Word: finegan
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Inside Sauter-Finegan (Victor LP). The strange land of heightened sensation that is the Sauter-Finegan band, where low is growlier, sharp is edgier, and no sounds are untinted. Sample titles: 10,000 B.C., Finegan's Wake...
Chest-Beater. The result was not, as might be expected, a kind of Spike Jones pandemonium, but gently exuberant, whimsical and thoroughly disciplined. Eddie Sauter and his partner Bill Finegan are running the most original band heard in the U.S. in years...
...arrangers for such once radical leaders as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, Finegan and Sauter got restless, last year started recording their own arrangements for RCA Victor (TIME, Aug. 11, 1952), finally took their own band on tour this summer. They decided to achieve new sounds by wider use of the old instruments. "We wanted to go high, so we wrote for piccolos," says Sauter. "We wanted to go low, so we added the tuba." Among the band's special effects: Finegan pounding his chest vigorously to imitate horses' hooves...
Their orchestration is highbrow, including a lot of counterpoint, but every Sauter-Finegan arrangement has either a palpable atmosphere or a clear story line or both, without ever tripping over its danceable rhythm. With the precision of a Marine parade and the grace of a lace handkerchief waving on the sidelines, the big band runs through a notably moist version of Rain, a playful Midnight Sleighride, a dreamy April in Paris. Jazz-wise listeners only had an occasional sense of too much novelty for its own sake...
Arrangers Sauter and Finegan were a little puzzled by their own success. "Maybe." said Sauter, "people just like to watch a juggling...