Podcast #10 Again: Raymond Scott Revisited

MusicFilmWeb: See It Loud

Tweet

Raymond Scott

Deconstructing Dad, Stan Warnow’s music documentary about the enigmatic composer, bandleader, and inventor Raymond Scott, makes an overdue theatrical bow on Friday, July 13, at Greenwich Village indie/art house Quad Cinemas. It’s a story, and a movie, well worth getting to know, so if you missed it the first time around, here’s a rebroadcast (or whatever you call it when you repeat a podcast) of our See It Loud conversation with Warnow, recorded in 2010 as the movie was on its initial film festival run.

As the title implies, Scott isn’t just Warnow’s subject, he’s also his father, which makes this a uniquely compelling entry in the annals of unsung-innovator music film bios. The leader of a popular swing band in the 1930s and ’40s and the somewhat unlikely maestro on the middlebrow ’50s TV show Your Hit Parade, Scott was a crazily inventive composer (best remembered today for tunes like “Powerhouse” and “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” which graced many a classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoon) and an overlooked pioneer in modern music history who created some of the earliest analogue synthesizers and sequencers.

He was also a distant and chilly parent who left his first wife and kids for an ingenue singer he discovered when she was barely in her teens. As much a psychological as a musical portrait, Deconstructing Dad sees Warnow, a veteran film editor whose credits include the classic music festival docs Woodstock and Message to Love, work out some understandably ambivalent feelings about his father while celebrating Scott’s singular artistry. The podcast has a few outdated references (and some ambient kitchen noise from one corner of the conversation), but it should still be fresh for those only now getting a chance to enter the strange world of Raymond Scott. If you can’t make it to the Village this weekend, check Warnow’s website for information on future screenings, or to buy the DVD.

Tweet