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Smoking at the Hungry I

Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2008-06-13 14:07

The thread about whether or not Reginald Kell smoked brought back an old memory.

At the Hungry I in San Francisco, in about 1961 or 1962, I watched a clarinet player in a jazz combo play with a cigarette in the left side of his mouth and the clarinet beak in the right. I never saw him again and I don't know whether he'd forgotten his ashtray that day or he was just showing off. He didn't take puffs while he was playing, as far as I could see, but as soon as he had a rest, he'd reach up with his left hand, take the cigarette between thumb and middle finger and have a quick smoke. (That's why I noticed and remembered that he put the cigarette in the left side of his mouth: He needed his right thumb under the thumbrest so he could hold up the clarinet while he smoked. The rests were too short to put the clarinet down.) He chain-smoked this way throughout the set, occasionally crushing the butt underfoot and lighting a fresh cigarette between numbers.

I can't remember the guy's name or the name of the band, but if I remember right, it was an opener, not the feature. (I'm pretty sure we went there that night to hear Allen Ginsberg read.) It was a quartet of piano, string bass, drums and clarinet. They played standards. The clarinet player was a tall, very thin, dark-skinned black guy with a processed pompadour. Good player. Good band. The pianist may have been Caucasian but I don't remember him well. I had the impression all four of them were sober--which made them unusual at the Hungry I at the time. Anybody have any idea who that was?

Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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