a posthumous Grammy Award nomination in the Best Instrumental Composition category for "Cutey and the Dragon." This late-life work, which was sketched out on paper by Scott in 1982, was completed in 2022 by Gordon Goodwin (who also received a nomination as co-composer). "Cutey" didn't win — it was edged out by a youngster named John Williams — but it was a thrill to have the quality of the new work acknowledged. The premiere recording of "Cutey" appeared on the 2023 album Raymond Scott Reimagined by Quartet San Francisco with Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band. Goodwin took the unfinished work and completed it in a manner that honors Scott's sophisticated yet playful style. A film of the studio recording can be viewed here. (Raymond neither received nor was nominated for a Grammy during his lifetime; the awards were launched in 1958, by which time Scott had largely stopped releasing records.)
In a recent episode, "Player Piano," on the popular podcast The Last Archive, producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explores "Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world." The episode can be heard on Apple Podcasts.
Scott's vintage recordings have been used in the soundtracks of a number of recent TV shows and films, including The Andy Warhol Diaries, This Fool, Winning Time, Lessons in Chemistry, and Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse. The long history of Scott's music in soundtracks can be found here.
Explore Raymond Scott's legacy in photos, historical artifacts, and stories at Google Arts & Culture's Music, Makers & Machines series, which focuses on the history of electronic music.
Lizzo sampled "Nescafé" by Raymond Scott (from his album Manhattan Research, Inc.) on the track "Tempo" (with Missy Elliott) on her Grammy-winning album Cuz I Love You. Scott is credited as a co-writer. The track has been used in the soundtracks of the TV shows Euphoria, Bigger, Empire, So You Think You Can Dance, and others.
Read Happy Birthday To Raymond Scott’s ‘Powerhouse,’ The Most Iconic Song In Cartoon History by Vincent Alexander at Cartoon Brew.
OUR BACK PAGES
SCOTTWORKS PERFORMANCE VIDEOS: We've posted a number of live performances from our September 2018 Raymond Scott Festival held in Burbank. Hear/see Scott tunes performed by Quartet San Francisco, Ego Plum, Skip Heller, Beth Sorrentino, and Michael Whelan.
ARTIFACTS FROM THE ARCHIVES: Learn more about Scott's electronic music career in our book Artifacts from the Archives, a FREE 349-page downloadable compendium of articles, documents, and ephemera, including previously uncirculated historic material.
Meanwhile, an online museum in Lithuania has adapted the book into a 25-minute video program about Scott's electronic music history.
