Klarinet Archive - Posting 000248.txt from 2008/01
From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Eddie Daniels at George Mason U.
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:22:20 -0500
X-posted to the bulleting board Sunday; edited the first sentence below to
change "yesterday" to "Saturday"...
I must report with chagrin that I did absolutely nothing Edgar Allan
Poe-related on his birthday Saturday, but instead spent the entire day at
the International Saxophone Symposium at George Mason University (Fairfax,
Virginia). One of the featured guests was Eddie Daniels, and yes, he did
play some clarinet. I had to miss the concert in the evening, where he was
soloist, but caught an outstanding one-hour set of free jazz in the
afternoon. He had by far the biggest audience I saw in the main auditorium
all day, although the place was still only about half-full. I wonder whether
the current economy prevented some of the schools from sending as many
students as usual.
That afternoon session was billed as an Eddie Daniels "Feature Jazz Clinic,"
but Daniels did nearly all of his talking through his tenor sax and his
clarinet. Although he said he was open to audience questions, people clearly
would rather hear him play, although, inevitably, some guy asked about his
setup. He said the tenor sax mouthpiece was a #5 Otto Link that Morrie
Backun sold him. He said the clarinet was the new Leblanc, tweaked by Morrie
Backun. It looked to me as if Backun also made him a barrel and bell (though
he didn't say so), since these were conspicuously red wood. The clarinet
mouthpiece was an Eddie Daniels, made from a Zinner blank, with a closed
facing that he'd opened up a bit, though it was still more closed than most
jazz players prefer. Daniels gave a demonstration of his classical clarinet
chops, including the scales and runs that leave a player nowhere to hide if
he doesn't know the fundamentals. He said (not entirely seriously) that the
great secret to teach saxophone students who wanted to learn to double on
clarinet was to learn to feel the reed through their lower teeth, the way
clarinetists do.
But there really wasn't a lot of talk. Daniels avoided getting trapped into
the "what you are is what you buy" obsession over mouthpieces and reeds and
all that jazz. The "clinic" part came in because Daniels let the audience
know from the top that this quartet had never played together before. That's
a sure guarantee that anything that can go wrong, will. I think Daniels knew
the drummer, but when it came time to introduce his fellow musicians by name
at the end of the hour, he'd already forgotten the names of the string bass
player and the pianist. In a nightclub setting, the audience would simply
notice that things were going wrong, but in a venue such as this, with both
the stage lights and the house lights up bright, the audience could tell
exactly *what* was going wrong, and why, and what these four superb
musicians did to fix the problems on the spot, without any breakdowns.
For instance, various groups had been shuttling in and out of that
auditorium all day. Daniels and his band came onstage cold, with no sound
check. They had trouble with the levels on the mic for the bassist (string
double bass with a mic hookup), who had to stop playing and adjust on his
amplifier several times until he got it where they wanted it. Similarly,
when he and the drummer got way out during the first few bars of the first
number, lesser musicians would have had to stop and start over. If the
bassist (who looked odd with the rest of the group, since he was a Navy guy,
in uniform--the strak haircut, the works--and about 30 years younger than
the others) had had the slightest insecurity on his changes, he never would
have been able to do what he did, which was stop for a bar, catch the
drummer and come back in again, seamlessly. (Daniels gave an amusing twist
to the situation by having the group play, "Can't Get Started," as the
second number.)
Daniels, when he switched from tenor to clarinet, had reed trouble. He
pointed to the other guys to take choruses in sequence, then walked to his
case, lying on the floor in the wings just offstage, where I could see him
from my seat as he changed his reed. Then he walked back onstage and came
back in. Once again, anybody with the slightest insecurity about the changes
would have been well and truly bollixed. I hope the younger folks in the
audience picked up this unspoken lesson that doing the homework pays off.
Great day altogether--mixed salad of music from finest to (shrug) "eh," with
dozens of performers ranging from exceptional pros to top students. Made me
want to come home and practice until my lips fall off.
Lelia Loban
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