During the Swing Era, when big bands dominated jazz, Benny Goodman moved away from the certainties of his core repertoire provided by Fletcher Henderson arrangements because, by 1939, just about every other band (except Claude Thornhill) was using the basic antiphonal template of question and answer riffs perfected by Henderson. He turned to a young, adventurous arranger called Eddie Sauter and, within a year, the sound of the Goodman band had been transformed, as Gunther Schuller has pointed out: “During the years of the early 1940s, the Goodman band – and Goodman himself – played with a dazzling brilliance that was the envy of all the other bands. The emphasis was not on soloists – as with Basie, for example – but on the orchestra and on jazz as arrangement and composition” [my itals]. Sauter's arrangements were so harmonically sophisticated that they might be said to have been modern jazz without being bebop. Equally, Bill Finegan was turning heads by making the cynically commercial Glenn Miller band sound musically interesting with arrangements such as ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘Sunrise Serenade’ and the sweeping orchestral colours of ‘Serenade in Blue’, his writing subsequently given a certain grittiness after studying with Stefan Wolpe and Darius Milhaud after WWII. In April 1952 the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra was formed, the like of which had never been heard of before and has never been heard of again. A 21-piece aggregation that demanded top notch musicians to make the bewilderingly complex scores sound like a walk in the park, once again, this was, “jazz as arrangement and composition.” But the big band-era had passed, and keeping such an ensemble together was not easy, as Finegan ruefully recalled: “From the time Eddie and I formed the band, everything went wrong but the music.” But what music it was, from serialism to programmatic suites, from Impressionism to good old antiphonal big band jazz. The Sons of Sauter-Finegan includes the full RCA Victor LP of the same name where the sideman are given their head, a series of blowing sessions in small group contexts to allow them to let off steam after the complexities of the written. What is of interest are the bonus tracks: four by the full band from Inside Sauter-Finegan – ‘Four Horsemen’, ‘New York 4 AM’, ‘Pennies from Heaven’ and ‘Finegan's Wake’ – from the original album that comprised 14 tracks, and the five tracks – ‘Exactly Like You’, ‘The Loop’ (Programatic), ‘Madame X’, ‘The Land Between’ (both Impressionistic) and ‘Sadie Thompson’ (good old antiphonal big band jazz) – from Concert in Jazz (the original album comprised 10 tracks). Here the soloists are integrated in ambitious and often strikingly modern arrangements occasionally leavened with a little humour that showed that forward-looking jazz need not inhabit volatile experimentation.