Word: sauter
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...band seemed to be playing musical chairs. The percussion man ran back & forth between kettle drums, cymbal and a toy drum, jangled some bells on the way, hammered a xylophone and, with evident pleasure, whammed a huge Chinese gong. Saxophone players switched to flutes, clarinets and even recorders; Sauter himself picked up a kazoo and produced sounds very much like bagpipes. Again the slate and another tune: The Doodletown Fifers. Two men played the piccolo, two the baritone saxophone, one the tenor saxophone. Then the three sax players put down their instruments and whistled. By the time they picked them...
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...