Metropole Orchestra feat. The Beau Hunks Saxtette - The Chesterfield Arrangements - Digital Download

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Arrangements of Raymond Scott`s compositions, originally arranged for and performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Arrangers include Fred van Eps, Irving Szathmary, Joe Glover, Roy Bargy, Russ Case and Nathan van Cleave. These charts were performed on the Chesterfield series between December 1937 and December 1938, but Whiteman recorded almost none of them. 

Gert Jan Blom, Beau Hunks Orchestra leader, set out to record these arrangements. He chose to work with the Metropole Orchestra, one of the nest large jazz ensembles in Europe, with whom he had previously recorded albums of music by Roger Roger and André Popp, and Dennis Farnon's Mother Magoo Suite. The Chesterfield arrangements called for a virtuoso saxophone sextet, so Blom added the sax players from the Beau Hunks Orchestra. The music of Raymond Scott has always been difficult to categorize. Because he does not fit any of the neat marketing categories, this has helped give his music a particular appeal to modern audiences. 

Jazz scholar Will Friedwald observes, "What makes Scott so relevant to our times is the rhythmic accessibility of his work. Scott supporters lament that the composer is invariably given scant notice in histories of jazz, but it's difficult to consider the '30s Quintette music jazz in any except the broadest definition of the term. The fashion in which Scott used rhythm and avoided a jazz conception of time ultimately works in his favor. Those wonderfully tricky, rinky-dinky, mechanical sounding pieces fall easy on the ears of contemporary listeners who've grown up with a rock and roll sense of time."

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