[Dixielandjazz] Tony Scott Obit - NY TIMES

[Steve Barbone]

Tony Scott, Jazz Clarinetist Who Mastered Bebop, Dies at 85

NY TIMES - By MARGALIT FOX - March 31, 2007

Tony Scott, a distinguished jazz clarinetist who in the 1950s helped steer
his instrument out of the swing era and into the sax-infested waters of
bebop, died on Wednesday at his home in Rome. He was 85 and had lived in
Italy for many years.

The apparent cause was complications of the prostate cancer Mr. Scott had
many years ago, his wife, Cinzia, said.

With Buddy DeFranco, Mr. Scott was considered one of the leading bebop
clarinetists. (The two men were often described as the only major
clarinetists to take on bebop, a style thought to be incompatible with the
instrument¹s soft, sweet sound.) Mr. Scott, who also played the saxophone,
performed and recorded with some of the titans of mid-20th-century jazz,
among them Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday.

If Mr. Scott was not widely known to the American public, it was partly
because his eclectic style made him unclassifiable: over the years, he
ranged through bebop and what today would be called New Age and world music.
It was also because he was peripatetic: for decades he roamed the globe,
clarinet in hand. He had lived mostly abroad since the late ¹50s.

Mr. Scott was also well regarded as a composer and arranger. His composition
³Blues for Charlie Parker,² which he created extemporaneously at a concert
in Yugoslavia in 1957, became his most-requested number. He also arranged
hits like ³The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)² for Harry Belafonte.

In a profile of Mr. Scott in The New York Times in 1967, John S. Wilson
described him ³playing his clarinet in his own uncompromisingly distinctive
manner, a manner which encompasses both a feathery, light-as-air
impressionism and an intense, emotional ferocity that makes the old-time
Œhot¹ men sound as though they were blowing icicles.²

By the end of the 1940s, the swing style popularized by Benny Goodman was on
the wane, and the clarinet was falling out of favor as a jazz instrument.
Mr. Scott persevered, touring Sweden, South Africa, Senegal, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and elsewhere. His 1964 album ³Music
for Zen Meditation² (Verve), a collaboration with traditional Japanese
musicians, is considered an early example of New Age music.

Among his other albums are ³The Touch of Tony Scott² (RCA Victor, 1956);
³The Modern Art of Jazz² (Seeco, 1957); ³Tony Scott in Afrika² (A World of
Music, 1997); and ³A Jazz Life² (Kind of Blue), scheduled for release next
month. 

Anthony Joseph Sciacca ‹ his family name is pronounced ³Shaka² ‹ was born on
June 17, 1921, in Morristown, N.J., to parents who had come from Sicily. His
father was a barber and amateur guitarist; his mother played the violin. He
began playing the clarinet at 12 and in 1942 earned a diploma from the
Juilliard School. 

Mr. Scott¹s first two marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the
former Cinzia Bastianon, he is survived by two daughters from his second
marriage, Monica Sciacca, a jazz singer, of Manhattan, and Nina Shaka of
Paris; and one grandchild.

During World War II, Mr. Scott was stationed with the Army on Governor¹s
Island in New York. This meant he could spend many happy nights in
Manhattan, playing the jazz clubs that lined West 52nd Street. He was such a
ubiquitous presence there, Mr. Wilson wrote in The Times, that ³one night an
out-of-town visitor, making his way down the street, began to worry about
what the booze was doing to him because he noticed that, in club after club,
the clarinetist always seemed to look the same.²