Chilowicz Sauter Thesis
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©2013 Alex Chilowicz ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A Career Retrospective of Eddie Sauter, Jazz’s Overlooked Composer and Innovator By Alex Chilowicz A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in Jazz History and Research written under the direction of Dr. Lewis Porter and approved by ______________________________________ ______________________________________ Newark, New Jersey May, 2013 ABSTRACT OF THESIS A Career Retrospective of Eddie Sauter, Jazz’s Overlooked Composer and Innovator By Alex Chilowicz Thesis Director: Dr. Lewis Porter With a career that spanned nearly four decades during the height of jazz’s popularity, Eddie Sauter contributed arrangements and compositions to some of the most significant jazz groups in the music’s history. Through his unique style, his constant desire to expand upon his compositional prowess through studies with various classical composers, and his general willingness to experiment with unusual melodic and harmonic gestures, Sauter produced music vastly different from that of most of his contemporaries. It is for this reason that the pensive composer was deemed “twenty years ahead of his time” by several critics of the day. As the chief architect for much of Red Norvo’s songbook in the 1930s, dozens of arrangements and compositions for Benny Goodman in the early 1940s, creative originals for Ray McKinley in the late 1940s, a unique repertoire with co- conspirator Bill Finegan in their jointly led “expanded” big band of the 1950s, and a handful of gems for Stan Getz with orchestral accompaniment in the 1960s, “prolific” barely begins to describe the output of Eddie Sauter. This thesis examines the life of the obscure yet influential composer/arranger Eddie Sauter from his curious beginning in 1914 as the adopted son of a German florist in Nyack, NY, through his forty year career spent among some of jazz’s most important individuals, until his untimely death at the age of 66 in 1981. i Preface Eddie Sauter’s musical output, while not widely studied, contains a massive amount of material. This thesis does not attempt to laboriously describe every track on every recording date in which Sauter’s arrangements and/or compositions appeared, for such an endeavor would augment the pages of this work tenfold. Instead, this work attempts to provide a thorough overview of the arranger’s career through a narrative supplemented by anecdotes, excerpts from interviews, historical documents, and a moderate amount of musical analysis. As this thesis was approaching its final stages, several interviews with key figures in Sauter’s life—his wife, Bill Finegan, members of Sauter-Finegan, Chris Griffin, Ray McKinley, and others—were discovered in the library of Queensborough Community College in the format of cassette tape. The information contained on these never-before-heard interviews was incorporated into this thesis insofar as time would allow. One of the immediate actions taken to preserve the material contained on these tapes (which were over two decades old in most cases) was the digitizing of these interviews. Although the author was unable to listen through all of the interviews on these cassettes, those that were deemed pertinent to the chapters contained herein were examined rather carefully. It is the author’s hope that these exclusive interviews with people who knew the Eddie Sauter intimately will shed new light on the composer’s somewhat elusive career path. The lack of easily accessible printed music by Eddie Sauter made the inclusion of musical examples in this volume a rather tedious affair. While the majority of the Goodman and Sauter collections are contained in the Yale University Music Library, virtually none of those scores are suitable illustrations for a document of this type. ii Additionally, a number of Sauter’s works are not to be found there, including all the McKinley materials, many of which are housed at the Library of Congress (and some of which are spread out in libraries and collections throughout the country). For this reason, the inclusion of musical illustrations in this thesis is kept to a rather select amount, and the music very often is discussed in the text without the need to refer to the score to grasp the points being made. In those instances, the recordings, which are fairly accessible, should suffice. iii Acknowledgements There are many individuals who assisted in the research and development of this thesis that I would like to address here. Firstly, I want thank Greg Sauter for his outstanding cooperation in providing me with information, photographs, and other documents regarding his father, Eddie. All of my accommodating interviewees, including Wally Kane, Larry Abel, and Bill Kirchner, supplied anecdotal material regarding their interactions with Sauter that helped to bring the man off the score page and into existence as a human being. I owe an especially large debt of gratitude to researchers Dennis Oppenheim and Dr. Jack McKinney for their efforts to interview several of Eddie Sauter’s closest friends, relatives, and business associates during the 1980s at a time when I still had not yet been born! It is through their labor of love that I was able to glean a wealth of information about Eddie Sauter that otherwise would have remained a mystery forever. For his efforts in guiding me not only through the process of drafting this thesis but also in my musical and individual pursuits beyond the classroom, I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Lewis Porter for his unwavering support. Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my mother and father, Karen David- Chilowicz and Daniel Chilowicz, and to thank them for their seemingly endless supply of patience, support, and love throughout a lifetime filled with music and questions. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 1! An Unusual Beginning .............................................................................................................. 1! Music Enters .............................................................................................................................. 3! A Brotherly Influence ................................................................................................................ 5! Things Begin to Pick up ............................................................................................................ 7! Archie Bleyer and the Columbia Blue Lions ........................................................................... 8! Bye-bye Columbia, Hello Barnet ............................................................................................ 10! Chapter 2 ......................................................................................................................... 18! A Little Background on Norvo ............................................................................................... 18! Norvo’s meeting with Sauter .................................................................................................. 19! The Formation of the Norvo Orchestra ................................................................................. 20! “Gramercy Square” and other Early Sauter ........................................................................ 21! Work for Mildred Bailey: “Smoke Dreams” and “Now it can be Told” ............................ 23! Chicago, Composition Lessons, and Margaret Charette ..................................................... 27! Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................... 31! A Telephone Call in Boston .................................................................................................... 31! Change in Style and Early Vocal Arrangements .................................................................. 33! Benny Out of Commission, Benny Rides Again .................................................................... 36! “Moonlight on the Ganges:” A Study in Interludes and Modulations ............................... 39! “Superman” and “Clarinet a la King” .................................................................................. 43! Eddie’s Illness Emerges ........................................................................................................... 44! Chapter 4 ......................................................................................................................... 50! Trying to Find Another Band ................................................................................................. 50! Ray McKinley Comes Along, Lessons with Stefan Wolpe ................................................... 53! Sauter’s Writing for McKinley .............................................................................................. 55! Sauter’s Quirky Originals ....................................................................................................... 58! Eddie Gets Sick Again ............................................................................................................. 58! Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................... 60! Encounter with Finegan .........................................................................................................