Behind every jazz musician lies a mentor whose passion for the art form instilled a sense of awe in their students. Young Louis Armstrong learned the trade from Joe “King” Oliver on Mississippi riverboats. Charlie Parker perfected his triple-time licks under the tutelage of saxophone great Buster “Professor” Smith.

That tradition continues at Moravian University when you consider the winding path that led two music education majors to a research project preserving the legacy of a little-known saxophone quartet from the ’50s and ’60s for future generations.

Nick Mancini ’26 and Coby Gumulak ’26 spent last summer immersed in the university’s SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) program, which provides stipends for students who engage in full-time scholarly research with a faculty member. The goal of their 10-week program: Restore the long-forgotten music arrangements of a group of four pioneering sax players—the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet.

Mancini, from Souderton, Pennsylvania, plays alto sax; Gumulak, from Phillipsburg, New Jersey, plays soprano. Both are juniors who first met at Moravian when they were middle schoolers attending a summer jazz camp. The instructor who taught saxophone at the camp was Neil Wetzel, professor of music and director of jazz studies, and their mentor and advisor on the SOAR project.

Mancini, Gumulak, and Wetzel were playing in Moravian University’s touring sax quartet when they came up with the idea for the research project. They had been playing jazz tunes from old sheet music, “copies of copies of copies” that Wetzel had compiled over the years. “The music was incredibly difficult to read,” says Gumulak. “There were missing notes from the pages being mimeographed many times, handwritten verses, some of it illegible.”

But there was something about the music that drew Mancini and Gumulak to certain challenging arrangements, all by a group of four saxophone players called the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet. “They had this super weird and different style,” says Mancini. “We’d never heard of these guys.”

“These guys” were Russell Cheever, Bill Ulyate, and Morris Crawford, staff musicians with the 20th Century Fox Orchestra, and Jack Dumont, a studio musician who played with many of the film and television orchestras up until the early 1970s. Collectively, the four musicians performed on hundreds of soundtracks for iconic movies like West Side Story, Cleopatra, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and TV shows like Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson; and The Flintstones. But their most significant contribution to jazz developed during their after-hours work in clubs and recording studios as they experimented with saxophone as a quartet.

Online searches yielded little background on the group. And most of their music survived only on scratchy LPs found in used record shops and dog-eared copies of sheet music marred by tears and coffee stains.

That sparked the idea for the research project: What can we find out about the group, the players, and their music? How can we channel that in playing this music and saving it?

As they dug deeper, the students discovered research by saxophonist Michael Keepe, PhD, for his University of Arizona dissertation on the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet and the role studio musicians played in the recording studios during the West Coast jazz era of the 1950s and 1960s.

Keepe’s dissertation filled many gaps, like the purpose of the quartet, captured in the words of member Bill Ulyate: “We were trying to stimulate good musicianship and playing (in a style much the same as a string quartet or other chamber music group) and show it can be done even with saxophones.”

Mancini and Gumulak learned that the quartet used its Hollywood connections to recruit top arrangers to write for them, including Billy May, Lennie Niehaus, and Russ Garcia, composers who were working for the likes of Frank Sinatra and renowned jazz drummer Buddy Rich.

Europe’s top classical quartets also influenced the Hollywood jazz players, in particular a French composer named Marcel Mule, who taught at the Conservatoire de Paris. The influences of classical composers like Mule on the West Coast jazz style of these studio orchestra musicians “raised the sax quartet to another level in terms of precision and technical ability,” Wetzel explains.

The students’ jazziest research challenge involved deciphering the missing and obscured musical notes of the hand-me-down sheet music. That meant analyzing the music, listening to it over and over and over, and experimenting with notes on their saxophones. The pair also endured the time-consuming task of recreating the drum sets and bass lines by listening to the recordings and working out the parts that didn’t appear on the old sheet music. They then entered their work into a music notation program to “engrave” and print out clean music. The research project also gave the students a crash course in copyright law as they resurrected and revised the old music into a cleaner, clearer, playable form.

Like the Hollywood Jazz Quartet themselves, Mancini and Gumulak recruited other musicians and technical help during a two-day session to produce, mix, and master recordings of the Hollywood quartet’s arrangements, which will be housed at Moravian for future students and researchers.

The research project had an impact on both students’ futures. “It reaffirmed my affinity for academia,” says Mancini. Says Grumulak: “Surrounding myself with their style and playing their music added to my own (jazz) vocabulary. I’ll probably use that influence in my own playing without even realizing it.”