Tony Scott has passed away?

[sergio]

I've just heard that the great Tony Scott has passed away on March 28th.
Does anybody know anything about it?

[Saundra Hummer]

Dennis Gonzalez posted that he was in Rome when he left us.

Tony Scott's left us a wonderful legacy; one which is moving to read about. He thought of Charlie Parker as I did. Charlie was more than people will ever know if they only focus on rumor and hearsay. Tony Scott was there and did it all, and with the very best, Charlie, premier among them. Tony, is and was a special man; a special talent. He certainly will be missed, just as so many others have been for so long now.

Tony Scott was one of the lucky ones, he stayed around and gave us lots of great music for decades. I like how he approached his music, his willingness to experiment and look to make great music and if it meant change, he was open to it. It was to him after all "Modern Jazz".

God Speed.

[JPF]

The New York Times


March 31, 2007
Tony Scott, Jazz Clarinetist Who Mastered Bebop, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX

Tony Scott, a distinguished jazz clarinetist who in the 1950s helped steer his instrument out of the swing era and into the sax-infested waters of bebop, died on Wednesday at his home in Rome. He was 85 and had lived in Italy for many years.

The apparent cause was complications of the prostate cancer Mr. Scott had many years ago, his wife, Cinzia, said.

With Buddy DeFranco, Mr. Scott was considered one of the leading bebop clarinetists. (The two men were often described as the only major clarinetists to take on bebop, a style thought to be incompatible with the instrument’s soft, sweet sound.) Mr. Scott, who also played the saxophone, performed and recorded with some of the titans of mid-20th-century jazz, among them Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday.

If Mr. Scott was not widely known to the American public, it was partly because his eclectic style made him unclassifiable: over the years, he ranged through bebop and what today would be called New Age and world music. It was also because he was peripatetic: for decades he roamed the globe, clarinet in hand. He had lived mostly abroad since the late ’50s.

Mr. Scott was also well regarded as a composer and arranger. His composition “Blues for Charlie Parker,” which he created extemporaneously at a concert in Yugoslavia in 1957, became his most-requested number. He also arranged hits like “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” for Harry Belafonte.

In a profile of Mr. Scott in The New York Times in 1967, John S. Wilson described him “playing his clarinet in his own uncompromisingly distinctive manner, a manner which encompasses both a feathery, light-as-air impressionism and an intense, emotional ferocity that makes the old-time ‘hot’ men sound as though they were blowing icicles.”

By the end of the 1940s, the swing style popularized by Benny Goodman was on the wane, and the clarinet was falling out of favor as a jazz instrument. Mr. Scott persevered, touring Sweden, South Africa, Senegal, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and elsewhere. His 1964 album “Music for Zen Meditation” (Verve), a collaboration with traditional Japanese musicians, is considered an early example of New Age music.

Among his other albums are “The Touch of Tony Scott” (RCA Victor, 1956); “The Modern Art of Jazz” (Seeco, 1957); “Tony Scott in Afrika” (A World of Music, 1997); and “A Jazz Life” (Kind of Blue), scheduled for release next month.

Anthony Joseph Sciacca — his family name is pronounced “Shaka” — was born on June 17, 1921, in Morristown, N.J., to parents who had come from Sicily. His father was a barber and amateur guitarist; his mother played the violin. He began playing the clarinet at 12 and in 1942 earned a diploma from the Juilliard School.

Mr. Scott’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the former Cinzia Bastianon, he is survived by two daughters from his second marriage, Monica Sciacca, a jazz singer, of Manhattan, and Nina Shaka of Paris; and one grandchild.

During World War II, Mr. Scott was stationed with the Army on Governor’s Island in New York. This meant he could spend many happy nights in Manhattan, playing the jazz clubs that lined West 52nd Street. He was such a ubiquitous presence there, Mr. Wilson wrote in The Times, that “one night an out-of-town visitor, making 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.”

[tkeables]

From today's AAJ news section onthis site:

The clarinetist Tony Scott died on March 28th in Rome, Italy, at the age of 86. The cause was prostate cancer. He died at his home in Rome.
The memorial service will be 5pm tomorrow (Rome time) at the church of the artists. Then the body will be flown to Sicily, the family ancestral home (Scott's family name was Sciacca).


He had started playing the clarinet at the age of 12 and with 14 had founded his first quartet. While studying music he participated in jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in the early 40s and soon was one of the few clarinetists actively participating in the bebop movement. Scott had his own sound which was neither classical oriented nor reflected the New Orleans clarinet tradition but, if anything, was influenced by the sound ideal of the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. With Webster he had played in 1943; later he worked with musicians such as Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, Claude Thornhill, but also with Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday for whom he worte arrangements as well. In the early 60s he travelled through Asia and became interested in Indonesian and Indian music. In the late 60s he settled in Rome where he performed from time to time and recorded occasionally.

[tkeables]

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 31, 7:59 AM

ROME - Jazz musician Tony Scott, a clarinetist, composer and arranger who worked with such greats as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, has died, the House of Jazz said Saturday. He was 85.

Scott died Wednesday in Rome, where he had lived for decades, according to a statement from the Italian center for the promotion of jazz.

"His death fills jazz audiences all over the world with sadness," the statement said.

Scott, who also played the saxophone, worked with many of the greatest jazz musicians over a career that spanned decades and continents, playing with Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan.

"I think a clarinet can be played as strongly as a saxophone or a trumpet," Scott wrote, according to his Web site. "It can be a delicate instrument, but it can be robust, can be played with the vitality that some guys have on the other horns."

Scott was born Anthony Joseph Sciacca in Morristown, N.J. Considered a forerunner of world music _ he was among the first jazz musicians to mix the genre with other influences.

His travels took him to Europe, Africa and Asia. He eventually settled in Rome, and became a fixture of the Italian jazz scene.

Scott took an interest in photography, and documented the work and life of jazz greats in a series of pictures that were displayed in an exhibit in France in the late 1980s. He wrote an autobiography called "Bird, Lady and Me" in honor of Parker and Holiday.

"I decided a long time ago I would rather be a jazz musician than rich and famous. I had the chance to sell out, but I didn't. I've never regretted that," Scott was quoted as saying by his Web site.

A funeral was planned for Saturday in Rome. Scott was married but information on other survivors was not immediately available.