Tuesday Nights with the Jazz Junky (KBGA 89.9fm, Missoula, MT ... or streaming at kbga.org, or spinitron.com, or many other sites such as streema.com).
I broadcast every Tuesday night from 10pm Mountain Time, until 2am Wednesday. Four hours of jazz, with conversation.
This past Tuesday (March 24-25, 2014), I had a guest from 12:30 to 2, the eminent clarinetist Dexter Payne. We discussed his devotion to Brazilian music and especially his admiration of Paulo Moura (d. 2010, in Rio), whom he had met and with whom he had discussed the clarinet. Dexter also recounted studying with the great Turkish clarinetist Serkan Cadri.
This has been Jazz Week in Missoula, culminating in the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival at the University of Montana this weekend. This long-running festival -- this is the 34th year! -- is unfortunately no longer blessed by the presence of one of the greatest clarinet players in the history of jazz as his age and health issues have made it difficult for him to travel from his home in Florida. This could hardly have come at a less than welcome moment in the resurgence of jazz clarinet, a phenomenon I've been observing for a year now and which I frankly declare is no less than The Great Clarinet Renaissance. How I wish that Buddy were once again present. I'd love to be able to interview him on the air about this startling resurgence of the instrument on the jazz scene.
The Great Clarinet Renaissance actually seems to have begun a decade and more ago, but in the usual fashion of these fluctuating epochs of jazz fan interest it has had a quiet but steady growth until, about three or four years ago it could no longer be ignored by critics, reviewers, and finally fans. For myself it was a process of growing awareness that more and more of the saxophone players in my particular field of vision were showing up on the stage with a clarinet in their other hand, which they would place on one of those upright stands next to the mike and in the course of a set would pick up the "gnarly stick" and blow it for a chorus or two. Locally, it was particularly the increasing usage by Chuck Florence, a terrific tenor player (started out with Mitch Ryder, then Jack McDuff, then with Jaki Byard, recording a tribute to Jim Pepper, the Native American tenor genius, and so on). I guess at first I attributed Chuck's new-found fondness for the instrument a kind of spin-off from the influence of Buddy and his annual foray into the Northwest. But about the same time another player of local fame and interest, Dexter Payne began recording alot with the clarinet (and it has clearly brought him national attention; he is now ranked #8 in Downbeat polls). That I attributed to his more or less recent adventures in Brazil, where the straight-axe never experienced the kind of eclipse that befell American jazz when Benny Goodman (and Artie Shaw) left the scene. It had become commonplace for critics and jazz reviewers particularly, to observe that "no one plays clarinet," or "...an unusual lineup with trumpet, clarinet, and ..." That didn't happen in Brazil, thanks to their vibrant musical life and the work of great figures like Paulo Moura, nor did it happen in Europe, where Totti Bergh, Tony Coe and Louis Sclavis were flourishing phenomenally. And, in fact, it didn't really happen in the U.S., where an entire coterie of outstanding players were still visible on the scene -- besides Buddy DeFranco there was Jimmy Giuffre, Tony Scott, Eddie Daniels, Alvin Batiste, Barney Bigard, Albert Nicholas, Don Byron, Ken Peplowski .... And I'm leaving out Pete Fountain! Well, the "dixieland" sub-genre can sometimes seem a little less than jazz, more a kind of caricature of earlier music, but it did support a lot of worthy musicians who would not otherwise have been able to survive. But much, much more important was the work of Eric Dolphy, the greatest exponent of the bass clarinet, who inspired many others to take up what was being characterized as an unfashionable instrument in its more conventional varieties - the B-flat, the G - but apparently was more palatable to critics if it could be seen as avant garde. In fact, two of the greatest clarinetists of the post-bop period were decidedly avant garde on the conventional type of clarinet: the highly influential John Carter and the great Perry Robinson, who is still around and playing quite well. Dolphy, of course, clearly inspired Byron and Bennie Maupin and anyone else who plays the bass clarinet.
I discovered Carter much earlier than I stumbled on Robinson, mainly through the release of his fascinating series of albums from Gramavision, Black Saint and Moers, on the origins of African-American music -- Dauwhe, Castles of Ghana, Night Fire, Dance of the Love Ghosts, Fields, and A Suite of Early American Folk Pieces. Carter was a strong player with a position of academic esteem, but still firmly rooted in the vernacular of jazz. This got reflected later in the work of the Canadian clarinet phenom Francois Houle, who recorded a selection of Carter's work in his album In the Vernacular: Music of John Carter (Songlines, 1998).
But it was the discovery of Robinson that really kicked off my exploration (still ongoing) into the Great Clarinet Renaissance. This amazing player began his studies under classical teachers but soon became influenced by the likes of Pee Wee Russell and Benny Goodman, then studied under Kalman Bloch and eventually became a kind of understudy to Tony Scott. But like so many clarinetists after the departure of Goodman, Robinson was much more interested in the avant garde, free jazz, the Third Stream. Nowadays, the great players are almost all of that type: Francois Houle, Darryl Harper, Anat Cohen, Andy Biskin (although he's a special case, a true eclecticist), Mike McGinnis, Ken Vandermark, Mark Sowlakis and the growing legion of clarinetists.
But ... mo latah.
