Eddie Sauter

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Eddie Sauter (top left) with (from bottom) Ralph Burns , Eddie Finckel , George Handy , Neal Hefti and Johnny Richards in the Museum of Modern Art , New York, 1947.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

Edward Ernest "Eddie" Sauter (born December 2, 1914 in Brooklyn , New York, † April 21, 1981 in Nyack , New York ) was an American arranger , band leader and trumpeter of the swing era and modern jazz . He led the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra with Bill Finegan .

Live and act

Eddie Sauter played drums at the age of eleven , switched to the trumpet and became a professional musician at the age of 17. He studied at Columbia University and music theory at the Juilliard School of Music and played with Archie Bleyer (1932) and Charlie Barnet . As a trumpeter, arranger (both for Norvo and for the singer Mildred Bailey ) and with his play on the mellophone he attracted attention in the band of Red Norvo (1935-39). He then worked as an arranger for Benny Goodman (1939-42) (e.g. "Benny Rides Again", "Clarinet a la King"), Artie Shaw , Tommy Dorsey , Woody Herman and in 1946 Ray McKinley ("Civilization") and "Arizay", 1947).

In 1952, Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan founded the Sauter Finegan Orchestra , which was initially planned as a studio band, but played together in changing line -ups until 1958. They were looking for new forms of musical expression in their orchestral big band music; they used unusual instruments such as gamelan , kazoo or bells for this purpose. With "Doodletown Fivers" they landed the first of their four hits; her composition rose to number 12 and stayed on the national charts for ten weeks. They borrowed the title “Doodletown” from a village outside New York, near which Sauter lived. They took the melody from the famous song "Kingdom Coming" from the Civil War .

The Sauter Finegan Orchestra , in which jazz musicians such as Trigger Alpert , Buster Bailey , Danny Bank , Al Klink , Ralph Burns , George Duvivier , Barry Galbraith , Bill Harris , Milt Hinton , Al Klink, Don Lamond , Mundell Lowe , Doc Severinsen , Nick Travis , Kai Winding and Phil Woods played, started his activities at the time of the decline of the big swing bands; Economically, it was a difficult time for big band work. Therefore, the music of the orchestra made some concessions to the taste of the time and only had modest jazz elements, like their second hit "Midnight Sleighride" (# 29) from May 1952. Sauter said:

“This is of course the“ Troika ”passage from Prokofiev's “ Lieutenant Kije Suite ”[op. 60, 1934] - but improved. I say this and I mean that. You know, when our recording came out, the radio stations played it right after the original and ours was just better! Oh, and one more thing: do you hear the hoofbeats at the beginning and at the end? That wasn't the great horse, that was Bill Finegan, who hit his chest very close to the microphone. "

The orchestra's last chart success was in August 1953 " The Moon Is Blue ", the theme song from Otto Preminger's original film of the same name , which was nominated for an Oscar. In 1954/55 the musicians of the ensemble only met occasionally for record sessions in which versions of the standards “A Foggy Day”, “ Autumn Leaves ” and “Old Folks” were recorded; The piece "Clarinet a la King" was created during a final recording session. Later, in 1986, the orchestra performed at several reunion concerts.

Sauter's extraordinary arrangements were to be found in his other projects, such as the one with Stan Getz (he wrote and arranged the string arrangements on Focus in 1961 and was involved in the film music Mickey One , 1965). From 1957 to 1959 he directed the SWF dance orchestra in Baden-Baden , which consisted of musicians from the Kurt Edelhagen orchestra (which previously held this position), an American rhythm group and European soloists such as Hans Koller . After returning to the USA in 1959, he worked mainly as a studio musician, worked again with Bill Finegan and founded a record company.

In 2003 he was inducted into the Big Band Hall of Fame .

be right

“There was tremendous serenity in Eddie Sauter's music. The pieces always seemed to be taken a little too slowly, and only later did it become apparent that the tempo - of course - was just right. It was those 'casual' tempos that are also known from Count Basie or Jimmie Lunceford . Eddie almost never used the full power of all brass and saxophonists, as was common on the German big band scene at the time, and when he did, he approached his climaxes slowly and organically. He had a whole ' percussion section' in the orchestra and used it like no one else in jazz. His percussion ideas came from Edgar Varese (…). And above all: Eddie Sauter had a sense of humor. (...) The Americans laughed when they heard Eddie Sauter, but the Germans remained serious. They just don't seem to have the 'soundboard' for great orchestral jazz to be fun. It had to be loud ... but humorous? "

- Joachim Ernst Berendt

Discographic notes

Projects as a leader

As a sideman

  • Mildred Bailey : That Rockin 'Chair Lady (1931-39)
  • Charlie Barnet: 1933-1936 (Classics)
  • Red Norvo: Dance of the Octopus (Hep, 1933-36)
  • Red Norvo: Jivin 'The Jeep (Hep, 1936–37)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Klußmeier : Jazz in the Charts. Another view on jazz history. Liner notes and booklet for the 100 CD edition. Membrane International GmbH. ISBN 978-3-86735-062-4
  2. ↑ Sauter's ancestors came from the small village of Kommingen , very close to Donaueschingen , where Sauter first introduced himself to a German audience in autumn 1957. quoted after Berendt, p. 195
  3. ↑ Berendt, Joachim Ernst: A window from Jazz , Frankfurt / M., Fischer TB Verlag, p. 195 f.
personal data
SURNAME Sauter, Eddie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sauter, Edward Ernest
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American arranger, band leader and trumpeter
DATE OF BIRTH December 2, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1981
Place of death Nyack , New York