Eddie Sauter's Music Time

Eddie Sauter, who was originally a trumpeter and after his early years with Red Norvo joined Benny Goodman's staff band, took over the Südwestfunk (SWF) orchestra in 1957 as the successor to Kurt Edelhagen. Here, for the first time in his career, he had the freedom to lead a jazz big band without a co-leader – which was a great opportunity, but also a major challenge. Already in 1959, he returned to the USA, where he demonstrated his talent for transparently arranged music with the album Focus (1961) by Stan Getz and his film music work. Sauter managed to translate the cool reduction of bebop's hecticness into a large-scale form without sounding cold. The radio concert series Eddie Sauter’s Music Time became the platform for his experiments. The recordings from the SWR archive were made in the winter of 1957/58, among others in Freiburg and Kaiserslautern, and document a program infused with a lot of American humor, which balanced standards, originals, and experiments.