Playing the tunes of 'toons By Paul Freeman For The Daily News POSTED:   06/03/2014 07:40:55 PM PDT0 COMMENTS| UPDATED:   8 MONTHS AGO   Click photo to enlarge Courtesy photo The album cover for "Cartoon Logic," by Jeff Sanford's Cartoon... ( Courtesy photo )   1 2 » Classic cartoons have given us some of the most hilarious imagery we've ever seen. But close your eyes, and you'll hear some of the most exciting, outrageously fun and deceptively sophisticated music ever devised.     Redwood City-based Jeff Sanford is musical director of the Cartoon Jazz Septet and Orchestra. He also plays clarinets, saxophones and flutes with the groups. They breathe new life into the swinging big band sounds that enlivened the animation of the '30s, '40s and '50s. "I used to get up Saturday morning and watch cartoons in Queens, in New York, especially Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and all that Warner Brothers stuff, as well as Walt Disney," Sanford says.  "I grew up listening to Benny Goodman. I was in a household with swing freak parents and an older brother who, besides listening to The Stones, was also into Miles and Chet Baker. So I grew up in a jazz-listening household, a classical-listening household, plenty of Mozart, Beethoven and Dvorak. And I learned the clarinet, starting at 9, playing classical music." But jazz became Sanford's primary passion. During his college years, he hitchhiked to California and ended up sleeping in a friend's yard in San Anselmo. "I remember waking up under a fig tree. It was obvious I was in heaven. And I vowed that I would come back, at some point, to live here." He did end up moving here, took a job as a courier and spent every free hour practicing music. "I started playing jazz in bars for people who didn't want to hear it -- and went from there." Sanford has played an amazing array of gigs, including Gershwin with the San Francisco Symphony, Latin jazz at Yoshi's, circuses and Italian weddings. He has performed with Regina Carter, Stan Getz, Steve Allen, The Ink Spots, Michael Feinstein and Eddie Fisher.  When Sanford heard Don Byron's 1996 album, "Bug Music," featuring the music of composer Raymond Scott, it hit him like an anvil dropping on Wile E. Coyote's head. Sanford found Scott's inventive, complex music incredibly appealing. "His parents were Russian Jews, and the whole New York thing is soul music to me. When I hear Eastern European music, somehow, to me, it's just in my DNA. There's a lot of klezmer in it. And it's very classically rooted.  "There's a layering in Scott's pieces. He lays down a theme and has another section of the band laying over another theme. And another. It's very rich and rhythmical. There are key changes, changes in tempo. Raymond didn't really care about the technical difficulties.  "It was that frantic stuff that woke Carl Stalling up to using Raymond Scott's music for cartoons. Raymond Scott never wrote for cartoons, never watched cartoons. Raymond Scott's music was just reflecting New York City life, and the frenetic challenge of crossing the street. But Carl Stalling, who originally worked for Disney and then worked for Warner Brothers, heard in Raymond Scott's music all this visual enrichment that could be had by laying that behind the action of the cartoons." A friend of Sanford's, upon passing, left the fellow musician a huge collection of charts. Included were several of Scott's works. Sanford began hunting for more. He found a treasure trove amid the massive piles of charts and orchestrations in the archives of Oakland's Paramount Theatre. Eventually, as word of his quest spread, the material began finding him. Now, half of the Cartoon Jazz Band's repertoire consists of Scott's material. They also play the music of other composers whose work wended its way into cartoons, all the way up to and including Danny Elfman ("The Simpsons"). In addition, the band interprets jazz greats such as Fletcher Henderson and plays originals written for the group by Lenny Carlson. The band, which had released a couple of live albums previously, recently released a pair of studio albums -- "Cartoon Logic" and "More Cartoon Logic." A successful Kickstarter campaign made that possible. "Everything about the music biz is shoestring, unless you're in the top, popular creme de la creme," Sanford says. "So, with esoteric work, we just try to do it, but not lose money."  He has played with some members of the band for more than 30 years.  Large bands are difficult to maintain, both fiscally and logistically.  "Fortunately, it's really good music," Sanford says, "and very challenging, the most challenging. And that draws the best musicians -- because we want to be challenged. We haven't been doing this since we were 9 and not take it seriously." The Cartoon Jazz Band was officially launched at the 2003 Stanford Jazz Festival. After a 2013 Stanford concert, the septet and orchestra were rehearsed and ready to record. They headed to Fantasy Studios. The session was productive, resulting in two albums' worth of tracks. "People got to the studio early. It was well arranged. We had endless coffee and we got to work and we knocked out about 28 cuts in three days, which is unbelievable. I've never been a part of something like that before. And it really clicked, as you can hear on the CDs. I didn't think we'd have time to put all of that on record. But we had a lot of energy going. I'm really happy with it." At Half Moon Bay's Bach Dancing and Dynamite on Sunday, Sanford's septet and 16-piece orchestra will get plenty of energy going again. "I want to present the most interesting, varied, high quality musical program I can, with the best musicians in the Bay Area. And for that, I need miracles in scheduling to happen. I can't have many subs with this music. People have to actually learn the music. They can't just walk in and read it. So I need my regular band. Fortunately, this music has drawn and kept the same great guys and girls to put this out." Audiences are fortunate, when they get a chance to hear these bands perform. "It's challenging being a musician," Sanford says, "just convincing people to take the buds out of their ears and listen to live music, to have some concentration ability, without having their hand on the remote, ready to switch to the next stimulus. But people who come are blown away. They can't believe that they're hearing this live.  "We're actually playing it. We're not cleaning it up, we're not punching in. We actually rehearsed it. That's why it sounds great. We're actually playing it, like the symphony does. They've been playing since they were 9 also -- or before. That's why the San Francisco Symphony sounds the way it does. They're really good musicians. It's no joke. That's their life. And it's the same with my cats. They're all very creative, totally into it." At 63, Sanford's musical adventure continues. In addition to his orchestra he regularly performs with his own quartet, the Martini Brothers, the Golden Gate Park Band, Frisky Frolics, and the Joel Abramson Orchestra. He's playing tunes for a friend's forthcoming mockumentary film, and has booked a gig on a clipper ship. He also enjoys teaching a big band class Tuesday nights at Palo Alto's Oshman Family JCC. "I'm doing what I like -- that's the secret of life. And it's a great life. It's not boring. Every day is different. That's one of the wonderful things about it." Email Paul Freeman at  paul@popcultureclassics.com.

 

A jazz band inspired by Looney Tunes

Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

 

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 4, 2004

Where would Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig be without Raymond Scott? Scott was the composer whose madcap 1930s music -- a dizzying comic mix of classical music, Ellington jungle jazz and Jewish klezmer, among other things -- was a prime ingredient on the soundtracks to a slew of classic Warner Bros. Looney Tune and Merrie Melodies cartoons.

Millions of us who grew up watching the crafty wabbit, Daffy Duck and the Roadrunner were weaned on Scott's fun-house music -- patches of "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "Powerhouse," "War Dance for Wooden Indians" -- without knowing it. In recent years, this antic music, which wasn't written for cartoons but adapted for them in the 1940s by Warner Bros. music director Carl Stalling and other arrangers, has cropped up on animated shows like "Ren & Stimpy" and "The Simpsons." Veteran Bay Area saxophonist and clarinetist Jeff Sanford fell under the late composer's spell as a kid in Queens, watching Saturday morning cartoons. Sanford has spent the past couple of years tracking down charts of Scott's intricately arranged music and organizing a 13-piece band to play it. "It's fun stuff. We get to the end of a piece and everybody just cracks up," says Sanford, 53, whose Cartoon Jazz band will play Scott's music Friday night at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. Sanford, a multi-reedman who plays everything from bar mitzvah gigs to swing dances, big band music and bebop, was inspired to take up Scott after hearing clarinetist Don Byron's 1996 "Bug Music" recording. In addition to early Ellington and the genre-crossing music of John Kirby, the disc featured a half dozen Scott numbers, including "Siberian Sleighride" and "Powerhouse." The latter, Scott's best-known tune, marries two memorable but unrelated melodies. The first is a frantically rampaging theme that's perfect for any chase; the second, a spooky, stepping melody that evokes "a menacing assembly line gone haywire," wrote Irwin Chusid, who directs the Raymond Scott Archives and produced "The Music of Raymond Scott: Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights," a 1991 CD compilation released three years before Scott's death at 85. Hearing Byron's quintet play this descriptive, swinging music, first performed in the late '30s by the Raymond Scott Quintette and later arranged for his touring 13-piece band, "stirred up all those memories of fun," Stanford says. "Raymond Scott was not writing for cartoons; these were his reflections of walking around New York in the '30s."
Sanford loves the wild energy and shifting colors of this music, which, like Gershwin's and Monk's, pulses with the rushing rhythms and blaring horns of modern city life. He also digs the way Scott incorporated and jazzed up classical themes, and "maybe some of the New York Jewishness of it, which appeals to my roots." The music is dosed with klezmer, which Sanford calls "Eastern European soul music. It gets me every time."

Born in Brooklyn as Harry Warnow, the son of Russian immigrants, Scott showed a talent for music and engineering at an early age. He became a pioneer of electronic music, inventing sequencers and drum machines and an early synthesizer called the Clavivox, among other innovations. Scott planned to pursue engineering until his older brother, Mark, a violinist and conductor who led the CBS radio orchestra, bought him a grand piano and put him through what became the Juilliard School. Harry joined the CBS band as a pianist and began composing quirky pieces for it. Not wanting to be known as "the conductor's brother," he changed his name to Raymond Scott, chosen for its crisp rhythm. He called his group a quintet for the same reason, even though there were six musicians (he apparently thought the term "sextet" would suggest something other than music). A notoriously tough taskmaster, Scott composed by playing phrases at the piano and having each musician repeat and memorize assigned parts. There was some improvising, but when somebody played something Scott liked, it was set in stone. The method may have been maddening to jazz musicians -- one of the original members of the Quintette was drummer Johnny Williams, father of famed movie composer John Williams. And another was trumpeter Bunny Berrigan, who couldn't take it and quit -- but the music grabbed the public. Scott was big on radio and records in the late '30s and '40s. He also appeared in movies (Shirley Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson tap-danced to his "The Toy Trumpet" in "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"). He became CBS' music director, wrote Broadway and ballet scores and was the bandleader of "Your Hit Parade," first on CBS radio then, in 1950, on NBC TV. In the '50s, he began writing and recording commercial jingles, often using electronic music played on instruments of his own making, and wrote music for such films as Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry." His "cartoon" music, with its abrupt shifts of key and tempo, "is really tough to execute. The tempos are just maddening. You have to have good musicians to do it," says Sanford. "This music has the same verve and power as when he wrote it," says Sanford. "I know I'm a dinosaur, but nobody's writing music like this. It's very cool."

Sanford got some of the charts from his friend Tony Parinella, a retired musician in his 80s whose Redwood City house is packed with big band music. Other Scott tunes came from the archives in the attic of Oakland's Paramount Theatre, where librarian Jean Cunningham, a flutist who plays with Sanford in the Golden Gate Park band, dug up the sheet music. He bought "At An Arabian House Party," with its exotic faux-Egyptian riffs, from the Scott archive. Bassist Marty Eggers, who Sanford sometimes plays with at Enrico's, heard he was doing Scott's music and gave him charts for the waddling "The Penguin." "It's a labor of love. I'm losing money at this," laughs Sanford. The other night, he was rehearsing the group at the South of Market studio of Don Bennett, a jazz bassist who made his living for years building architectural models and now constructs stand-up electric basses for Clevinger. Bennett, a white-bearded cat with a Cheshire vibe who lives on a Sausalito houseboat near the floating home of his lady friend, writer Cyra McFadden, hosts various band rehearsals and jam sessions at 20 Lucerne, a wonderfully funky 1920 brick and wood shop filled with dusty drill presses and lathes, tree chunks, plants, vintage clocks and old cigarette ads. Bundled up in jackets and sweaters, sipping red wine or Modelo beer, the musicians worked through Scott's madly swinging numbers, polishing entrances, dynamics and phrasing. "Don't worry about exaggerating the accents -- it's cartoon music. Lay into them," Sanford said at the top of "Boy Scout in Switzerland." Running through "Twilight in Turkey" -- which quotes the minor-key ditty to which Little Egypt danced the hoochie-coochie at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and to which generations of schoolboys have sung risque lyrics about the ladies in France and their pants -- Sanford told tenor saxophone soloist Dick Mathias, "At H, if you want to squawk or holler, that's fine." These arrangements call for the reed players to switch back and forth quickly from saxophone to clarinet and for the brass to use all kinds of mutes, from rubber plungers to metal Harmons.

"Scott wanted to paint a sound picture. The titles are evocative of what he wanted listeners to envision," says trombonist Rick Walsh, an arranger who works as an orchestrator and copyist on movie and Broadway scores. Walsh, a big guy wearing a yellow tie printed with music from "Tosca," toured with Gladys Knight, played with the late saxophonist-bandleader Benny Carter and orchestrated music for "The Predator" movies. He first heard Scott's music on cartoons and later studied it in a film scoring class at Boston's Berklee College of Music. "The music is a welcome collision of American and European influences," says Walsh, whose wife, pianist Marianne Addington, is also in the band. "It's like being on a ride -- you don't know what's going to happen. You come out the other end after three or four minutes and say, 'Wow, that was great!' Or, 'That was absurd.' It's funny."

Drummer Mark Rosengarden was driving the music, coloring it with the requisite rim shots, cowbell clanks and cymbal crashes, thumping tom-toms and martial snare rolls. He remembers hearing Scott's music as a kid in New York, on acetates his father, the drummer Bobby Rosengarden, brought home."It mystified me, it was so fast and crazy," says Rosengarden, whose resume includes stints with Vince Guaraldi, Bette Midler and Randy Newman. "It's like Frank Zappa. He'd rehearse you to death. He didn't want to hear any struggle. He wanted to hear masterful, on-the-money playing, and so did Raymond Scott." It's worth the effort for these guys, who rehearse this music for free and don't make much performing it. Harvey Robb was playing baritone sax, wearing woolen gloves with the fingers cut off, an accoutrement he picked up playing chilly outdoor shows with the Pickle Family Circus for 20 years. "It's fun getting together with good musicians to play challenging music," he said.
Sanford loves sitting in the middle of this maelstrom of sound. "I always feel like I'm in a privileged space when I'm playing in a good band," he says. "I have a good seat for listening. Sometimes when I'm rehearsing this band, and the tenor player is wailing away, I have to remember when to come in because I get lost in hearing him. This music touches all of us, because it's so deep in our memory."