Soft Plaintive And Moody - Sil Austin

These Foolish Things

Soft Plaintive And Moody!

Sil Austin And His Orchestra
Mercury Records MG 20576
1960

From the back cover: In the beginning – before early "society band" leader named Art Hickman got the happy thought – there were no saxophones in dance bands. Today there are not only saxophones; there are at least three schools of thought on how they should be sound. There's the constricted, muffled, adenoidal school associated with tenor lead bands. There's the introspective, almost vibratto-less, subtle and educated sound blown but the "hot-because-cool" contemporary school. And there's the wide open, unashamedly emotional, big and fat and proud-to-be-alive-and-blowing school.

Some people in classifying the music produced by the above would say that school number one is pat and shallow – emotionless. School number two froths and bubbles with emotion under the surface, yet couches that emotion under an intellectual and mature blanket. And school number three is frankly emotional, passionate even, and doesn't care who knows it.

Sil Austin is the honor graduate of school number three. The sound of his horn is directly descendent from the Coleman Hawkins-Chu Berry-Herschel Evans open horn style that gave so much of the character and drive to the big swinging bands of the Thirties and Forties. It's the very sound Sil heard and made when, as a teen-ager, he won an amateur contest at the old Apollo Theater by honking out a lush version of "Danny Boy" for the judges. It is, indeed, a sound whose popularity has never really wavered and probably never will.

September Song
Gone Again
Around The World
At Last
Trust Me
Don't Get Around Much Anymore
Moonlight Become You
All Of A Sudden My Heart Sings
Please Send Me Someone To Love
I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good
Moonlight In Vermont
These Foolish Things