Nutty Squirrels

Alvin & the Chipmunks may have done it first, but when it came to cartoon-pop rodents, nobody did it better than the Nutty Squirrels. The brainchild of jazz vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Don Elliott and jingle composer Alexander "Sascha" Burland, the Nutty Squirrels employed the same sped-up vocal playback techniques as Ross Bagdasarian's Chipmunks, but added to the mix a far stronger musical approach, a sharper, hipper sense of humor, and the studio support of jazz greats including saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. And though the Chipmunks beat their many rivals in the race to record stores, the Nutty Squirrels actually outpaced Alvin, Simon, and Theodore to television by a year. Both Elliott and Burland had enjoyed commercial success prior to the Nutty Squirrels' 1959 formation -- the former was arguably the most notable proponent of the jazz mellophone as well as a gifted and innovative scat vocalist, experimenting with multi-tracking and tape speeds to dub as many as nine different vocal tracks per tune on his LP The Voices of Don Elliott. Burland, meanwhile, was a Hollywood-based orchestra leader perhaps best known for composing the theme song for the hit game show What's My Line? The author of a number of commercial jingles (including, most famously, Alka-Seltzer's "No Matter What Shape Your Stomach's In"), for Riverside he recorded the album Swingin' the Jingles, a collection marrying advertising themes with jazz. (The session even included an appearance by Maynard Ferguson.) By the late '50s, both Elliott and Burland were devoting much of their energy to writing advertising music for Madison Avenue, and when "The Chipmunk Song" emerged as an enormous hit in late 1958, their own commercial instincts began to take over. The Chipmunks -- the creation of...