Welcome to Vedder Entertainment –
Home of Scat Cats

and Swing House

Meet the Main Headliners for the ‘Cats’

Carole Crawford

Lead Vocalist

Carole Crawford was born and raised into the Big Band tradition. Her father, Edward Vedder, was a jazz trumpet player during the World War II years who also performed in some of the great territory bands in the Midwest after the war.

Carole‘s carries on the legacy as a vocalist whose repertoire covers all the great music of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s and, of course, the great Big Band tradition of the ‘30s and ‘40s that she loves.

Andy Schumm

Multi-Instrumentalist

Andy Schumm is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger originally from Wisconsin. He founded the six-piece jazz group Chicago Cellar Boys in 2017 and also was a featured member of the Fat Babies. He plays cornet, clarinet, sax, and piano, among other instruments.

Now based in Chicago, he has appeared all over the traditional jazz world, both domestically and internationally. He is also an avid student of the history of jazz.

John Otto

Reeds

John Otto, reedman extraordinaire, enjoys playing many styles of music. He has performed and recorded with many well-known bands all over the country.

His roots in music also run deep: John’s mother was a soloist in church music, musicals, weddings and an accomplished jobbing musician herself. His dad played trombone for fun and liked listening to Big Bands in the late 1930s. After John got a taste, he was hooked.

We’ve got a Passion for Jazz!

We love jazz – of all persuasions and eras. Whether it’s the music that started it all, in the 1920s and ’30s, or the Big Band tradition of the ’30s and ’40s that has got you swinging, Scat Cats and the Pat Crawford Big Band deliver. Vocalist Carole Crawford, multi-instrumentalist Andy Schumm and reedman John Otto make up this talented group known as the Scat Cats.

Their repertoire features a particular style of American jazz, based on the great 1920s and ’30s jazz piano style of Fats Waller.

And for dancing and events, the Pat Crawford Big Band plays music of the swell, elegant and crazy 1920s and 1930s style of jazz, from George Gershwin and bands containing many of the great jazz swing era musicians to emerge with their own bands in the mid-1930s and 1940s: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and others.

This type of jazz in the 1920s and early 1930s was fertile ground for the great jazz trumpet/cornet genius Bix Beiderbecke and also the early vocals of Bing Crosby and the Paul Whiteman Band and the Rhythm Boys.

This is happy jazz with a bounce that isn’t heard from most jazz groups today.

You can hear Scat Cats and the Big Band performing in jazz venues as well as for private parties and special events in the Kenosha/Midwest vicinity.

Coming in 2023…

A Scat Cats Album and Tribute to the Great Annette Hanshaw

We are excited to share that Scat Cats will be recording our first album in March 2023, focusing in large part on many of the tunes recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1901-1985), one of Carole Crawford’s favorite jazz singers of the 1920s and ’30s. (Here, Hanshaw is pictured on the August 1934 cover of Radioland magazine.)