Do we like Tom Scott?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful and some quiet teaching work turned up, but there's too little on the record to score him higher.
Quick flag first: there's a New Zealand rapper with the same name, and the Aussie-adjacent headlines belong to him. This card is the American sax man, born in 1948, who got into recording as a teenager on a Jan and Dean album and was leading his own trio by 1965. He's been a first-call session player ever since.
The CV is ridiculous. He formed L.A. Express in the mid-70s and worked on Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark and Miles of Aisles. He wrote the Starsky and Hutch theme, played the sax solo on Paul McCartney and Wings' Listen to What the Man Said, and became a Blues Brother. Reports put him at 13 Grammy nominations and three wins.
He also toured with George Harrison in 1974. He tells a lovely story about it, with Harrison saying he was a Beatle once but was now doing what he loved. Another from the Blues Brothers days has John Belushi telling him he was now one of the band. Warm, self-deprecating stuff, not a bragger's tale.
On the harm test, we went looking for the usual red flags: anti-LGBTQ+ or anti-trans comments, conspiracy theories, culture-war grifting, and shady collaborators. Nothing turned up in the reporting. A PolitiFact entry for a Tom Scott is a different man, a mayoral candidate. That's honestly the whole list, and an empty search isn't the same as a glowing reference.
On the good-person test, no lawsuits, convictions or allegations turned up against him either. What did turn up is teaching. In 2023 he ran master classes at Oxnard High School in California, and he said of the students that their “enthusiasm and their joy just fills us with happiness”. He also hosts a podcast, Tom Scott's Podcast Express.
Nothing new on him lately beyond gigs. He was booked as the guest at a Dixon Municipal Band concert in Illinois on 28 March 2026, with a free clinic for local players beforehand. That's a veteran still turning up for community bands and students, which counts for something.