Klarinet Archive - Posting 000598.txt from 1998/04

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: Re: The Infinite vs. Buffet R-13 & E-12
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 05:02:08 -0400

Jason Hsien wrote:
.
>.... just a couple days ago, I was at Radio City Music
>Hall and saw "the" clarinet... Benny's clarinet. It was just a very weird
>feeling looking at that clarinet, knowing that "the" great jazz clarinetist
>of all time (of course, IMO. you might not think so) played it.

Well .... Goodman was undeniably great, but there were and are so many
great jazz (and legit) clarinetists that I would never venture to call
anyone the greatest. Edmond Hall, Buster Bailey, Peanuts Hucko (I defy you
to tell him from Goodman with your eyes closed) to Buddy de Franco and John
Dankworth, and dozens more I could enumerate if I stopped to think. And I
always liked Shaw better than Goodman. That great tone, his fine feeling
for the beat, and the architecture of his solos .... and there was a young
Swede named Stan Hasselgard whose career was cut short by a fatal accident.
Plus the Frenchman who replaced Grappely for a while with Django Reinhardt
-- does anyone remember his name?

Here's a question that bothers me -- why is the clarinet so rare in modern
jazz? The trumpet and saxes survived into today's jazz idion, or idioms,
but the clarinet was for a couple of decades almost the defining sound of
exciting swing music, and now it seems to me it's been all but abandoned.

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>