Tony Scott
b. Anthony Sciacca, 17 June 1921, Morristown, New Jersey, USA. Scott learned to play clarinet as a child, later studying formally at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. During the late '40s and beyond, he made his living playing in big bands and as a sideman in mainstream groups, sometimes playing tenor saxophone. Fascinated by the new jazz sounds emerging from Minton's Playhouse and other New York venues, he became a strongly committed bop musician. Unfortunately for the development of his career, bop and the clarinet were uneasy bedfellows, although Scott was one of the tiny number of clarinettists to achieve some recognition, building a reputation through the '50s as one of the best new players on his instrument. He was also active as an arranger and musical director for several singers, including Harry Belafonte, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. In 1959 he recorded the remarkably forward-looking SUNG HEROES, with Bill Evans, Scott La Faro and Paul Motian, but the same year left America, tired of music business racism and despairing of the fact that so many of his close friends—Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Sid Catlett, Lester Young, Billie Holiday—had recently died. Scott spent six years travelling, both in Europe and (mostly) the Far East, and began to incorporate into his repertoire elements of ethnic music, especially from India and the Orient, creating a personal precedent for world music long before the genre was acknowledged. The records he made in the mid-60s as aids to meditation proved to be popular and consistent sellers—‘a godsend’ he said of them in 1988, claiming that their royalties were still his main source of income. In the early '70s Scott settled in Italy, playing at festivals and touring, often to the far east, making occasional records and as often as not anticipating trends and fashions in music—even if, as so often happens with pioneers, his work has been overshadowed by that of other less-talented musicians. His latest project to date has been a double album consisting entirely of different versions of Billy Strayhorn's standard, Lush Life. ‘No one has sung it right yet’, Scott told WIRE in 1988, ‘including Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, everybody—they all goof it’.