Tony Scott (June 17, 1921 – March 28, 2007) was an American jazz clarinetist and arranger with an interest in folk music around the world. For most of his career he was held in high esteem in new-age music circles because of his involvement in music linked to Asian cultures and to meditation.
Scott, whose given name was Anthony Joseph Sciacca, (pronounced “Shaka”) was born in Morristown, New Jersey, the son of Sicilian immigrants. His father was a barber and amateur guitarist; his mother played the violin. He began playing a metal clarinet at age 12, formed his first band at 14, quickly mastered the piano and was playing in Harlem jazz sessions by the time he was 18. He studied for three years at the Juilliard School, performing Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” on piano as his audition piece.
Scott joined the military after graduation served in the US Army in the New York area, playing alto saxophone in big bands, tenor saxophone in Dixieland bands, and clarinet and piano in small swing groups. In 1943, he first heard saxophonist Charlie Parker, one of the progenitors of the bebop style, and was determined to bring Parker’s musical advances to the clarinet. They often performed together, and Scott would later call Parker the greatest man -- not just the greatest musician -- of the century. He once said that the first time he distinguished the sound of the clarinet soaring above a jazz band it seemed to him to embody the essence of life and freedom.
He was one of the first musicians to interpret Bop on the clarinet and continued to sit in on jam sessions in the New York clubs, frequently playing several venues in the course of an evening. He performed on his clarinet in numerous short-lived groups, including those of Ben Webster (1943), Sid Catlett, Trummy Young and Earl Bostic, and led his own quartets intermittently until 1956. He also worked frequently as a saxophonist in big bands with Buddy Rich (1946)Tommy Dorsey, Claude Thornhill (1949) and Duke Ellington (1953)
In the 1950s he worked with Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. He was a pianist and music director for Harry Belafonte in 1955. He also had a young Bill Evans and Paul Motian as side-men on several albums released between 1957 and 1959. In the late 1950s, he won on four occasions the DownBeat critics poll for clarinetist in 1955, 1957, 1958 and 1959. At a concert in Yugoslavia in 1957, two years after Parker’s death, Scott improvised “Blues for Charlie Parker,” which became his best-known composition. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” he said. “Musically, it was the high point of my life.”
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Scott was known for a more "cool" style on the instrument than his peer Buddy DeFranco who often played a more aggressive bebop style. Despite this, he remained relatively little-known as the clarinet had been in eclipse in jazz since the emergence of bebop. In 1959, he left New York City, where he had been based, and abandoned the United States for a time. In the 1960s, he toured South, East, and Southeast Asia. This led to his playing in a Hindu temple, spending time in Japan, and releasing Music for Zen Meditation in 1964 for Verve Records.
He settled in Italy in the 1970s, working with Italian jazz musicians such as Franco D'Andrea and Romano Mussolini. He also played the part of a Sicilian-American Mafia boss in Glauber Rocha's film Claro (1975). Scott experimented broadly with musical styles in the 1970s and ‘80s. After an extended break he made an album in England (1981) and Italy (1984). Cultivating an air of eccentricity, he grew a chest-length white beard and sometimes took apart his clarinet onstage, pretending to use it as a telephone. Nonetheless, his playing remained strong, and he continued to perform into his 80s. He began showing an interest in electronica and, in 2002, his Hare Krishna was remixed by King Britt as a contribution to Verve Remixed.
He died of prostate cancer on March 28, 2007 at his home in Rome, Lazio, where he had lived for more than 30 years. He was 85.
In 2010, a documentary film by the Italian director Franco Maresco about the life of Scott was released titled Io sono Tony Scott, ovvero come l'Italia fece fuori il più grande clarinettista del jazz (English: I am Tony Scott. The Story of How Italy Got Rid of the Greatest Jazz Clarinetist).
(Edited from Wikipedia, Los Angeles Times, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & Downbeat)