Stu Brown Sextet’s Raymond Scott Project

28/06/2010

From Bugs Bunny to the weirder side of jazz @the Platform, Easterhouse

Stu Brown Sextet’s Raymond Scott Project
The Platform, Easterhouse, Glasgow
3/5
 
It’s an off-kilter sort of afternoon. The show starts late because double-bassist Roy Percy was held up behind an Orange Walk en route to Easterhouse from an earlier Jazz Festival gig in the city centre. Then the sound engineer can’t hear the errant thunderous boom that’s clattering around the barely one-third full auditorium, so the gig is stopped one track in to readjust the sound set-up.
 
Gremlins despatched, when things do get going, the informative narrative by mastermind of the Raymond Scott Project, our affable host, Scots drummer Stu Brown, leads the audience on a journey through the extraordinary work of American bandleader, composer and engineer Raymond Scott, godfather of the modern synthesiser and creator of iconic cartoon soundtracks. We are also drawn into the journey that Brown is on, having begun this project two years ago and now evolving it further with daring and adventurous reinterpretations of some of Scott’s less conventional, more obscure creations.
 
You can’t help but suspect the smattering of kids and parents in the audience are here because the early chapter of Scott’s canon is woven so inextricably into Warner Bros’ Looney Tunes. Sure enough, after the interval a trio of youngsters clamber into the back row muttering about it being the music from the cartoons, only to leave two songs later after a particularly challenging (at least for those not attuned to the dissonance of modern jazz) arrangement of one of Scott’s works for the Electronium, deploying a wind-synthesiser that’s creepy in a ’70s cult sci-fi, Blake’s 7, Tomorrow People way.
 
The 1930s and ’50s works are patently easiest to digest; the contrast between these tunes and the experimental later works is stark. Maybe, this being a matinee, it should have come with a PG certificate, lest others, like those kids, mistakenly arrive expecting a double-bill of Daffy and Bugs. And perhaps, given the community involvement prior to the show - local children worked together with Stu to create their own stop-motion cartoons to go with the music – a lighter set playing up the WB angle might not have been a bad way of getting more youngsters through the door. Though with the England-Germany match kicking off at roughly the same time as this show, getting the numbers through the door that they managed is no mean feat.
 
Scott had a killer knack for evocative song titles: ‘Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies’, ‘Celebration on the Planet Mars’, ‘New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House’. And his skill at creating restless, hyper-energised pieces, twining exotic shimmies through the horn arrangements, is superbly conveyed by this really excellent band. If we weren’t all vuvuzela-ed out, the South African soccer-horn might’ve been ideal for enhancing the spooky vibe clarinettist Martin Kershaw works up in ‘…Haunted House’.
 
Thanks to these fresh arrangements, which all the band members – Tom Gibbs on piano, Brian Molley on tenor sax, Tom MacNiven on trumpet and bandleader Brown on drums - the contemporary value of Scott’s work, so far ahead of its time, is plain. The slinking bassy throb of ‘Snake Woman’ wouldn’t be out of place on a Tom Waits record, while the timings, especially of the drums, on some of the Electronium sessions that have been reinterpreted by Stu and his merry men with backing from the Scottish Arts Council, are something you might hear on a Roni Size track. The work Stu Brown is doing here is genuinely impressive, and if the starker new arrangements of Scott’s bold/odd Electronium works premiered today hook the more serious jazz aficionados, then fairweather listeners can remain happy with the kickabout cartoon capers of that first album.
 
Vicky Davidson
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