New Sound

In Chicago's Blue Note Cafe last week, the tiny bandstand was jammed so tight that the grand piano dangled off the platform and had one leg supported by a post. Glittering in the colored lights was an instrument few jive cats had ever seen--a harp, and across the back gleamed a picket fence of big tubular chimes. Altogether there were 21 players and 77 instruments, with ten microphones scattered among them. A spectacled, shy young man named Eddie Sauter--one of the leaders of the band--wrote something on a slate and held it up for all the players to see. They went into Moonlight on the Ganges the way it had never been heard before on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Nile or the Ganges.

The 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 up again, the second piccolo had switched to tenor sax, quickly moved on to flute, then back to piccolo.

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.

As 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.

Juggling Act. The band's tour has drawn interested crowds. Wherever there is a dance floor, about half the crowd uses it, the other half stands open-mouthed and gawks at the activity onstage. At Chicago's Blue Note, with no dancing, the crowd of teen-agers and well-dressed, middle-aged couples just gawked, smiled happily and applauded.

Arrangers Sauter and Finegan were a little puzzled by their own success. "Maybe." said Sauter, "people just like to watch a juggling act."

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