Sal Salvador Orchestra collection

This collection consists of big band parts and full scores for the Sal Salvador Orchestra. There are also memoranda pertaining to performances and storage for these manuscripts. The bulk of works in this collection were arranged respectively by Hank Levy and Larry Wilcox. Sal Salvador worked in Stan Kenton's big band during the early 1950's and some arrangements in this collection are by musicians who share that association: Hank Levy, Johnny Richards, Don Sebesky, and Ray Starling. Other contributors of arrangements are George Andrews, Charlie Barnet, Johnny Richards, George Roumanis, Sal Spinelli, Jon Wooley, and George Zinsser.

For the bulk of these of scores, the common orchestration is for reeds, brass, and rhythm section as follows:

reeds: alto, 2 tenor and baritone saxophones

brass: 4 trumpets, mellophone and 2 trombones

rhythm section: guitar, piano, (contra)bass and drums

Variations among the orchestrations do exist with vocal parts or expanded brass sections including French horn, bass trombone, and tuba. The arrangements for Count Me In and Frettin' (Sebesky), Easy Living (Roumanis), Blue Ray and Like Someone in Love (Starling) exclude reeds and call for expanded brass sections. Vocal parts were written for Harry the Hoople (Wilcox) and Misery (Levy).

Two pieces in this collection, Look But Don't Touch (Wilcox) and Easy Living (Roumanis), are complete with full scores as well as parts. A few others pieces, The Adventures of Tracey (Levy), I'm Glad There Is You (Wilcox), It's You Or No One (Levy), include a part that is labeled for conductor and guitar (or "Sal"). In these cases, instead of systems of multiple staves typically found on conductors' scores, the arrangers wrote on a single stave containing the guitar part, harmonizations, melodic lines and solo and group entrances.

Some band parts have been personalized with the name of the player rather than the instrument. Guitar and mellophone parts are commonly denoted "Sal" and "Ray" respectively. The mellophone part for Might As Well Be Sprung has a "special note" transcribed from the arranger Hank (Levy) to brass player Ray (Starling). In the note, Levy requests a French horn like timber from the mellophone.