I have played a lot with Mat Mathews and Mat played a lot and recorded a lot with Tony in the USA and in my truck on the road he often talked about Tony.
I sent a recording of Mat and me and a few weeks later he telephoned me that he liked the recordings. After talked about 15 minutes about clarinets and dogs and mouthpieces we agreed that we should finish this conversation in Rome.

World citizen

With all the persons I interviewed for this magazine the name of Tony Scott was in the conversation. A man that gave the clarinet a place in jazz and modern music a very own style of playing with notes that I thought are not possible and still he does it.
He was educated at the Julliard school of music and the NYC Contemporary School of Music, he played with people like Errol Garner, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Billy Holiday. So he is a person with a lot of luggage. He recorded with Bill Evans, Paul Motian but also with South African Kwela musicians records with music for Zen Meditation he is a world citizen with a big interest.

Cinzia, his wife picked me up when I arrived at a very small station. After a 15 minutes drive we drove through a gate to the big villa where Tony and Cinzia are living. Tony was playing my album, he listens to it whole day Cinzia told me.
After some conversation we took our clarinets and oops that note is high and in tune I didn’t know that there was an E that high on the machine. And that with no teeth, my dream that I couldn’t play anymore when my teeth will fall out melted, and before I knew Tony taught me to play that high E. We went to his room to listen to recordings of him and we also listened to recordings of me that I took with me. We had great fun.

We took out our tenors and started to play.
83 years old and still playing on a tenor like Coltrane in his wild years and Albert Ayler when he had a rough time. And that with two of that loony`s. We continued to do that for two days. The next day we did some recordings that we listened back very careful a nice and very learning experience.

On the 1st floor there is an exhibition room with paintings and ceramic from Tony. Cinzia is helping Tony editing his biography. He showed me his clarinets , a Selmer, which he doesn’t play so much on and a Buffet a composite one with an incredible small barrel, but everything very beautiful and in pitch with a marvellous tone. The weight of the clarinet is very light and Tony likes that. But that man sounds great on everything I think if you give him a broomstick with a reed on it will sound great. In his working room there are all pictures of Tony with Charlie Parker, Billy Holiday, with Lester Young, with Coleman Hawkins, Thelonius Monk and more and more a whole wall.

Tony Scott, Anthony Joseph Sciacca born on June 17, 1921 in New Jersey. An Italian immigrant family based in Italy after a long period of roaming. It surprised me to find somebody with that age that is so sharp standing with both legs in reality and still playing with a passion… still with a technique. His tenor is a gold-plated Mark 6 that he bought when he left the states to go to Japan where he lived for years. A few of his beautiful albums are the Clarinet Album, Lush life and the complete Tony Scott.

It was very relaxed to play with him playing with the dogs in the garden talking to his wife and beautiful daughter. Next day Nina and Cinzia took me to the train and I just made it in time for the plane. A few hours later I was sitting on the sofa very close to my dog Lala at home listening to recordings of Tony and me from the last few days, what happened ?

I thought I went out to do an interview.