by Cinzia Scott

"I'm confusing to a lot of people. I'm a traveller. Many of my old friends don't understand that. They don't know how many sacrifices I make - and have made - to stay as pure as I can, to play jazz as I feel it. Everybody wants me to be a prosperous senior citizen, I've had opportunities to be a big-time band leader, to do a variety of things that could have made me rich. I chose to be a vagabond and retain my sense of youth and freedom.

People around the world love jazz because they’ ve all contributed to it. Like painting, it has borrowed the best of many cultures. America provided the melting pot, the roots come from everywhere
...but remember, jazz is Black!

My entire career had been built around my dedication to jazz, the Afro-American or Black Classical music. It is this music which I feel wells up from the Afro-American’s ability to absorb music from all  the world and bring forth a unique sound, strained through the Black experience in America, retaining much of the emotion connected with the rituals of sounds, tones, rhythms and feelings representing the mix of European and African cultures.
(Tony Scott)

Tony Scott, Anthony Joseph Sciacca - family's name - was born in Morristown, New Jersey, on June 17th, 1921. Considered a LIVING JAZZ LEGEND, a MUSICAL INNOVATOR and a WORLD MUSIC PIONEER is an artist with the ability and intention to defy categorizations, who by using his past experiences has always been projected into the forefront of the musical tendencies of his time.
He is considered the BEST CONTEMPORARY JAZZ CLARINETIST, in the mean time he is composer, arranger, orchestra director, and instrumentalist of exceptional versatility, expressing his art with equal intensity through the clarinet, alto, tenor and baritone sax, flute, piano, voice and jazz scat singing. ,

From the forefront of New York's jazz world in the fifties - sharing stages and studios with the biggest in the business and repeatedly winning of the most prestigious critics and popularity jazz poll awards - he is famous for propagating the ‘hey-day’ of Bebop throughout the world, in the mean time to be the first to realize musical world interactions - and the first 'New Age' music - through his meandering the different countries in a subtle cross-cultural venture started already in the '57- and still never ended - with an unlimited concerts' and recordings' production. Many times winner of the most important t internationl musical awards, Scott was recognized in 1957 by the USA government for his help to the culture and friendship in the world through the medium of music.

Starting from his enthusiasm for the musical atmosphere of the middle ‘40s, and his devotion to CHARLIE PARKER as man and musician Tony scott was the first to play Charlie Parker’s Bebop music utilizing the clarinet in the new idiom, and his sound is like no other clarinetist in history: he combines the huge tonal and agile movements to create a hyperactive, huge but controlled surge of sounds. In his high range he was able to reach 8 notes higher over the highest C on the clarinet, with a sound so powerful, that it equals the sound of saxophones and trumpets in black modern jazz.

Tony Scott has seen it all. He graduated from The Juilliard school of Music, following studies at NYC Contemporary School of Music, with composer Stefan Wolpe, but already from the 1940's his world was between Harlem, Greenwich Village and 52nd Street , when the block between Sixth and Fifth Avenue was lined on both sides by closet-sized clubs that poured out a heady mixture of Bop, Swing and Dixieland. It was a world where the musicians roamed from one club to another between sets or gathered in Reilly's bar or the White Rose Tavern to drink and talk. Tony Scott sat in with everybody through Down Beat , Showplace, Onyx, Village Vanguard, Cafe Society, Club Sudan, Three Deuces, Spotlite, Famous Door...; in Harlem: Reinessence, Minton's Playhouse, Count Basie Club...; and NYC Theatre, Town Hall and Carniegie Hall...

"One night an out-of-town visitor, waking 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. It wasn't the booze. It was just Tony Scott on the move."
(John S. Wilson, The New York Times.)

Scott spent the later part of the 40's trying to evolve a clarinet style which departed completely from the Goodman concept of the 30's and which carried out the Parkerian ideas without simply copying Parker’s phrasing. The result was a feathery, long-lined, boneless style which, until the 50's, seemed to frustrate him by constantly escaping from his clutches. During the 50's, however, he mastered it to such degree that he could range freely from the most feathery, light-as-air impressionism to an intense, emotional ferocity and intensity that makes some of the ‘oldtime hot’ men sound as though they were blowing icicles.
(John S. Wilson, The Collector’s Jazz 1959 - The New York Times)

Scott played with all the greats of the 'GOLDEN AGE OF JAZZ', from Errol Garner, Buck Clayton, Billy Taylor,Trummy Young, Art Tatum, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Gillespie, T. Monk, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Sid Catlett, Charlie Shavers, Al Cohn... to Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen Mcrae and Billie Holiday - for whom he was clarinetist, pianist, arranger, and orchestra leader at Carnegie Hall concert and on the original album, Lady Sings the Blues .
He played with numerous famous USA orchestras - Buddy Rich, Charlie Ventura, Lucky Millinder, Benny Carter, Charlie Ventura, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and between '53 and '56 led the Tony Scott Big Bands and Tony Scott Septet recording for Brunswick and RCA Victor . He's been musical director for Harry Belafonte, arranging greatest hits such as Day-o and Matilda - which were recorded for RCA with the Tony Scott Orchestra and Chorus - and he was part of what was called 'Third Stream Music', playing with The Modern Jazz Society and Modern Jazz Quartet Quartet led by John Lewis and Gunther Shuller.
He led his own differents quartets with musicians Milt Hinton, Dick Hyman, Bill Evans, Paul Motian, Clark Terry, Sahib Shihab, Jimmy Knepper, Henry Grimes, Dick Katz, Philly Jo Jones, Osie Johnson, Kenny Barrell, Winton Kelly, Percy Heath, Mc Coy Tyner, Keith Jarrett... receiving all the best reviews from magazines and newspapers. The recording of that time are still successful reissued on CD: The Complete Tony Scott; The Both Side of Tony Scott; Tony Scott & Bill Evans; A Day in New York.

Following his strong curiosity at the end of 1957 he set off on a seven-month odyssey through Europe - Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Yugoslavia, France - and, searching for the Black Jazz roots, through South Africa, where he wanted to play, in time of Appartheid, integrated jazz concerts, which were never done before in Johannesburgh and Durbans. He recorded also for African RCA with African pennywhistles (flutes) and an African women's vocal group.

I'm a traveler, a born tourist. I love to see other peoples and their countries. I love to hear their sounds, their sights.
I love the smell of a country. I love evrything moving and travelling.
At the same time I'm learning and I'm rejuvinating myself

I just want to be like a snail. I want to go nowhere.
If the snail wanted to go up, he'd go up to the Empire State Building
If he wanted to go down, he'd be in the grass
Instead he's moving without going anywhere.
I want to float like a snail.

I saw a photo by Verner Bishoff of a lifesize Buddha sitting in a garden full overgrown grass. The Buddha had a snail on its noise.
I just looked at that photo and gasped. It was like the jazz scene, deserted. Everyone had died and no one was left to nurture it.
When the jazz scene became a cemetery, I tried to find a way to get out.

When you are open you find everything,
when you have a closed mind you find nothing.

It was from the end of 1959 that, saddened by the deaths of his musician friends, he left the States just after his own quartets recording: Sung Heroes - deep melancholy dedication to the lost dear friends (with Bill Evans, Scott La faro, Paul Motian whose Scott put together for the first time ) and Golden Moments and I'll Remember ( with Bill Evans, Jimmy Garrison, Pete La Rocca), now CD reissued as At Last.
Tony Scott started wandering the globe like a Jazz ambassador, playing his way, in every country meeting new musicians, new cultures, sounds and thoughts, teaching and playing jazz in many concerts and jam sessions, in the most important radio and television broadcasts and also in many recordings.
In the Orient he spent five years playing and travelling... Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa, Vietnam, Formosa...creating and improvising with Japanese musicians the first 'New Age' album: Music for Zen Meditation - Verve).

Back to the States, invited by George Wein to play the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, he spread his new musical resoursces keeping alive for two years with McCoy Tyner the Dom club on St. Mark's Place, at the same time capturing all the occasions to rekindle the old spirit of jazz in a recessional NYC market, where jazz was displaced by pizza corners and striptease clubs.

" We were all relics...nobody were making jazz anymore..."(Tony Scott)

Invited by Joe Berendt to play with the Indonesia All Stars at the 1967 Berlin Jazz Festival, following he spent two years in Africa traveling trough Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia, Morocco and Senegal, where he recorded with African musicians.

"I could never center myself in such a small world
as normally is considered the world of Jazz.
To me the world ' Jazz ' means improvisation with a beat.That's all.
If it's from America then you are going to have certain elements coming in, maybe in another country you use your own folk songs and you get something out of that. In Africa we used African feelings - idiomatic phrase telling out the land, the people, the animals, the forest, the jungle, waterfalls, the bigness of Africa, thousand of years of culture."
Tony Scott

"Today, while his former idol, Benny Goodman, remain in his own specific groove, having shunned modernism after a brief flirtation with it in the early 1950's, Scott continues to grow."

"He was the first to bring Bop to the clarinet in the 1940's. Determined not to stop there, he has managed to remain in tune with the times since then. Unlike many other clarinetists, Scott does not let the instrument limit him."

"He brings to it concepts and procedures basic to trumpets and saxophones. Also, he often creates textures one associates with other musical cultures. His performances as a result, are more robust, communicative, less rigid than those of players who adhere closely to completely legitimate clarinet techniques."

"Moreover, he is not afraid to display his emotions in performance. He cries, exults, and express pain. Scott can 'sound' beautiful, but it is most apparent that the content of his solos matters most to him. "(Burt Korall, International Musician 1967)

From 1970 he decided to settle definitly in Europe where he played an uncountless number of Europe 's countries, from up North Europe - Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany...- to the Balkans, Hungary, Checkoslovakia, to South Europe - France, Swistzerland, Spain, Italy, alternating his activity of jazz soloist to the orchestra director, composer and arranger with the most important European radio and television Big bands.
A new 'less action- more depth soulful' way of jazz recording is whispering from his clarinet . His ideas changed from traditional music to expressing the Universe and its mysteries using both traditional instruments and electronics sounds, recording experimental, free, spatial, fusion, world, spiritual and healing music.

" Every instrument, every sound has its time.
But, as Monk said 'That's all I can do'.
The way I play the clarinet is my style, it's personall.

When I was in Japan I asked a clarinetist what he thought of
Tony Scott's style. 'Good', he said but it's too difficult to copy. "
(Tony Scott)

Above all, he is a most interesting and fascinating pioneer artist, with a tri-dimensional, 360° vision, who moves his creativity with the same strong passion between many art forms: music, photography, writing, painting, theatre and movie acting. Playing, teaching, speaking, encountering many different kinds of people, he has gathered together, united and diffused the cultures of the world with extraordinary instinct and depth of soul, as well as with great intellect, dramatic talent, pathos, and sensuality, an overflowing joy of life, and an insatiable hyperactive curiosity. For this reason he has been able to avoid the pitfalls others have fallen into, by living his art courageously (or unconsciously), by always experimenting with new avenues of expression… or perhaps the reason is all in what he describes as his 'Hebrew-Sicilian-Viking-African' blood:

I'm a Gemini and they have no logic, go by intuition, and I'm Sicilian, no logic, go by intuition, so I've got it in reinforced cement with steel rods going down it. I play the clarinet in the same way.

There's a lot of demons down inside me that I gotta take them up sometimes, pat them on the head and sometimes kick them in the ass.
You gotta keep your spirit behind your physical, because if your mind says 'Let's get out there and DO IT!' and your body says 'Oh, man I'm tired', you don't move.

It's not easy to be an human being and on top of that an artist - well, that may be a little harder and a little easier. Anybody's gotta work in that office every day, good God! Give me jazz starvation instead of having to do that, same subways and traffic.I've seen people doing the morning rush hour...but I've been coming from Minton's Playhouse jam session at 8:a.m., man, I'm free.
(Tony Scott)

Tony Scott e has been - and still is - a great and well known photographer til the '50 when he could take portraits of his great friends musicans followed by photos tooked all round the world during his travelling. Expositions of his better material were organized in USA, in France - Coutance and Paris Fnac Museums- and in Germany.

His abstract paint activity started in 1994 - he calls JAZZ PAINTING - is rapresented by events of colors' moviments which, go through the space of both textile or ceramic tiles in the same way the sound can go out of his clarinet through the space. He likes to paint big dimensions inspired by his musical sense and totally blended with it; his paintings are rising in the same way of his photo or his jazz solos are made: like an unexpeced wind during a space of relaxed concentration...as he said:

"I open the tap.. I need only let the water to flow...
My paints are to hear, not to see..."
Tony Scott

His own preferred painting "...The Wellspring of Charlie Parker" (mt.4x 2.50)
His own autobiography?... "Bird Lady and Me"
His most known composition? ..." Blues for Charlie Parker"

"With my memories I want the Black Gods of Jazz to be living.
I hope to be part of the Jazz past and
I hope to help Jazz be a part of the world's sound of the future."
Tony Scott

“…a benevolent leader…restless leader of his own life…a wandering Jew…a flying Dutchman…loveable and capricious…egoist yet open to others…egocentric yet ready to collaborate…infantile yet wisely…who refuses to compromise…the last ‘dinosaur’ of a species never extinguished… more than just a survivor…unique being among us… a revolutionary of yesterday’s clarinet… today’s defender of  a never-tiring idea...” (Blue Jazz)

©Cinzia Scott