For those of you who have arrived on the page directly from Raymond Scott-related places, be sure to visit the rest of the Night Blooming Jazzmen site to learn about this great Dixieland band.

Most of my efforts in preserving Scott's music have been devoted to careful transcription of the recordings of his "Quintette." These fantastic arrangements for six instruments (he avoided the word "sextet" for various reasons) were not written down at the time. Instead, Scott worked them out with his musicians and they committed them directly to memory. My transcriptions are often the only written versions of these pieces of music and so they are performed by ensembles around the world. They are all available through RaymondScott.net. You can see a list of the arrangements I have completed here.

Several top-notch groups have used these transcriptions for concerts and recordings. Recently, the Quintette 7, an ensemble within the US Army West Point Band, released "Quintette 7 Plays the Music of Raymond Scott." This is an all-professional group of extremely fine musicians. Other than subsituting tuba for string bass (as a tuba player, I see no problem in this!) and adding some auxilliary percussion, this recording is very true to the original Scott sound - in fact I think it is an imporvement. Their web site includes several full-length sound files too.

Stu Brown has been playing Raymand Scott's music (making use of many of my transcriptions) for a couple years already. He has released "Twisted Toons - The Music of Raymond Scott" you can find out more about this recording and listen to several performances at the Raymond Scott Project. This is another find professional group.

On May 18, 2009, I had the opportunity to perform several of these transcriptions at my alma mater, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech.) Though Caltech is not known for its music program, we have an unexpected number of fine musicians among our students, faculty, and staff. I have included the live recordings of all the music from this concert on this page. The recordings were made by Johnny Brugman (the trumpeter's son) using a hand-held digital recorder. The only editing that has been done to these files is a careful re-equalization to remove as much of the room acoustics as possible. I achieved this in my own studio using Digital Performer. You can download the poster that we used to advertise the concert as well as the program.

In addition to transcribing some 30 of Scott's original "Quintette" recordings, I have been creating arrangements of Scott's music for contemporary big band. This is a standard instrumentation used by high schools and colleges in their music departments. The idea is to make Scott's music more accessible to the schools and further promote his musical legacy. All of my big band charts are also available through RaymondScott.com. I do this as a fun and completely non-profit project. I do not need your donations (thank goodness!)

Here are four recordings of my big band charts that were performed on January 23, 2009 at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. The concert featured both of Caltech's big bands with guest artist Flea. Flea is an honest-to-goodness rock star. He is the bassist and one of the founders of The Red Hot Chili Peppers - and also quite a good jazz trumpet player. He is also one of the most professional and nicest celebrities with whom I have had the pleasure performing. Flea is not playing on any of the Scott pieces. He had not heard of Scott until the concert - but I think we made an impression on him.

The Caltech Monday Jazz Band is an all-student band. Understand that Caltech has no music department so all the players are doing this for fun and have only one rehearsal each week. The Caltech Thursday Jazz Band (in which I played tenor sax at this concert) is open to faculty, staff, members of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (its run by Caltech) and some particularly good community players. Both bands rehearse on Monday evenings! However, many years ago, the Thursday band rehearsed on Thursday. We call the bands with these names to avoid having an "A" and "B" band.

"In an 18th Century Drawing Room" is an update of a stock arrangement that was published in the 40s. I have completely re-edited the parts as well as changed the instrumentation. It features John Brugman on trumpet and Matt Whited on piano. "Christmas Night in Harlem" is based on the "Chesterfield" arrangement performed by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra at the 1939 New York World's Fair, featuring Jack Teagarten on trombone and vocal. I have rescored this for modern big band, and rearranged the vocal to have a more prominent role. I have also updated the non-PC lyrics (I apologies to Mitchell Parish who wrote the original lyrics.) It features Kjerstin Williams on the vocal. By coincidence, Kjerstin is also a trombonist - but I still cut out the trombone solo. "The Toy Trumpet" and "Yesterday's Ice Cubes" are totally original arrangements. Brenda Goforth Adelante is featured on "Toy Trumpet."

To download these, chose "save linked file" from your browser. After the file is on your disk, remove the ".bin" extension to leave the ".m4r" (ringtone) as the only extension. I had to add the ".bin" to get around a Safari problem.