Biography Edgar Sampson

Edgar Melvin Sampson (New York City, NY, October 31, 1907 – January 16, 1973, Englewood, New Jersey) was a composer, arranger, saxophonist, and violinist.

Born in New York City, he started playing violin at age six and picked up the saxophone in high school.

Born Edgar Melvin Sampson in 1907, Sampson started his professional career in 1924 with a violin piano duo with Joe Colman. Through the rest of the twenties and early thirties he played with many bands including those of Duke Ellington, Rex Stewart and Fletcher Henderson. In 1933 he joined the Chick Webb band. It is while with Webb that Sampson created his most enduring work as a composer, writing "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Don't Be That Way". He left the Webb band in 1936 with a reputation as a composer and arranger that led to freelance work with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Red Norvo, Teddy Hill, Teddy Wilson and Chick Webb. He continued to play sax through the late forties and started his own band (1949-1951). In the late forties through the fifties he worked with Latin performers such as Marceino Guerra, Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente as an arranger. He recorded one album under his own name, Swing Softly Sweet Sampson in 1956. Due to illness, he stopped working in the late sixties.

Edgar Sampson became a student of the Schillinger System in the early 40s. The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, named after Joseph Schillinger, is a method of musical composition based on mathematical processes. It comprises theories of rhythm, harmony, melody, counterpoint, form, and semantics (emotional meaning, as in movie music).

It offers a systematic and non-genre specific approach to music analysis and composition, a descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar of music. The Schillinger System might have served as a road map for many later developments in music theory and composition. Instead, it languished in relative obscurity.

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