Recent Releases & Remembrance
Now available — an unprecedented new collaboration between violinist Jeremy Cohen's Quartet San Francisco, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, the vocal ensemble Take 6, and the Raymond Scott Archives.
Raymond Scott Reimagined is a thrilling 14-track set which includes Goodwin’s inspired arrangements of eight Scott classics, including such mainstays as “Powerhouse,” “Twilight in Turkey,” “Huckleberry Duck,” and “In an 18th Century Drawing Room.” The album also introduces a posthumous Scott composition, “Cutey and the Dragon,” which was crafted from an unfinished sketch Scott made in 1982 for his granddaughter Kathy, with Goodwin completing the composition in a manner that honors the great composer’s style and verve.
Watch a short film about the evolution of this historic collaboration, and read Jonathan Widran's feature story about the project .
IN MEMORIAM
In 2022 we lost a dear member of the Scott family, CARRIE MAKOVER, who was the eldest of Scott's four children. Born in New York in 1938 to Raymond and his wife Pearl, Carrie co-founded Reckless Night Music LLC in 2012, following the death of Raymond’s widow Mitzi, to preserve Scott's musical legacy. Carrie was a key part of our Raymond Scott team and did much of the design work on our website. Read more about Carrie's eventful life.
We also remember and celebrate our late friend and colleague HAL WILLNER, who passed away from Covid in April 2020. Hal was a longtime Raymond Scott enthusiast who served as Executive Producer on the 1992 Columbia CD Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights, which kicked off the Raymond Scott revival. Hal was a featured interviewee in Stan Warnow's Scott bio film Deconstructing Dad, and in September 2018 he was a panelist at our debut ScottWorks conference in Los Angeles. Read more about his remarkable life.
RAYMOND SCOTT'S JINGLE WORKSHOP
A lavish 2-LP/2-CD set of 120 TV and radio commercials from Scott's enormously successful Jingle Workshop, 1951–1965 was issued in 2019. For over a decade Scott earned a solid living composing, arranging, and recording catchy ditties for Revlon, Delta Airlines, Stuckey's, Alka-Seltzer, Sprite, the Ford Motor Company and other sponsors. Hear Dorothy Collins, Mel Tormé, and dozens of unnamed session vocalists and musicians serenade you about beer, ice cream, gasoline, cigarettes, more beer, bread, cars, mouthwash, and MORE beer. The album includes finished spots, outtakes, rehearsals, alternates, demos, studio chatter, and irresistible earworms about mid-20th century consumer goods. The styles range from cool jazz to percolating Latin, from lush orchestrations to piano & voice; and even some stray electronic works. Collection produced by Irwin Chusid for Modern Harmonic. On double LP and or two CDs.
Raymond Scott News
In November 2023, Raymond Scott received a posthumous Grammy Award nomination in the Best Instrumental Composition category for "Cutey and the Dragon." This late-life work, which was sketched out on paper by Scott in 1982, was completed in 2022 by Gordon Goodwin (who also received a nomination as co-composer). The debut recording of "Cutey" appears on the 2023 album Raymond Scott Reimagined by Quartet San Francisco with Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band. Goodwin took the unfinished work and completed it in a manner that honors Scott's sophisticated yet playful style. Raymond neither received nor was nominated for a Grammy during his lifetime; the awards were launched in 1958, by which time Scott had largely stopped issuing commercial recordings.
In a recent episode, "Player Piano," on the popular podcast The Last Archive, producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explores "Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world." The episode can be heard on Apple Podcasts.
Scott's vintage recordings have been used in the soundtracks of a number of recent TV shows and films, including The Andy Warhol Diaries, This Fool, Bugs Bunny Builders, I Am Groot, Cursed Films, and Young Sheldon. The long history of Scott's music in soundtracks can be found here.
Explore Raymond Scott's legacy in photos, historical artifacts, and stories at Google Arts & Culture's Music, Makers & Machines series, which focuses on the history of electronic music.
Lizzo sampled "Nescafé" by Raymond Scott (from his album Manhattan Research, Inc.) on the track "Tempo" (with Missy Elliott) on her Grammy-winning album Cuz I Love You. Scott is credited as a co-writer. The track has been used in the soundtracks of the TV shows Euphoria, Bigger, Empire, So You Think You Can Dance, and others.
Read Happy Birthday To Raymond Scott’s ‘Powerhouse,’ The Most Iconic Song In Cartoon History by Vincent Alexander at Cartoon Brew.
Scott's experimental electronic work "The Rhythm Modulator" can be heard in the soundtrack of a Gucci video production.
Machinedrum's album, A View of U, includes a cover of Scott's electronic work "Idea 36" in a track featuring Chrome Sparks, who commented: "Raymond Scott is an absolute boss. While on tour, we were blasting Scott’s early modular synth experimentations in the van. We loved them, so we had to try sampling. We ended up with what blossomed into our version of 'Idea 36'.” Machinedrum's Travis Stewart offers further comment at Magnetic Magazine.
OUR BACK PAGES
SCOTTWORKS PERFORMANCE VIDEOS: We've posted a number of live performances from our September 2018 Raymond Scott Festival held in Burbank. Hear/see Scott tunes performed by Quartet San Francisco, Ego Plum, Skip Heller, Beth Sorrentino, and Michael Whelan.
ARTIFACTS FROM THE ARCHIVES: Learn more about Scott's electronic music career in our book Artifacts from the Archives, a FREE 349-page downloadable compendium of articles, documents, and ephemera, including previously uncirculated historic material.
Meanwhile, an online museum in Lithuania has adapted the book into a 25-minute video program about Scott's electronic music history.
