Our Forgotten but Notable Neighbors: Eddie Sauter Musical Genius

If ever there was a story that epitomizes the proverbial Hometown Boy Who Makes Good, it is that of Eddie Sauter, 1914-1981.  The story of his development from the typical kid-next-door into a widely recognized musical genius is also an important part of the tale and lore of Nyack, its people and its vibrant cultural cauldron.  

Indeed, by his late teens, even before he left his Nyack home to join nationally renowned bands and orchestras, the elements of his musical persona, as well as his ethos of self-improvement and the drive for perfection, upon which his success were based, had already been deeply ingrained within him. Over the years, he would continue to challenge himself, expanding his knowledge and widening his musical horizons, even going, as it is said, “where nobody else has gone”.

Born with the name Ernest Edward Meyers, he was the third son of Nyack residents Edward Ernest and Margery Meyers. Tragically, at the age of two his mother developed health issues that led to her institutionalization. Permanent custody of baby Ernest was transferred to the Meyers’ neighbors, August and Julia Sauter, a childless couple, who would raise him lovingly as their own son; he would adopt the name Edward (Eddie) Ernest Sauter.

Although being part of the jazz and dance band scene requires one to frequently be on the road, traveling from town to town, and performance to performance, Eddie Sauter would never really leave Rockland County.  Despite his celebrity and fame, it was where he raised his family and it would remain his home, both in the physical and the abstract sense.  

Although raised by the Sauters, for the rest of his life Eddie would stay in close touch with his biological brother, Stanley Meyers, who was ten years his senior. Stanley himself had a deep and active interest in music, and in a 1963 interview Eddie described Stanley as being one of two people who instilled in him the incentive to continue in the musical field.

The other person who Eddie credited with mentoring him and inspiring him to pursue a musical career was Miss Gertrude Goldstein (later known by her married name, Mrs. Gertrude Maged), his music teacher in the Nyack school system. Eddie credited his teach with developing his interest in music and his subsequent rise to success. He is quoted as saying, “She led you into music, explained to you what it was all about, emphasized it was something you had to live with and then showed you how to live with it.”

She first met Eddie at the old Liberty Street School when he was 9 years of age. In those days, the Nyack school system had only one school building for grades 1-12. Initially, she considered him to be a talented child. However, by the time he was 10, she realized that he was not just talented but had a truly special innate musical gift which, in her words, “…needed to be properly nurtured.”  She made a commitment to help him develop in any way within her means.

When Eddie was in 7th grade, Miss Goldstein would arrange for him to get out of class to play the trumpet in the High School band at school assembly. As Eddie grew, Miss Goldstein would take him by bus to Columbia Teachers College. He would play with the Teachers College Symphonic Orchestra while she was attending class. She also saw to it that he was given advanced trumpet lessons. She believed in challenging him musically and never holding him back. 

In a 1963 interview, she stated that “he had a natural musical gift in every form –- rhythm, was a fast reader, had an ear for music, the lip required for a trumpet and never made a mistake.  He always had that trumpet with him and was constantly practicing.” Eddie also played the drums.

In 1929, when Sauter was a sophomore, the Nyack Junior and Senior High School building on 5th Avenue (now BOCES) opened. The school offered daily music classes that included courses on the rudiments of music, music appreciation, theory and history.

Eddie was also an integral part of the school’s band and orchestra, in addition to the Glee Club and the Choral Group.  This wide variety of musical experiences would serve him well later on in his career.  

He would stay up late at night to listen intently to live radio broadcasts of Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, whose use of adventurous harmonies influenced Eddie’s arrangements 

When his schedule and parents would allow it, he’d travel into Manhattan to watch performances of the biggest names in jazz. On occasion he would be allowed to sit in with them. At times, when he was too late to catch the last train back to Rockland he had to sleep on a bench in the Hoboken terminal, waking early the next morning to take the first train home to Nyack.

 Even prior to his 1932 high school graduation, he had his own orchestra named ‘Eddie Sauter and His Eight Aces’, in which he served as the leader, trumpeter and music arranger. The band played local dances and civic function events throughout the area and was an unofficial house band at Coyle’s Tavern by Rockland Lake. A local radio station, WCOH, even broadcast their live performances.

In late 1932, 17-year-old Eddie then joined forces with another local band leader, Jack Dailey, a man in his early 30s and already an accomplished professional pianist, to form the ‘Dale-Sauter Orchestra’. That group, which was extremely popular with dancers throughout the county, even played at Manhattan’s Empire Room.

When the opportunity to branch out and play with a nationally recognized band arrived, Eddie jumped at it, joining the Charlie Barnet Orchestra as trumpeter. Although he didn’t stay with Barnet for long, while there he made some important contacts that led the way to a spot in the Red Norvo band. This would be his big break.  

While with Norvo, he permanently put away his trumpet and became a full-time arranger. An arranger is a person who takes a melodic theme, then re-configures the parts to be played by the musicians and vocalists, with the goal of creating a new, enhanced version of the original composition.

He had a flare for structuring harmonically innovative instrumental combinations that can only be characterized as Sauter-esque. His charts with the Norvo band were like a musical magic carpet upon which Mildred Bailey, the band’s vocalist, could float upon as she sang. This group was so popular that in 1938, two of their songs hit #1 on the Hit Parade. Years later, the famed jazz critic Robert Gottlieb wrote that Eddie Sauter and Red Norvo, “created three years’ worth of the most beautiful vocal records ever produced.”

It was while arranging for Norvo that the music world began to realize, as had Miss Goldstein some fourteen years earlier, that Eddie Sauter possessed a unique gift. For example, in a 1938 article in The New Republic magazine, Sauter was referred to as “a young genius.” It was also during his tenure with Norvo that band-mate Stewie Pletcher drummed into Eddie’s head that to reach his full God-given musical potential he must boldly “take chances”. This philosophy would serve him well throughout his career.

When Norvo’s band broke up, Eddie was hired to arrange for Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, whose orchestra was the number-one band in the country. For Eddie, this was an opportunity of a lifetime, and he wrote some memorable arrangements. But after a relatively short stint with Goodman, on January 1, 1942, Eddie would be admitted to Nyack Hospital with tuberculosis, a life-threatening disease at the time. With this, his career crashed from the pinnacle of the world of jazz to several years of obscurity.  

He went through a long period of recuperation, much of which was spent at the Summit Park Sanitorium under the skilled care of Dr. Robert Yeager, after whom the facility is now named.  

While Eddie was sitting out WWII in Rockland due to his TB, Sergeant Bill Finegan was leading the Army Orchestra at Camp Shanks in Orangeburg. Before the war, Finegan had been a successful arranger for Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey’s orchestras, but as a soldier his job was to entertain the troops at Shanks, the embarkation camp from which 1.3 million soldiers would pass through before being sent to fight in Europe. Being so close, Sauter and Finegan, two of the most accomplished young arrangers in the world of jazz, met and struck up an acquaintance. Neither could have realized it at the time, but their meeting would have a profound impact upon both their careers a few years down the road.

With the end of WWII and his return to generally good health, Eddie went back to arranging. Following brief sojourns with the Artie Shaw and Woody Herman Orchestras, he joined up with Ray McKinley’s band, billed as “The Most Versatile Band in the Land”. But the Big Band scene had lost a lot of its allure by that time, and it eventually disbanded. Author Scott Yanow opined in his 2000 book “Bebop” that McKinley’s ensemble is largely “remembered today due to Sauter’s charts.”

Eddie and his family then packed up and moved to Germany where he worked as the musical director at a radio station. After two years he came back to Rockland and formed an orchestra with Bill Finegan, his Camp Shanks buddy, who would become his musical alter ego. 

‘The Sauter-Finegan Orchestra’, as it was known, became extremely popular in the early to mid-1950s. Unlike bands of the past, its orientation was not just to play dance music. Rather, it aimed to expand the range of orchestral capacity while, at the same time, cultivating and integrating new blends of sounds and rhythms. The band’s compositions leaned toward jazz yet also gave nods to other branches of the musical cosmos. 

In 1953, Time Magazine called Sauter-Finegan “… the most original band heard in the U.S. in years.”  Another commentator stated, “To the history of recorded sound, the orchestra led by Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan has made one of the most remarkable contributions…. they have heightened color, produced new sounds and evoked moods heretofore unconsidered in popular music.”

Sauter-Finegan’s biggest and most memorable hit is titled “The Doodletown Fifers”. The tune, which was named after the small North Rockland community that became depopulated in the 1960s, was Eddie’s musical homage to Rockland County, his lifetime refuge and comfort zone. But despite the near unanimous admiration expressed by critics and the public alike, The Sauter-Finegan Orcchestra would be forced to fold after a few years due to financial difficulties.

In 1961, Eddie teamed up with the exceptionally talented and world-renowned jazz tenor saxophonist, Stan Getz, for an album entitled “Focus”. Eddie composed and arranged 7 pieces, which are best described as musical poems, using a piano and 12 stringed instruments to form an underlying aural springboard which would propel Getz’s soulful, unconventional, and yet majestic sax improvisations. “Focus” is that rare instance in which two geniuses, coming from diverse creative directions, interact in a totally synergistic manner, in which the finished product greatly outstrips the sum of its parts. 

Getz would later declare that “Focus” was the musical achievement that he was proudest of throughout his long and illustrious career. However, although it was nominated for a Grammy in 1963, “Focus” did not win. Two years later, though, when Stan won a Grammy for his Bossa Nova recordings, he handed the statuette to Sauter as an expression of his unparalleled respect and admiration for Eddie’s work on “Focus”.  This album is, in many people’s estimation, the piece de resistance of both men’s creative lives. More than six decades after its release, it is still unsurpassed in its sheer musical audacity, beauty and brilliance.

After “Focus”, Eddie Sauter continued working, largely composing and arranging commercially for Broadway shows, movies, and TV.  He even wrote a piece called “Tanglewood Concerto” that was performed by the Boston Pops Orchestra led by Arthur Fiedler. Then, on April 21, 1981, he succumbed to a heart attack in Nyack Hospital, a short stretch from the house he was brought up in on North Highland Avenue. However, his musical legacy lives on.

A fitting accolade was given Eddie by Leonard Goldstein, a great musician in his own right, who was the Director of Music for Nyack schools for many years, and who had performed with Sauter in the “kids bands” back in the early 1930s: “Eddie Sauter is the most creative and ingenious arranger and composer of jazz …  I don’t know of anyone that comes even close to him in inventiveness and fresh ideas.” Famed band leader, Glenn Miller, is quoted as having said that Eddie Sauter was a decade ahead of his time; not to be outdone, critic George Simon wrote in Metronome Magazine that it would take the world of music 20 years to catch up with Sauter’s innovative ideas. Today, forty-four years following his passing and the better part of a century from the writing of some of his famous arrangements, the music of Eddie Sauter is neither stale nor outdated. Rather, it still sounds fresh and modern, and remains as alive today as when first written and recorded. Such is genius!

Eddie Sauter, Nyack’s Hometown Boy remained physically and spiritually connected to Rockland throughout his life. It would be a well-deserved honor and an expression of pride for Rockland County to name his most famous composition, “The Doodletown Fifers”, as its official song.

For those who would like to familiarize themselves with the creative genius of Eddie Sauter, Nyack’s hometown musical genius, here are a few choice selections that are available online:

“The Doodletown Fifers”: The Sauter-Finegan Orchestra

“Summertime”: The Artie Shaw Orchestra

“Benny Rides Again”: The Benny Goodman Orchestra

“Night Rider” from the “Focus” album: Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter

“How Deep is an Ocean?”: Peggy Lee with the Benny Goodman Orchestra